Henry Schein and 3Shape offer labs intraoral scanning certification

Henry Schein Halas has commenced offering its customers 3Shape products through its Connect Dental arm including the 3Shape Trios® intraoral scanning solution. As part of this, the company played host to the inaugural 3Shape laboratory certification program in Australia to ready local dental labs to accept and process intraoral scans from clinicians using Trios.

In conjunction with a 3Shape trainer from Denmark, this program saw an initial group of five labs from around Australia trained in how to accept scans, design restorations and order C&B models at Henry Schein's Sydney headquarters in January.

"We're excited to now be offering our customers the 3Shape Trios intraoral scanner," said Ross Phillips, Connect Dental Specialist Business Unit Manager at Henry Schein Halas. "The Trios represents the state-of-the-art in intraoral scanning and we believe that technology like this will quickly become commonplace in dental practices across the country.

"However, because this technology is in many ways brand new, the entire market is in dire need of more education, more training and more supporting infrastructure in order to take advantage of the benefits an entirely digital workflow can deliver."

Trios Product Manager, Renee Lampreia, said that "As a company, we recognise that this technology is moving quickly and in order for our dental laboratory customers to be able to utilise these types of systems efficiently and to maximum potential, they need to be highly trained. We also realise that clinicians want to be certain that their laboratory is certified to manufacture these types of digital restorations. Therefore the need to bring in a specialist from the factory to help meet these goals was a must. Apart from training the first group of Australian labs, our own Digital Specialist Staff were also trained on how to run the certification courses in the future."

Henry Schein Halas Chairside CAD/CAM Business Manager, Quentin Daniels, said that the trend in digital dentistry was continuing towards more open solutions that allow clinicians freedom to choose the best hardware and software to suit their needs.

"Trios fits perfectly into this model and delivers the best digital impressions we've yet seen," he said. However, in order to take advantage of these great digital impressions, we have to make sure that the rest of the picture is in place.

"The Trios captures the digital impression and 3Shape provides great software for restoration design, but how will you create the physical restoration that you've designed and of particular importance with digital impressions, how will you make the model you need to work on?

"Digital impression taking is exciting because a large percentage of work completed nowadays by dental laboratories already uses CAD/CAM technology to varying degrees, mostly using scans of models made the traditional way. By allowing the dentist to create a digital model of the patient's dentition chairside reduces the number of steps in the process and increases the accuracy and efficiency of the workflow. However, in many cases, the technician still requires a model to work with and in all cases, some form of manufacturing for the restoration is required.

"So before digital impression taking can be a viable solution, both of these elements need to be in place. And, in addition to all of that, we're still a long way off the plug-n-play concept with digital dentistry, so a strong level of technical support needs to be available at both the time of installation and on an ongoing basis to ensure all these technologies can continually operate in unison.

"Finally, we need to educate both clinicians and dental technicians on these burgeoning technologies that are quickly becoming game changers and continually offer training on how to take best advantage of the benefits on offer."