I wrote a blog a little while ago about 3D printing. It was when I returned from Cologne after the demonstration I'd had of the new SprintRay MIDAS printer, which is being distributed by Straumann (but also by others), which has moved printing in practice chairside way, way forward in my opinion.
I've not had so much attention from a clinical blog such as that for a long while, and of course, that feels good as it strokes my cat and boosts my ego, thinking that I've done something decent.
I actually had someone say to me, "You'll not believe how many Straumann printers you've sold for us".
It's quite interesting that the power of a short blog post about what I was impressed with in Cologne can convince people to go down the track and change the direction of the practice, or at least research a change in the direction of the practice.
As with all these things, though, there's a difference of opinion, and my friend and colleague, Andy Legg, pointed me in the direction of the blog from the Nexus clinical guys (the awesome Steve Campbell and his crew), which is here, which is effectively a counter blog from the technician's perspective of chairside printing.
I suppose, just to be clear, I think the blog I wrote was not suggesting that everything was rosy and ready now, and you could just drop these things into your practice on Monday and be in an entirely different clinical space.
As with all of these developing technologies, there is work to be done.
The blog by Hugo Sousa, though, suggests, first of all, that there was a blog written by a respected clinician. I think that was referring to me, but I'm not sure, and I would never ever describe myself as respected. Secondly, the blog discussed clinical time usage and all the things that go along with that in practice, how it takes 30 minutes to finish a printed crown, not 12 minutes, and how that time could be better spent in practice by the clinicians seeing more patients.
This would be to suggest two things:
So, let's take the scenario (and I'm dreaming into the future here) that a SprintRay printer or equivalent can print a crown, which is 'NHS acceptable'. By that, I mean you print it in a different room, and therefore, you can call the room a lab, and therefore, you can say it's a lab-produced restoration, and you can, therefore, use it as a final crown.
Let's also assume that the material that we're using is acceptable and, for the NHS regulations, a high-filled composite crown almost certainly would be.
Let's say that it does take something like 15 minutes to do a prep in an NHS setting (sad but probably true), and let's say it takes another 15 minutes to design and print the crown to first finish (certainly true from what I've seen in several places).
Let's say then that that has to be finished, sprues have to be cut off the crown, it has to be polished or finished and let's say that's done by someone else, not by the dentist, and that you're organised enough to make that happen. In the 30 minutes of this happening, you could be cutting another crown prep on someone else, doing some check-ups, fitting a denture, doing an implant consultation or doing whatever you want and then when the 30 minutes were up, you could fit the crown in a short period of time.
Contrary to what Hugo was saying, you could cut your clinical appointment for a crown in the NHS to 30 minutes if you were organised, and this would just be being organised.
It's not that this technology is entirely ready and fixable, and you can fly into it - of course it isn't; it's just that the change that's coming now is so obvious and so quick that the guys who use the first move or advantage to understand it and integrate it, to see how they're going to change their practice procedures to fit this (and I'm talking about appointment book management) are the people who are going to get the biggest win from the developing technology moving forwards.
We've been working on this since Cologne quite extensively and quite intellectually to see how it works, how it fits, how it may also impact our plans to move forward with CEREC 2.0 in our practice, and whether that is something that we should do so, not only is it fantastically exciting and invigorating for us in the team but it looks like we can make some enormous differences to the way we provide treatment for our patients.
This is not the end of laboratory dentistry by any stretch of the imagination. The guys at Steve's place in Yorkshire and others like them will only flourish and get better as the number of technicians decreases, but it is a way for us to offset the potential disadvantage of the fact that we now have about 50% less technicians than we had 10 years ago.
Blog Post Number - 4144