Using a Digital Workflow to Increase Efficiencies
Inside Dental Technology delivers updates on digital workflows, materials, lab techniques, and innovation in dental technology through expert articles and videos.
June 1, 2024
Volume 15, Issue 5, June 2024
Page(s): pg. 16
Sean Han, CDT
Nearly 20 years after opening his first dental laboratory, Sean Han, CDT, was ready for a reset. His full-service laboratory in California had become highly successful and grown to almost 30 employees, but Han was becoming more and more interested in CAD/CAM design and full-arch digital dentistry. "My biggest interests were always in dental implants and cosmetic dentistry," Han says, "so after doing the beginners certification course for Dentsply Sirona's inLab CAD software about 12 years ago, I started to engage more in the full-arch arena and getting more involved chairside." As a ceramist, Han had found it all to easy to get stuck behind the laboratory bench, only thinking about the part of the process right in front of him. But when he joined a study club run by one of the dental offices he worked with, the Ueno Center in Campbell, California, maintained by Jeremy Ueno, DMD, he began to understand how much of a team effort the work truly was. "Going into a clinic was mind-blowing," Han says. "I saw beauty in what they were doing, especially in the full-arch treatment concepts, and I knew that was what I wanted to focus on."
Han took the leap in 2017 and moved to Phoenix, Arizona, to start his brand-new specialty laboratory, Master's Arch. In the beginning he planned it to be a very small, boutique lab, but it has since grown to 10 employees, all specializing in full-arch restorations. "Our goal is to provide education-based creative solutions and workflows to every practice that we work with," Han says. "Our main focus is building a team effort to create a more efficient, prosthetically driven, digital workflow."
Ueno followed Han over to Master's Arch as one of his main clients, and the two soon became close collaborators, creating a new, fully digital implant workflow. "We started using Dentsply Sirona's Astra Tech Implant System® EV along with Atlantis® patient-specific prosthetic solutions," Ueno says. "From the clinical perspective, the Astra implant's design allows for better primary stability, so that has been a godsend for me surgically, to be able to achieve well over the 25 Ncm of torque that we need when we place implants."
Han adds that the SmartFix abutment solution also provides stability. "We do a lot of angulated multi-unit abutments (MUAs)," Han says. "These abutments are great because they come with two pieces where there is no screw loosening due to their unique design, so that has been a game changer to see almost zero of our cases having screw loosening or prosthetic loosening, which can be an issue with other MUAs."
The real benefit of their new workflow, however, is saving chair time. Using Primescan® and photogrammetry, they are able to precisely plan the implant location and send records back and forth completely digitally, so that Han can do a digital conversion to merge his smile design with data from the patient's mouth. According to Ueno, the new method of taking only digital records cuts the hour or more of chair time that would be needed for a traditional pickup down to just 15 to 20 minutes of digital record taking by a dental assistant. Han also appreciates the cost savings associated with doing all the communication digitally because he no longer must travel back and forth to California to do the conversion manually. Without the need for any analogue impressions or conversions, the Atlantis solution improves the efficiency of the entire process and communication between multiple players to provide an optimal patient experience, benefiting any dentist, surgeon, or laboratory involved in the case.
"I have a lot more control with the digital CAD design and am able to create an easily cleansable design on the intaglio surface that merges the digitally generated wax up with the actual surgical implant positions," Han says. "So it is a really nice, clean workflow to create the temporary."
Once the patient has healed, they return to the Ueno Center for a torquing test, and digital records are taken of the healed intaglio surface, temporary scans, and XYZ photogrammetry scans, which are then sent to the restorative dentist. Because the collaboration all happens digitally, Han can have a long-term provisional prototype delivered to the restorative office ahead of the patient's first appointment.
"Once the patient has tried the prototype for a couple weeks and it is confirmed, then I basically just copy and paste the design and all of the case information and send it to Atlantis to create the custom titanium bar while I create the zirconia restoration," Han says. With photogrammetry, Han is able to submit records with under 10 µm accuracies, and Atlantis is able to match that accuracy and guarantee a passive fit, creating a patient-specific, customized restorative solution tailored to the laboratory's preferences for anything from a single-tooth to a full arch fixed or removable restoration. "With the Atlantis solution's guaranteed passiveness, we are able to save even more chair time by eliminating unnecessary patient appointments and fit adjustments," Han says. "That makes the whole case less expensive for us, and it also provides a better experience for the patient, which will ultimately win us more cases."
Atlantis provides patient-specific solutions for all major implant systems. Offering custom abutments, bridges, and base solutions, as well as compatibility with sophisticated design software, Atlantis brings two decades of innovation backed by long-term experience and reliable results for comprehensive prosthetic solutions.
For more information, contact:
Dentsply Sirona
Prosthetics.CustomerService@dentsplysirona.com
844-848-0137
