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Tips From the Technology Evangelist: How Patients & Practices Benefit From Digital Impressions
Chief clinical editor and technology editor John Flucke, DDS, explains how his practice employs digital impressions to achieve clinical efficiencies and enhanced patient care while impressing and educating patients. [3 Minutes]
Video Transcript
The way we do things in my office is I cut the prep, and then the assistant does the scan. So we wheel the iTero in, and we put the iTero, if the assistant is right handed, the iTero goes on the left hand side of the chair, I get up, the assistant walks around if she's right handed, she sits where I was sitting. And we have the device positioned so the patient can clearly see the screen, and then the assistant starts to do the scanning process after they talk a little bit to the patient about what we're going to do and what are the benefits of digital impressions.
And then the patient can see the screen and they actually watch the process as it unfolds. And patients love the technology. Number one, there's no impression material and patients love that. But they also love the fact that this is a technology that interacts with them. They know that that's their mouth on the screen, and they know that what is going into that system is going to be used to make their final restorations, and so it's really incredible for them to see it done. And then when they come back for the seat visit to be taken back by how easy that seat visit it is. We normally in my office will book 30 minutes to seat a single unit crown, and I think most of us probably operate on that particular timeframe. It is very unusual in our office now to spend more than 10 minutes on that process, and that 10 minutes includes seating the patient, removing the temporary trying the permanent prosthesis in, and then cementing it. And it's a rare day when we have to make adjustments. A lot of these restorations go in, just whoosh, you slide them in, you check your contacts the contacts are great, the margins are spot on. You tell the patient to, "bite down, how does that feel?" and they can't tell it's there. You check the occlusion, everything is hitting exactly how it should you cement and they go, and oftentimes they'll comment on my gosh if I had crowns done the old way with the goop and you know we ground on them for half hour to get everything right. It's phenomenal that this is just basically put it in and go.
