How Top Dental Practices Are Managing Lab Work Now

For most of dentistry's history, the phone has been how lab work got managed. You called to check on a case, confirm a prescription, ask about a delay, or chase down a status update someone forgot to send. It's how things got done.

It's also why most practices feel busier than they should.

The phone isn't a workflow. It's a workaround for the absence of one. And the cost of relying on it doesn't show up on a P&L line item; it shows up everywhere else: in the case that sat for two days because no one realized it was waiting on a confirmation, in the remake that traces back to one ambiguous sentence no one re-read, in the assistant who spent her afternoon on hold instead of preparing the next patients. These moments feel small in isolation, but when you add them across a year, they're the reason your day feels harder than it should. This isn't about saving a few minutes; it's about removing the disruption that's quietly built into how lab work gets managed.

The gap most practices haven't named yet is the one between doing the dentistry and managing the dentistry. The clinical side has modernized, but the management side hasn't. And every hour spent reconciling cases over the phone is an hour that should belong to patients.

My Account is Glidewell's free connected case management platform, included with your Glidewell account, and built around a simple idea: every part of a case should live in one place, accessible from one login.

That means case submission, real-time tracking, 3D design review before production, billing, and in-case messaging — all anchored to the case itself, not scattered across phone calls, email threads, and sticky notes. With My Account there’s no switching platforms, redundant follow-ups, or blind spots. When you open a case six weeks after submission, the whole history is right there: every message, every approval, every update. You can see exactly where every case stands, know what's next without asking, and make decisions without first reconstructing the conversation.

This isn’t a simple features update. It’s a new way to stay connected to your lab partner with full visibility into every case, where the management layer finally catches up to the clinical output.

Most practices that have My Account use it for the basics: submitting cases, checking status. That's the surface. The real value sits in three places most practices overlook.

The first is 3D design review before production starts. Most case problems don't originate in production, they originate earlier, in a gap between what the doctor envisioned and what the lab manufactured. Reviewing and approving the 3D design before fabrication moves the moment of correction upstream, where it costs nothing. You catch any issues and align expectations with the lab, reducing remakes and chairside compromises before they consume anyone's afternoon. If the issue isn’t caught until after fabrication, it can cost a remake, a delayed patient, and a conversation no one wants to have in the chair.

The second is in-case messaging. Email is the wrong place for clinical communication because it's unsearchable across cases, easily buried, and disconnected from the case it concerns. Anchoring every message to a specific case means the conversation lives where the work lives. Six months later, when a similar case comes through, you can read what was decided last time instead of guessing.

The third is mobile access. The dentist managing the practice isn't always sitting at a desk. A case that has to wait until someone is back at a computer is a case that loses hours every time it needs attention. Mobile check-ins between patients make pockets of time — the few minutes between operatories — more productive.

These three close the workflow gap and change how the practice runs.

My Account removes the cost most practices don't realize they're paying.

The cost is already in your day. It's the time you're spending on hold. It's the follow-ups that shouldn't have been necessary. It's the remakes that started as miscommunication. The choice isn't whether to invest in better case management .You're already investing in it, in the most expensive way possible. The choice is whether that investment keeps flowing into phone calls and reconstruction work, or into a system that handles it once and lets you move on. This is how high-performing practices running consistent operations are managing their lab work today.

The shift is simple: fewer steps between you and the information you need. And it's already part of your Glidewell account.

Log into My Account and start running your workflow from one connected system.