Someone on our team sent over a thread from a dental operators group recently. Operators were talking through technology selection and evaluation, trading recommendations on various products.
To be honest, the thread left us a little frustrated.
Not because the advice was bad, and not because people were unwilling to help. The opposite. Operators were generous with their time and candid about their experiences, which is exactly what makes that community valuable.
The problem was what was missing.
Recommendations without context
There was no discussion of what else was already running inside the organization. No discussion of the organizational outcomes anyone was trying to hit. No discussion of the workflow the tool was actually supposed to change.
It was mostly some version of we love this one and stay away from that one.
Those recommendations are real, and they are honestly given. But they are built on somebody else's practice, somebody else's processes, and somebody else's problems. A platform that transformed a 12-location group with a centralized billing team and one practice management system may be actively wrong for a 40-location group running three systems and decentralized front office staff.
Put it in a clinical context
Imagine presenting a treatment plan to a patient with no exam and no imaging. Just a recommendation, based on what worked for the last patient who walked in.
We would never do it. The entire profession is built on diagnosing before treating.
Yet this is exactly how most operators evaluate and select critical technology.
The purchase gets made on peer recommendation and a strong demo. The diagnosis, if it happens at all, happens after go-live, when the workflow does not fit and the team quietly reverts to the old way.
What a diagnosis actually looks like
Before evaluating a single vendor, an operator should be able to answer a few things clearly.
- What specific outcome are we trying to move, and what does it look like in the numbers today?
- Which workflow is this tool meant to change, and who performs that workflow now?
- What is already in the stack that overlaps with this, and what are we paying for it?
- What does our current system already do natively that we are not using?
- Who has to adopt this for it to work, and what is their capacity over the next two quarters?
Answer those first and the vendor conversation changes completely. You stop being sold to and start evaluating against a defined problem. The demo becomes a test rather than a pitch.
This is an industry problem
The same theme came up in several separate conversations with operators, founders, and investors that same week. It is not one group getting it wrong. It is a gap in how the industry as a whole approaches selection, and it is one we need to get better at collectively.
So we will ask the operators directly, because we would rather learn than lecture.
- Do you have a selection process you actually follow?
- How are you diagnosing what you need before you start evaluating vendors?
- How are you communicating that process to potential vendors?
If you have built something that works, we would like to hear about it. If you are in the middle of a selection right now and want a second set of eyes before you sign, that is a conversation worth having too.
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