Communication is what Digital Dentistry is all about
My personal journey into digital dentistry started in 2006 when I bought a 3shape D250 lab scanner. I remember thinking that the time of casting and grinding metal was coming to its end. A new era was dawning! It took a while but today I can say that the new era has indeed dawned. Casting and trimming metal objects has become a small fraction of what I do and I can outsource that part of my work with the click of a button. These days I spend most of my time in front of my computer screen, designing all kinds of prosthetics from single crowns to all on four hybrids to the “humble” full denture. Digital Dentistry is a reality. Not anymore a marketing gimmick but indeed a modern and powerful set of methods and tools delivering better outcomes for our patients.
This is what I and my partners realized three years ago when we first conceptualized NITEO. Dental clinics are digitizing rapidly while the “white standard” of the monolithic zirkonia restoration has overtaken porcelain-fused-to-metal restorations by a large margin already. If you are a clinician reading this you probably already own an intraoral scanner or are planning to buy one in the near future (if you are an exception please tell me in the comments below, I would really like to know!).
This led to another realization: are our dental laboratories ready for this new reality or are we trying to solve 21st century problems using 20th century tools and mindsets? Our laboratories (NITEO came about with the merging of three dental labs) were using a mixture of digital and analogue tools and processes.
On the one hand the work of manufacturing dental prosthetics will always be a hybrid process. We will always have to end with a physical object that will need to meet very specific criteria. Any level of computer wizardry can only get you so far and our work will inevitably have to be handled or at least checked by an experienced dental technician before shipping. At the same time, even the most talented and experienced dental technician has to admit that there some things done by the new technology can simply not be replicated by the human hand and analogue techniques. A good mix of technology and hand skills, of digital wizardry and practical experience is essential.
On the other hand we saw that the real revolution is in communication. The use of intraoral scanners brings a colorful realistic rendering of the case in front of the practitioner’s and the technician’s eyes in an instant. I have in many cases advised clinicians on path-of-insertion or occlusal clearance issues while the patient was still on the chair. In the analogue era simple things like this would take a few days to be communicated and, crucially, it meant extra appointments. The points of view, magnification and detail we can get after a scan is an invaluable asset.
What our experience has shown to be the most powerful tool of all is the sharing of the design with the dentist. We use Exocad to design our cases and we can get an html output file. This means that our customers can simply follow a link and inspect the design in 3d on their browsers. This level of communication and our commitment to it is the essence of what NITEO does. We are seeing that the dentists who take the time to carefully look at the design and offer feedback are the ones with the fewer repeat cases.
