Is the Cadent iTero™ Recession Proof?...

... Dental offices are down across the country and as a result Dental labs are as well.  The majority of labs around the country are down in sales, some more than others, and being 10% down or better is considered good for the current market.  Ragle Dental Laboratory isn’t really any different from any other lab fighting the current economic situation, except for one thing:  the Cadent iTero™ dentist.

So far this first quarter of 2009, the iTero™ user dentist is up on average by an astonishing margin of 55% in business compared to 2008’s first quarter and about the same for the last quarter of 2008.  We benefit in basically two ways from the Cadent iTero™ scanner.  First, the scanner has the ability to grow a practice by an average of 20%.  So as long as we’re doing the restorative work, we grow too.  Second, the expense of remakes virtually disappears.  But the real winners in the use of the iTero™ scanner are the practitioner and the patient. 

We’ve studied the growth of a practice after the purchase of a Cadent iTero™ scanner and the efficiency gained from its use pays for the scanner five times over in just the first year.  Ragle Dental Lab has never purchased a piece of equipment that resulted in an ROI of 500% and let alone in the FIRST YEAR!  The scanner on average saves 20-30 minutes per patient and that includes both appointments.  If you could save 20-30 minutes per patient, how much time would that leave you in your day to add more patients to your schedule to increase your bottom line?  You do the math. 

There are multiple ways a practice benefits from the iTero™ scanner.  The first is the level of efficiency just discussed to add time to see more patients in a day to grow your practice without adding an operatory or an associate.  The second is the remake factor that is saved from never remaking a case due to the restoration not fitting.  How many times a year do you have to re-schedule a patient due to a crown that doesn’t fit?  Not only is the patient unhappy that they have to come back for another appointment, but you have to waste your chair time.  The cost of remaking the crown becomes peanuts in comparison to the extra chair time used.  Gordon Christensen in the February issue of Dentistry Today has a great article on digital impressions and in a study conducted between digital impressions versus traditional impressions had this to say about the results, “Surprisingly to us, given the choice between conventionally made or digitally made restorations, almost every restoration that the dentist elected to cement was the digitally made one.” 

Another advantage to taking a digital impression is you only take it once.  How many times do you take multiple impressions on the same patient?  Do you send the lab two sometimes three impressions per case to ensure accuracy is met?  Even if once a week, you re-take an impression because you saw a bubble on a margin, that’s still an extra cost eliminated by using digital.

There are a lot of little advantages to using digital, but the last big one is the iTero™’s marketing ability.  There’s no doubt that patients perceive this technology as progressive and therefore perceive the practice as progressive.  When patients are given a choice between traditional impressions and digital, they routinely choose digital due to comfort.  A popular comment is, “so I don’t have to have that goop shoved in my mouth?”  We know patients are looking for comfort in a dental office but the major benefit to the patient is that they simply get a more accurate restoration.

Now because of the integrity of a digital impression, we are able to offer a 100% discounted no-hassle remake policy to our Cadent iTero™ customers.  This isn’t possible for us to offer with a traditional polyvinyl impression.  Also we believe in Cadent so much that we have invested in the fabrication of the digital model.   We have a press release done by Cadent, Inc. posted on our website that went into several dental trade magazines announcing that we have become the first Cadent milling operation in the United States outside of their own facility in New Jersey.  We have renovated the old Dom’s restaurant behind our current facility and purchased the necessary equipment to run such an operation.  We will mill all of our own accounts’ models but also the models for laboratories located in the Central U.S.  We’re very excited about this and invite anyone to come see the operation. 

Conventional impressions have been the standard of care for all of the 20th century with changes in material used only, but the principal has stayed the same.  There is now a better option out there, so why not use the best available.  Some say, the traditional impression works and if it’s not broke, don’t fix it.  But the horse and buggy works too.

Take a look at Gordon Christensen’s article on digital impressions, topic number 4.