8 Uses for Dental Photography

Patients often ask why we take pho­tos, and espe­cially why we take so many.  So for a quick sum­mary of why you, as a den­tist, should use dig­i­tal pho­tog­ra­phy in your prac­tice, here you go:

1. Den­tal Insur­ance — it’s hard for an insur­ance adjuster to deny a claim of a tooth with a big hole in it from doing the endo, or show­ing the huge cav­ity, etc.

2. Case Pre­sen­ta­tion — whether using the iPad, Pow­er­Point, or what­ever, you want an easy way to show patients what is going on in their mouths, whether it’s a sin­gle cracked tooth, peri­odon­ti­tis, brux­ism, etc.

3. Diag­no­sis — it is IMO impos­si­ble to prop­erly diag­nose and treat­ment plan com­plex cases with­out good photography.

4. CYA — it’s unfor­tu­nate that I had to do so, but I have avoided sev­eral prob­lems with the NC Board regard­ing patient com­plaints because I had a case thor­oughly doc­u­mented start-to-finish, thereby elim­i­nat­ing the patient’s abil­ity to say I did poor dentistry.

5. Track­ing Your Work Over Time — with key­word tag­ging, you can label your pic­tures and later do searches based on them to fol­low the suc­cess (hope­fully!) of your treat­ment over years and decades.

6. Self-Improvement — it’s kind of tough to hide from your­self when the pic­tures are on a 24″ HD mon­i­tor or big­ger.  Pic­tures don’t lie, and I know that I am moti­vated to do bet­ter when I take a pic­ture and find some fault (how­ever nit­picky) that I didn’t see before dis­miss­ing the patient.

7. Lab Com­mu­ni­ca­tion — it’s a LOT eas­ier to com­mu­ni­cate with a lab about shade, con­tour, etc. using high-quality pho­tographs than try­ing to draw it out on paper.

8. Show­case Your Work to Patients — it’s far more effec­tive to show patients con­sid­er­ing some treat­ment pho­tos of YOUR work than of some­one else’s, espe­cially on the Web.