Episode Transcript
Welcome back to the Evolution of Dental podcast, brought to you by Evolution Dental Science. Today we're joined by Chelsea Homire, who is co-founder of the Digital Dental Assistant Academy, pushing the boundaries of what digital dental assisting means in the world of dentistry today. Chelsea, how are you?
I'm good. How are you?
Doing well, doing well. So this program that you started it seems to be something that is a much needed and under addressed topic in the dental industry these days. Can you introduce it? Tell me a little about it, what you're doing?
Yeah. So this year, myself and two of my partners, Wayne and Rochelle, we just decided it's about dang time. There's such a hole in the market for teaching dental assistants. The ones that do, you know, 80% of the actual work, with the dentists directing them. But there's such a hole for teaching dental assistants digital.
They're not teaching it to them in school. There's no extra CE courses about it at any conventions. So we just want to change that. We want to flip the script and empower those assistants and let them know that we're there for them. And we're going to create this whole community of digital dental assistants and resources for them.
That's amazing. What inspired you to launch this program?
My own struggles. Haha.
Your own struggles? Haha.
Yea my own struggles. I always knew I wanted a little bit of a career change being a dental assistant. I was good at it. I liked my job, but I just kind of wanted more. I was always kind of told that I was, like, so extra, right? Like, you need to calm down, you’re so extra. Like, why are you doing all of that? Like, and I never really quite understood why. I've always been quite the ambitious person. So then when I was learning 3D printing, about 4 or 5 years ago, when I really started getting into it, there was no courses for assistants at all. So I was either taking doctor courses, which were expensive and super lengthy and very involved, things that I quite didn't understand as an assistant, because I don't have that background. And then I was watching like ceramists on YouTube, looking at what color ceramic they were layering. So I knew what color stain to use on my 3D prints, and it was bad stain after bad one and trial and error and trial and error over and over again, posting it online, getting lots of hate for it. And I had such a struggle learning it. I'm like, I don't want any other dental assistants to go through this because our jobs are hard and busy enough as it is. I was lucky enough to have a boss who really gave me a lot of freedom to let me learn and let me make mistakes, and I had time during the day to practice. But most assistants don't. Most of them are busy. Their doctors want to delegate to them, and they need a fast, easy way to learn this with real world workflows. So that's what we're going to bring in.
It definitely appears to be a vacuum in the market. And we at Evolve are constantly working with new assistants that doctors are throwing into, basically into the grinder to learn how to do things that are way over their head. Not that they're not capable, but there's just no framework for them to learn these sort of things.
No, they don't even know where to start. They're like, where do I even start learning? I can't just jump into learning digital dentures all of a sudden. You need to learn to print models need to learn to print occlusal guards, work your way up and make sure you understand the foundations before you jump to that. And frankly, some doctors just don't like to train. They don't want to. Do they have their own families, their own thing going on outside of work. They're working 40 hours a week doing dentistry, anyways. I kind of can't blame them, but they still need really qualified, you know, really elevated assistants. So that's what we're here to fill that gap for.
And they expect them to graduate whatever course or school that they're going to with some of this knowledge. But how would you compare what they're learning in the schools now with, with what you're teaching?
Well, I know when I went to school 15 years ago, they were at least ten years behind in technology. So if that says anything there, we are kind of talking to schools a little bit. We're trying to actually we're going to have student discounts for students in school. Or if you have graduated within the past year, you will get a discount on the curriculum. So we are going to have the really much more simpler courses for those new grads. But then those complex courses for those assistants that have been at it quite a long time and really need that complex, training.
Absolutely. Good timing with things like the new iTero Design Suite. How has that influenced how you approach this?
Oh my gosh, how does nobody know about this iTero Designs Suite? It's funny because I posted it I posted a you know a story on my Instagram and it was like, oh my gosh, you guys, everyone who has iTero has this. Within five minutes I got two messages that were like, how do I have that? What do I do? And I was just like, okay, the I need to make a video about how to install it. I need to make that video first. But yeah, we have a list of 9 to 10 videos that we're going to start recording for everything that you can do in the iTero Design Suite. We're going to make it really simple. And even in every video you'll hear me say stuff like, now use your left click to rotate it. And remember, you can turn your meshes on and off on the left hand side. So I try to kind of remind everyone what we're going through every time and keep it. So if they can watch one video, they can go from start to finish on models. They watch one video start to finish on splints. That's loading it in all the way to printing, so they don't have to go and watch a million videos and try to piece it together themselves, which is what I did. I want to package it up and make it nice and easy for them with a nice little bow on it.
A nice little bow on it, nice little structure that they can work through on their own time.
Yeah, exactly. And that's actually our next webinar too, is where to get started learning digital dentistry. If you're an assistant and you really want to jump into digital, especially 3D printing, that's what our next webinar is about.
That's excellent. How's it been going with you, with this experience so far, what's been the reception you've had so far?
Oh my gosh, we are not fully launched yet, and we already have people contacting us for private training, which we are able to do on the side. You know, when you're starting a company, there's a lot of waiting around for paperwork to go through and stuff to get approved. So in the meantime, we're actually able to take on training clients and start getting our business name out there already. We have people message us every single day that are like, when are you launching? When can I take the classes? What's going to happen? But we also want to make sure we're doing it right. We're not going to rush into it too fast because we want it to be something really amazing that can be a hub for dental assistants, no matter where you are, to learn. And to not only learn just to like, have resources and know that you can go somewhere, ask questions without feeling foolish or without feeling like, oh my God, I can't believe, I don't know this, you know, the doctors would know this, but I don't because I don't have that background. I want to make it really accessible to them and know that there's no such thing as a stupid question. You don't know what you don't know.
Don't know what you don't know. Absolutely.
I love that phrase. Because it's so true, though.
There seems to be a lot of, lack of understanding as to what the dental assistant should or could be capable of out of school and what their understanding of these scanners are, because it seems like they're teaching impressions very well. But that's technology of 20 years ago now.
So yeah, they're teaching X-rays on the phosphor plates and calling them digital.
Yeah. If I take a picture of a picture it’s digital now. Right?
Yeah. Exactly.
Yeah.
So they are so far behind unfortunately. And that is our aim. I really want to help schools because, really, I want these assistants out there as soon as they're out of school knowing digital. All offices at this point have some form of digital. You need to know how to work computers. There are some people that go to assisting school and they can ace their way through school, but they barely know what a file is on the computer. So we have to update our curriculum to get them out-of-the-gate, knowing how to chart on the computer, not just on paper. How to do scanning right out the way. You can teach them how to do impressions. And there's always a place for impressions, but they should know at least how to scan or clean and set up a scanner and maintain it right out the gate. We have to update their curriculums if we want them to get high quality jobs outside of school, because I remember going from school into the real world, and I just felt like I got hit by a bus. I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing, what is happening, and that was a ten month school. A lot of them are going with these ten week schools. Do you think they're teaching them anything about digital in these ten week schools? You know, it's like very basic, barebones. So if we can give discounted memberships to their students at least and have it really affordable, even if the school doesn't pay for it, those students can have something really affordable monthly payments and be able to update their resume to, say, digital dental assistant, graduated digital dental Assistant academy. They're going to be able to make more money right off the bat, and they're going to be so much more productive in the office right off the bat.
Yeah, it sounds like a really big value add to the existing, curriculum with the other schools.
Yeah, 100%. The more you look at ads, you know, I'm always on Indeed looking at ads. What are these dentist searching for? A lot of them are saying experience with digital dentistry a huge bonus or experience with scanning necessary. And so now we're seeing that these skills are not optional. If you want to move forward with dentistry, you have to learn digital. And the schools are always a little behind. So maybe we need to just, you know, pull them along with us a little bit.
Absolutely. And they have their place. I mean, there's definitely things that the schools teach that the assistants need to know just the basics.
Oh 100%, they need the foundations. They need to know their tooth numbers, the names of everything, different kinds of cements, all of that. Digital dentistry. You know, 3D printing is a smaller aspect of dentistry, but it is growing every single day.
Yeah, it's not the whole picture, but it's definitely a big part of the picture. And it just goes back to kind of the photography analogy and talking about the white phosphorus with the x rays. It's like, you know, taking a picture of a picture is not going digital. But everyone's using a digital camera these days, whether it's their iPhone or the big DSLR, right? I think that from what I understand, it's intimidating to a lot of assistants. It's intimidating to a lot of doctors, much less a lot of assistants, especially ones coming out of school or even ones with a lot of experience, chairside with analog dentistry. What would you what would you say to somebody who's looking to get into digital with maybe a lot of experience in analog dentistry, maybe none? But looking at the digital sphere and just kind of intimidated by the idea of it.
So first I would say come to our next webinar. Obviously, that's where we really, really break it down. That is I was just working on my presentation for it yesterday. I want to get it all perfect. I'm so OCD, but I would say you always going to start with the basics. My doctor always told me, a doctor, that I worked for like ten years ago. If you can't explain it to me if you can't break it down step by step. If you can't break it down for a four year old, you don't understand it. And if you don't understand it at its core, how can you be expected to grow and get better at things? So I would say, make sure you completely understand the foundations and know exactly what's going on. Understand your programs before you try to go to really complicated stuff. You can't jump right into partials and dentures right away. You need to do your models, your guards, maybe start doing some printed restorations, but master one before you move on to the next. I'm not a firm believer in, you know, learning drinking out of a fire hose. I think you should take actually, all of our courses are going to be designed an hour or less, so you can even do them in your lunch break. And then there's workbooks with all of them, and then you can re-watch them all whenever you want to. So making that training accessible and making it just easily broken down. It can be incredibly intimidating. It was to me. I was really lucky in the fact that I had a doctor that really taught me a lot, and I asked questions all day, every day, and I wasn't afraid to ask questions. But not every assistant has that luxury right?
No, of course not.
Other doctors are just saying learn it, go away, which I get. I have worked for doctors like that. I worked for lots of different doctors and I worked for all of them across the board. So we would just want to be that resource for everyone. Whether you are a doctor. Doctors can join Digital Dental Assistant Academy too. If you like the way we teach, you're welcome to join because again, we break it down and make it simple. So we are aiming towards assistants. But if you're a doctor and you want to join, that's what we really try to do is break it down. So you understand the foundations of everything. So you can really understand all of it. When you're, in my opinion, when you're taking a course and you're like, all right, I'm going to this, I have no experience 3D printing, but now I'm going to this three day long course, and we're going to be in courses for ten hours a day. How much of that are you really going to bring back with you on an every single day basis and implement daily when you don't have all the follow up resources, the ability to go back and watch them and really taking it at bite size and being able to absorb all those pieces.
Absolutely. Now, I think the bite size approach is a very good one. It makes it much more well, to borrow the analogy, digestible, especially the idea that you can just watch it on a lunch break and then revisit it when you need to.
Exactly.
You were sharing, before we began recording, you were sharing a story about, someone very young you had taught how to do 3D scanning. Can you speak a little bit to that? Yeah. So my daughter Eleanor is seven, and I don't have her on social media a lot. But she loves what I do. And we had the new TRIOS 5 wireless sent to us. We were really excited. And my daughter loves technology. She knows 3D printers. She'll pick files that she wants to 3D print. And so now she's like, mommy, I want to do it. I'm like, honestly, this thing is so lightweight. It's wireless. It's really fast. I'm like, let's try it. So I set up my ring, light my camera, and she scans almost my whole lower arch. And that was me sitting straight up in a chair with no air-water syringe to dry off the teeth and a shaky seven year old trying to figure out what to do. So it's almost like fun for me to be able to break things down and explain to her, because it's almost like, well, if I can explain it to her and it makes sense to her, then I can explain it to my students. And she loves being involved in it. So we have this video of her scanning my teeth. Need to post it on YouTube. I just recorded it the other day, but if I could teach a seven year old to do that, assistants can do it. Or doctor or whoever. If I can teach my daughter and my daughter is learning to grasp the stuff, I can teach other people to do it, it's not what's the word I'm looking for? It's not intangible at all. It seems intangible at first, and it seems like you are biting off more than you can chew. But when you have the right resources and their right support system, it is absolutely doable.
Absolutely doable. 100%. And like you said, if you can, if you can teach somebody that young to take a full-arch scan with no experience and then an ideal setting, then it should be pretty approachable for for a seasoned dental technician, or season dental assistant who has no experience in digital, but it's just approaching us for the first time. And let's let's be honest, a lot of these doctors are intimidated by the idea too, and they don't want to sit there and do this on their own all day. And I need a resource for their for their assistance to learn these kind of skills.
And they need a trusted resource, right? They don't want to just keep saying go learn it from someone. They need someone who they know is going to teach them the right systems. And, we even give like, templates. You print this out and you put your doctor's preference on it. This is the resin that we use. This is the offset that we like. This is our preferred polishing method. And you print it out and you have him sign it and date it. And there you go. Now you have all of your protocols that the doctor has made, and you hang that up in your lab and there is no question about it, what needs to be done.
That's excellent. Yeah, that's very regimented as well as, something that adapts to the doctor's preferences.
Yeah. Because not every I know a lot of when the doctors teach, they say this is what I use, but they might do something completely different depending on where you are. So I don't necessarily teach exact preferences. I'm not going to teach you how to prep for an onlay, but what I can teach you is I know the common issues and I can help walk you through it, but your doctor is the ultimate one who has the call on everything. They are on the oversight on everything. So having that in between of confidence and ability to do it, but also knowing that they're the boss, they need to check it. And if they tell you to change it or make improvements, we have to do that because at the end of the day, they are the boss and they are the doctor.
At the end of the day, it's still a value add. You're not trying to take things over, you're not trying to usurp the doctor.
No, when you elevate your assistant, your whole office gets elevated! Right. And when you have confidence in your assistant, you just don't go in and say, all right, my system is going to do your filling by. You say, this is my very confident assistant Maria, she's been here for ten years. She is very confident and extended functions. She's going to place you're filling. I'm going to come in and check it. We might take a bite wing at the end. Might not. But you are in very capable hands. I'll be back in 30 minutes. You know, projecting that confidence onto your assistant projects on to your patient. And I think that's one thing that a lot of the times we get wrong, we have to project our confidence that our patients have to feel confident when our doctor compliments us in front of the patient and says that we do a very good job, that's why we're trusting them. The patient trusts us and it just makes for a smoother experience. So when your assistant gets elevated, she's not taking your job. She's freeing up your time to go do other things that only a doctor can do. She is taking over the things that you don't have to do, or he, excuse me. She's taking over the things that the doctor doesn't have to do. So the doctor can go in and do an extraction, a crown prep, all of those things that we can't do.
And all those things that maybe a doctor does not want to make the time for. Like again, running a 3D printer, designing an online like a lot of doctors enjoy, the the process of doing their own lab work. But let's be honest, most of them did not go to dental school to learn how to make onlays on a 3D printer in the back room when they could be seeing patients.
Yes, 100%. Well, that's almost like to me, having a lab, because when you start 3D printing, you are your own lab. If a lab started, very unlikely they're going to have one employee that's going to do everything. They're going to delegate what they can to other employees, what they feel comfortable with. And it's the same thing when you start printing in your office. You are your own mini lab, so you have to think of it from a business perspective as well. Because just because you're 3D printing, if you're taking all of your time and doing this all yourself, are you really saving any money whatsoever? Are you saving yourself the headache of not using a lab when you're spending all your time doing this?
Right, you have a finite amount of time as a doctor or assistant, and like it's better used if they're not learning on the job and trying to figure it out as they go, pioneering all by themselves every time.
Yeah. It's I was really lucky in the fact that I had a doctor that gave me so much freedom and the ability to learn and the ability to make mistakes, but I know that not a lot of offices are like that. Some doctors, we don't have time for this. We run really busy offices already. How can you expect them to learn all this new stuff with a lack of resources when they're already running around like chickens with our head cut off? It's the change that you make, and maybe that change is closing off an assistant for one day a week to do lab work, or for two hours every day they go do lab work, but we are able to delegate to them so the doctor can go and do more important things, more things that are productive in the office, because let's be real, the doctor just designing a partial is not incredibly productive.
No. And let's be real, if you don't design partials every day, you're probably not going to make the best partials either. What was, what was one of the more exciting or interesting journeys you had during, your discovery of 3D printing and getting into this, the process of it that inspired you to want to co-found, the Digital Dental Assistant Academy?
I think my, like, cut my, for lack of better terms, like come to Jesus moment when I was like, this is what I want to do is I just started having a lot of I started posting everything I did because I was like, all right, I'm going to get a lot of love or a lot of hate. Either way, I'd like to teach this one day. I knew I wanted to teach, but I didn't know how, so I just started posting everything I did. And then all of a sudden people are messaging me, asking me for training or asking me what I use for certain stuff. So I just saw this, like, kind of hole in the market. I'm like, all right, I guess, I guess I'm going there. I've never been a huge social media person before. Like, I live in a gravel road in the backwoods of rural Missouri. Like if people, like, think I must live this, like, glamorous life cause they're like, oh, you're on social media and you're always posting and, you know, you travel to Miami and Chicago and LA and I'm like, no, like I literally drive my 2000 lifted Jeep Cherokee to the airport and fly places. And then I come back on my gravel road and I kind of just come home to see my family, where we barely even have internet access because we live in such a small area. So if I can do this, I anyone can.
Absolutely.
As cheesy as it sounds.
Yeah. I mean it's cheesy but it's real and you know, it's so you you came to this from a perspective of just kind of throwing stuff at the wall with social media to see what stuck, to see what the reception was and, and kind of learning as you went. Is that right?
Yes. So I kind of wanted to know. You can't I can't just go on and say, I'm going to teach everyone. I'm like, where? What is going to be my niche? What is going to be my angle whenever I teach? Because we all can't just be the same. Right. And I want I wanted to be unique. I wanted to be my own. Honestly, I would say the biggest factor is I wanted to leave my mark on dentistry, that that's the that's the what it is. I wanted to leave a legacy and I want to help shape dentistry, as cheesy as that is. Side note my husband's like, great great great grandfather. Actually, is considered one of the founders of modern dentistry. He was the. Yeah, he was the dean of, the Pennsylvania School of Dentistry for a couple of years, wrote a lot of books, and I have these hand carved masks from Japan from 150 years ago that they made for him while he taught the Japanese, how to do modern day dentistry. He taught them that that weren't worms in your teeth, that those were nerves. And we could take out those nerves and, like, really from kind of the voodoo way of thinking to the modern day way of thinking. And once I learned that, that like my husband's family, I was like, this is all coming together now, like I'm supposed maybe I'm supposed to teach people and help drive dentistry and where it's changing and going. So I think at its core, that was probably my driving force.
That's really fascinating. Did you know that before you, before you married him? Like, is this something that was sort of like, no?
No, I did not know that before I married him. Yeah. So when we first got married, I was a just a plain old dental assistant. Like, I was not doing any teaching, no, not at all.
No? Okay that makes it even more interesting!
I know that's why he's more. He's not. And he's a contractor, like he's a carpenter. He builds houses. But after I found that out, I bought his book from Amazon and I did all this research on him. I wrote an article about him, and I even did some research on the masks. The masks are hanging in my office downstairs, and you can see the twine and the metal wire on them. And I even posted them for, someone to translate them for me and just learning about him and all that he did. Really trying to drive dentistry forward and teach the next generation of dental professionals was like, maybe that's what I'm supposed to do.
Absolutely. Yeah. Talk about things coming full circle.
Right? Yeah. That was that was a very real full circle moment.
Whole new digital way so to speak. That's awesome. That's so cool. What, if you if you could impart any one thing to somebody listening to this podcast, what would that one thing be? Big question.
Oh big question. Yeah. I'd say stop waiting to be ready to make a change because I think ready is a choice and not waiting until the right time comes along. I could have waited until the right time, come along to speak at a convention, or I could have waited until someone asked me to. But instead I'm out there sending my horses to people, and I'm not waiting for the doctor to find a course and send me. I'm finding the course, printing it out, saying, this is the hotel I'm staying at, give me your card. I'm going to help our office. You know. So instead of just waiting for the world to be ready, like, just go out and do stuff. Stop being afraid of failing. Because failure absolutely happens. Because you're going to fail 3D printing. You're going to fail learning digital dentistry sometimes. But if you can learn from every single one of those failures, then is it really a failure or is it just a learning experience to make yourself that much better? Because do you think those doctors were great at Crown Preps right out of school? Not even their first 20 crown preps? Exactly. So that's why we can't say, oh, I'm mad because I, I had to print fails this week. Okay. I'm sorry. Let's figure it out. But do you think that you know. Yeah. Welcome to 3D printing. Do you know, do you think those doctors were super great at anything right out of school? It took time and practice and learning from their mistakes to be the doctor that they are. And that's what it takes to be a digital dental assistant or learn digital in general. Stop waiting to be ready. Just go and start it. Take it step by step and it is completely doable.
It's completely doable. The right time is now. There is no right time.
There's never a right time, right? That's like saying we're we're going to wait till we have kids for the right time or something. And you're like, there's never a right time to have kids. What do you do until you're ready? Like, who's ever ready to have kids? Who's ever really ready to? You just have to do it. You just have to be committed. Say, this is the change that I want to make. It's going to help my office. It's going to help my career, might potentially help make me more money, respect, and even bring like more job fulfillment. I have so much more job fulfillment now going digital because I can scan a patient, design the car, print it, deliver it. The doctor was not in the room for any of that, and that's anywhere from 500 and $1,500 profit. With about an hour's worth of work on my end and about $5 worth of resin.
Huge value add.
Oh my gosh, guards, you could pay for your printer in six months. Just printing guards, easily. Yeah.
Just printing guards. That's incredible. So, Chelsea, where can, where can I followers and listeners, find your stuff? Where can they sign up for your courses?
The easiest thing to do is just go to theddaa.com, go to our website and go to subscribe for updates. We don't spam people. We're not going to send you ten emails a day, just simple updates. We host free webinars every month. We have three free courses available right now, so free downloads, lots of resources, and lots of benefits. I am all over social media, the Digital Dental Assistant, but the easiest, best way is just go to theddaa.com and subscribe.
Well, thank you for your time. We appreciate it.
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me. This was fun. I feel you guys know how to make girl feel special.
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Evolution of Dental Podcast, brought to you by Evolution Dental Science. For more episodes like this, please like and subscribe and join us on all of your favorite podcast platforms. We look forward to seeing you on the next one.
