The world has changed dramatically due to the influx of technology. Dentistry has seen a huge swing toward digital in the last 10 years. One of my personal pet peeves was the introduction of the concept "digital workflows" into marketing. What bothered me is that it seemed to imply there was a true digital workflow and not the *concept* of digital workflows.
Digital radiography made tremendous changes in how offices functioned. That *is* a digital workflow, but it didn't mean everything around it was digital as well. I felt the term brought a dust cloud of misunderstanding to doctors trying to evaluate things to incorporate into their practices.
However, now I'm much happier because I can tell you with confidence that digital workflows truly exist. It's now routinely possible to really have 1s and 0s be the only thing between you and delivery of care. The DWX-43W mill form DGSHAPE is a good example of this. This is the second DGSHAPE mill that's been in my practice. We started out with the DWX-42W in 2022 and upgraded to the new model about 14 months ago.
The unit is open architecture which is a huge benefit. When I began milling in 2022 we had been taking digital intraoral scans with our iTero scanners for about fifteen years. We were familiar with our scanners, knew how to use them, and were getting tremendous results with them. Because of the open architecture we could immediately use the scanner data to feed the mill. Our results were impressive.
The process is now scan digital, design digital, and mill digital. The only physical part of the process is the patient and the finished crown. That is a truly digital workflow!
The amazing thing to me is that this is only getting better. I think in the next 5-10 years dentistry is going to see a tremendous amount of what we do migrate into the in-office sphere. The results are precise and predictable and the delivery time will be cut dramatically. There is always going to be a need for dental labs. There are somethings that will require human brains to create them. However labs are currently more digital than most dental offices. That means that even if you don't ever want to do things in-house, you'll still get better results and help your lab by doing as much digitally as you can. This is the future that I've been dreaming of for over two decades and it's finally starting to arrive.
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