As dentists look for opportunities to expand their practices and streamline their restorative workflows, same-visit restorations have emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas in dentistry. With chair time — and the patient’s time — at a premium, the ability to provide a crown in a single appointment is invaluable to the dental practice. But with multiple CAD/CAM milling solutions on the market, questions inevitably come up about what kind of crowns can be milled in-office, and how they compare with the restorations dentists receive from the lab.

The best place to start when exploring the restorative capabilities of in-office CAD/CAM milling solutions is the single-unit posterior crown, which tends to be the “bread and butter” of same-visit dentistry. Monolithic zirconia has become the most popular restorative material used in dentistry, particularly for cases in the posterior, where strength and durability are the primary concerns. To address that clinical preference, a number of chairside CAD/CAM milling units are capable of milling zirconia crowns. However, these systems mill zirconia crowns in the soft state, requiring oven-firing of the restoration after milling is complete, which adds to the time the clinician and patient must wait before the crown is delivered.

Only Glidewell offers CAD/CAM solutions that enable dentists to mill crowns from BruxZir^® Zirconia — the most trusted and clinically validated dental zirconia. When you add the glidewell.io^™ In-Office Solution to your practice, you are able to quickly create BruxZir restorations right in your office. With no oven wait required, you can deliver BruxZir NOW crowns straight from the mill, allowing you to treat more patients in less time. BruxZir Zirconia, which the independent Gordon J. Christensen Clinicians Report^® has called “the most successful tooth-colored restoration in the history of dentistry,” is backed by 10 years of clinical validation, making it the ideal choice to address concerns dentists have about the quality of chairside-milled restorations.

According to Dr. Scott Barton, a dentist from San Antonio, Texas: “A lot of dentists say, ‘I’m not going to bother with chairside milling if I can’t do BruxZir restorations.’ Well, with glidewell.io, you can have it both ways.”

The pre-sintering of BruxZir NOW strengthens the material and eliminates the risk of shrinkage. Materials that are not pre-sintered must be baked after milling, requiring the doctor to interrupt their workflow multiple times for post-processing steps. Instead, with the NOW (no oven wait) materials exclusive to glidewell.io, you can just let the mill do its job and simply come back when the crown is ready to deliver.

When adding a chairside CAD/CAM system to your practice, milling time is a key consideration — but it is only one part of the equation. To properly gauge the impact that a particular system will have on your practice, you need to look at the complete chairside workflow, from intraoral scan to completed restoration. Let’s consider zirconia restorations as an example.

Here’s the chairside workflow for BruxZir NOW:

It’s easy to see which workflow will help your team maximize efficiency and productivity.

Dr. Thomas Rolfes, whose practice in Costa Mesa, California, has grown substantially since he began offering his patients same-visit crowns, says: “We are loving our new digital workflow with glidewell.io! It’s changed the way we practice. Faster, more profitable, and most importantly — better.”

The fastmill.io^™ In-Office Mill is the CAD/CAM milling machine behind the streamlined restorative workflow for glidewell.io. It’s the only chairside milling unit capable of producing BruxZir NOW crowns, and it does so in a highly efficient manner that patients will notice when they quickly receive their restoration in a single appointment. And while the crown is milling for one patient, you have the flexibility to move on to your next patient, resulting in a more efficient workflow. Just leave the mill running and go about the rest of your routine. In under 40 minutes, your BruxZir crown will be milled and ready for delivery when you return to the other patient.

The efficiency of this workflow is beneficial to patients and practices alike. According to Dr. Rolfes: “It’s cut our costs and increased our profit because we’re treating patients so quickly. It’s also been incredibly useful — the digital workflow it creates has been a game changer for our practice.”

The ability to provide your patients with a crown fabricated from the most trusted zirconia in dentistry can set your practice apart from the competition. The appeal of this workflow is illustrated best in a 2015 comprehensive dental survey, which found that two out of three patients would change dentists to book a single-visit appointment.¹ Patients value dental efficiency more than ever, and will reward practices who can provide high-quality restorations in one visit, minimizing the time that patients need to spend away from work and family to receive care.

In addition to the proven durability of BruxZir Zirconia, glidewell.io offers an array of other materials that allow you to skip the oven wait, from CAMouflage^® NOW for inlays, onlays and veneers, to BioTemps^® NOW for precise-fitting temporary crowns and bridges. And now, you can also mill crowns from BruxZir Esthetic NOW, a highly translucent zirconia material that has quickly become the preferred option for anterior cases in Glidewell labs, surpassing even the leading glass ceramics.

These expansive material options for same-visit restorations are transforming the way forward-thinking doctors practice restorative dentistry. “BruxZir Esthetic NOW offers the same combination of strength and beauty we would receive from the lab,” said Dr. Cary LaCouture of Parker, Colorado. “So we’re able to confidently provide single-appointment zirconia restorations in the smile zone, too.”

If you’re ready to take your practice to the next level by offering patients same-visit dentistry, glidewell.io is the solution that allows you to deliver restorations made from the most trusted material in dentistry. In addition to advanced milling technology and the most proven restorative materials available for in-office use, glidewell.io features intuitive one-click designs and world-class support directly from the lab, which we’ll explore in Part 2 and Part 3 of this blog series. In the meantime, watch Jim Glidewell’s new, in-depth video to learn more about what BruxZir NOW can do for your practice and your patients.