There’s little doubt that, for any dentist, the last few years have seen more change (and presented greater challenges) than any period in living memory. Even before Covid, the profession was in radical transition. Digital dentistry technology was making its presence felt ever more pervasively, cosmetic treatment was accounting for a larger proportion of workload each year, and operating models focused on reducing chair time and increasing turnover were becoming ever more evident… and ever more necessary.

Post Covid, everything notched up. Improving efficiency so as to work through backlogs became vital overnight. Increasing profitability to recover from financial impacts became imperative.

For dentists already used to digital workflows, a deeper commitment to the technology, with adoption of the most recent advances, offered a pathway for achieving the required improvements to efficiency and profitability. For many dentists who had until then hung back on going digital, the opportunity presented by lockdown downtime to read and research further into digital workflows, led to the conclusion that the time to embrace digital had come.

Whether your practice has been fully digital for some years, or are still in changeover, the benefits of optimising digital workflows are evident.

Digital dentistry has brought huge benefits for dentists. Diagnosis and plan design have become easier. Treatment plans have become simpler to present to patients resulting in improved understanding and approvals. The often fraught process of communication with dental labs has been transformed. The needs for remakes and patient callbacks have been cut substantially.

“Despite having embraced a digital workflow, however,’ our Business Process & Manufacturing Analyst at 3dental, Adam Crowe, explains, “many practices are still one easy step away from fully optimising their digital efficiency. By outputting digital scans and models for aligner treatment to a conventional lab, even one handling digital work all the time, unnecessary layers of communication, time and cost are still being included in the workflow.”

How do we know? Because since opening our doors as a digital dental specialist in 2018, we’ve been producing precision quality solutions for some of the UK’s leading dental laboratories. In many cases, the dentists involved would not even have known their work was being subcontracted to us.

In 2022, we rebranded as 3dental to launch a new, direct-to-dentist service to help you reap the maximum possible benefit from a simplified and optimised digital workflow.

Using our fast and easy to use portal, you can upload all digital files associated with your case directly. You’re free to use IPR and attachments as you wish. We create the treatment plan, load it back to the portal and notify you that it’s ready for approval. If it needs adjustment, you can specify that through the platform (though if you need to speak to our technicians or your account manager, you can call us at any time). Once you OK the plan, we manufacture the aligners, pack them in a custom designed box along with a slimline aligner carry case, chewies and cleaning products, and dispatch them. All within 72 hours.

You. Us. A simplified and optimised workflow, with no-one inbetween to slow things down… or mark them up!

Part of our aim in designing a service that could help you simplify your workflow has been to review the process of monitoring progress. We wanted to provide improved clinical visibility while helping to reduce the number of callbacks you need and bringing any rectification that might be required onto the portal as part of the case.

By using a remote digital monitoring app, patients can upload regular, self-taken images of their aligners in place, to our platform. The AI powered monitoring solution then tracks the movement of their teeth. You get increased patient compliance, improved monitoring frequency and, as a result, you can deliver an enhanced standard of care, while significantly reducing chair time - for both you and your patient. Should a problem of any kind be identified by the AI-driven system, it will notify you so you can make immediate adjustments online, or call the patient in for examination.

If you’re already working with digital dentistry day to day in your surgery, the hard part of transformation is behind you. Might not simplifying your workflow to work with us directly, rather than sending your aligner cases to a lab who may in any case outsource it to us, be the final step to unlocking maximum efficiency and improved savings.

to simplify your aligner case workflow