Should Dental Labs Turn to Digital?

Digital TransformationDigital transformation is a trend that’s impacting many areas of the medical world, including dental. Innovative technology provides many benefits, from improving efficiency to achieving better outcomes for patients. When you’re weighing the pros and cons of going digital in your dental lab, keep these five factors in mind.

Easily Receive Digital Cases From Dentists

Many dentists are incorporating digital systems into their practices. Everything from patient records to impressions has gone digital.If you don’t adopt technology at the same pace as your clients, you end up hindering your dental lab’s long-term growth rate.

Adopt technology at the same pace as your clients, otherwise you may end up hindering your dental lab’s long-term growth potential.

Think about what the dental landscape will look like five or ten years down the road. You want to make sure that your lab can accept cases from dentists without any hassle. Do you think many practices will use non-digital systems in a few years? Future proofing your lab is an essential element to thriving in a tech-forward world.

Impressions Delivery and Treatment Time Reduced

Another benefit of digital is the way it streamlines many parts of the dental appliance process. You start off with improved accuracy, which reduces the time it takes to create an appliance that works for the patient. You can avoid a time-consuming back-and-forth process between your lab and the dental practice.

Avoid a time-consuming back-and-forth process between your lab and the dental practice. 

Everyone involved in the process is happier with the faster treatment time, from the patient who doesn’t have to have as many appointments, to the dentist who sees their practice grow from the great word of mouth recommendations.

Improving Communication Between your Dental Lab and your production center

Digital transformation empowers your lab to enhance collaboration and communication with production centers. You don’t have to wait for mailed paperwork and packages to get to their location. Your team can design digitally any type of restauration and send it instantly to a milling center of your choice, which allows you to provide a fast and efficient workflow that benefits both you and your clients.

Go Model-Less

When you’re working with digital data, you can usually eliminate the need for a physical model. The production cost of the dental prostheses goes down significantly with this move, and you reduce the number of steps needed to create an appliance. The cost savings helps in many ways, from freeing up your budget for other essential expenses to offering competitive pricing for your dental office clients.

How to Take the First Digital Steps

You don’t have to transform your dental lab overnight. One of the best things about digital adoption is that you can slowly roll it out, starting with the areas that benefit the most. For example, if you can’t retain dental office clients because your production costs are too high, you would start with a solution that moves most of that process to a digital system.

You don’t have to transform your dental lab overnight, just start with the areas that benefit the most and work your way up.

It takes some time for your lab to adjust to the new processes and procedures in place, but you put yourself in a good place for the future. You need to undergo a digital transformation sooner or later, so it makes sense to get started proactively.

Scroll to Top