Eoin O’Sullivan explains how digital workflows in restorative dentistry represent a paradigm shift in the way we provide complex restorative dentistry.
Dentistry is becoming more challenging and patients’ expectations are rising.
Particularly since COVID-19, we are increasingly under pressure to provide high quality dental care in fewer visits. This places increasing demands to gather clinical information more efficiently and to be able to communicate more clearly with our patients and our colleagues.
The use of digital workflows facilitates information gathering and allows us to communicate both with our patients and our colleagues in ways that we have never been able to do before.
New challenges
Digital workflows are becoming increasingly more relevant in today’s world: dentists’ new challenges are to maintain the same standards of dentistry in less time, provide adequate communication to ensure they can treatment plan effectively and subsequently gain patients’ consent, and of course deliver treatments more efficiently and more predictably.
Our dental technician colleagues have been very proactive in developing digital workflows, thanks to which they have been able to provide us dentists with new sophisticated ways of making restorations in a more cost-effective manner.
However, until we as dentists embrace digital workflows, including the use of intraoral scanners, we will not be able to unleash the full potential of digital.
I have welcomed the collaboration between Align Technology and Exocad, which is enhancing communication between dentists and lab technicians, allowing us to plan treatment and make restorations more predictably and more efficiently. It is a true game changer and allows us to engage with our patients and gain informed consent much more effectively.
In the following case presentation, my aim is to explain how using a fully digital workflow helps to diagnose, plan and provide complex dental treatment in a very predictable way.
To read the rest of this article, view the photographs and gain CPD, visit cpd.dentistry.co.uk/courses/digital-workflows-in-restorative-dentistry.
