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Digitalization - The Future of Dentistry
Prof. Michiel van Genuchten - Head of Dental Software Solutions
Digitalization is increasingly impacting dentistry and will lead to substantial changes affecting how dentists and dental technicians will carry out their profession in the not so distant future.
What will be the impact on patients, dentists, dental technicians and the value chain?
In the past, dentistry involved many analogue processes, manual labour and physical intermediate products such as impressions. On the one hand, it can be stated that not everything will change tomorrow. On the other hand it is clear that innovations such as CADCAM, intra-oral scanning, pre-operative planning and workflow management will have an impact on dentistry in the years to come. In our interview later in this issue, Prof Dr Daniel Wismeijer concisely describes the impact of digitalization on the dental profession as follows: The patient will remain analogue and the in-mouth piece he or she receives is analogue. Everything in between will become digital. If this is the case, it is evident that digitalization will change the value chain and that dental professionals may want to be prepared in order to capture the opportunities offered by these changes – not tomorrow but even today.
Patients
They are clearly affected by the developments in the fields of intra-oral scanning and pre-operative planning. Intra-oral scanning will make biting in an impression a thing of the past. Pre-operative planning will make a flapless operation possible and, as in many other activities, better planning also reduces the risk of surprises during the operation. Basically, implant treatment will be available to more patients as pre-operative planning tools will allow more general practitioners to enter Implantology.
Dentists
Scanning will enter the dental office in the form of intra-oral scanners and, in some cases, Cone Beam CT scanners. Also, more and more patient and treatment data will be generated in the GP’s office. As a result, the GP will increasingly have to operate with IT equipment such as computers, software and network connections and, accordingly, will need to obtain and continuously train the skills needed.
Dental Technicians.
Some of the scanning procedures will leave the lab to the GP and new materials will change the workflows. While some process steps become less important (e.g. impression scanning), new process steps may be introduced (e.g. analysis of digital scans and pictures to design an optimal result).
The Value Chain
The major changes may take place across the value chain. Dentists and labs have been working together for many years. Typically it was a relay: one did his part of the job and then handed the analogue “stick” – mostly an impression – to the next player. It can well be imagined that the race will change if this stick becomes digital and can be handed over with the speed of light. It saves the production and material costs of the analogue intermediate product. More importantly, it allows all the information to be preserved, preventing the loss of precision that is typical for a transition from analogue to digital (e.g. when scanning an impression) or from digital to analogue (e.g. when creating a drill guide based on a digital pre-operative plan
When will it happen?
What can be expected from digital dentistry in the years to come? A quote from Bill Gates may provide some guidance: “We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten. Don’t let yourself be lulled into inaction”. There is no digital crystal ball yet. However, dental is certainly not the first industry to go digital. Dentistry was preceded by significant industries such as the photo industry, where digitalization brought major changes in materials and printing. Another example is the computer industry, where market leaders such as IBM and DEC were replaced by newcomers such as Microsoft and Oracle. Typically, players across the whole value chain are affected by digitalization. A current example is books: right now it is obvious that many paper books will become e-books and that the book industry will go digital to a large extent.
It is not difficult to predict that an industry such as the dental one will go digital. What is more difficult to predict is when it will happen and what the successful business model will be by the time it happens. It is obvious that a lot can be gained by digitally connecting the different players in the dental value chain. The amount of analogue models that has to be produced, transported and reworked can be reduced and as a result the value chain will become more precise and more efficient. Workflow management will become a topic in the dental industry, just as it became important in other industries that went digital.
Who will do the work?
Digital dentistry will require the contributions of many different people and parties. GPs, surgeons and lab technicians will be needed to translate the analogue processes into digital processes that make sense. They will also play a key role in a digital era, although their role may change. There will also be an increasing number of software engineers that translate the specifications of digital dentistry into designs and working software products.
One of the major changes in a digital world is that there are typically more companies involved in providing the customer with a total solution. Take the example of watching a clip on YouTube: doing so involves using the products of four major software companies: Google (which bought YouTube), Microsoft (the operating system and the browser), Adobe (the video player) and Citrix (supplier of the video streaming infrastructure).
By the way, these are all software companies with more than one billion dollars in revenue. Some of them are showing increasing interest in the medical industry these days. For those interested, take a look at www.google.com/health or www.healthvault.com. In digital dentistry, not all technology will be supplied by one company. This increases the importance of standards that allow products of different suppliers to work together properly. An interesting example in this context is coDiagnostiX, Straumann’s pre-operative planning software. coDiagnostiX is able to work with the output from all Cone Beam CT scanners since all CBCT scanners provide their output according to the Dicom standard. This allows us to focus on pre-operative planning for implants without having to worry about the CBCT scanner. Standards like Dicom will play an important part in the era of digital dentistry.
