Publisher’s Letter: Innovations for Practicing Dentists

I want to encourage you to ask the question, “What is my lab doing to make my everyday experience better?” When a delivery deadline is missed, when the results aren’t what you’re looking for, when Tuesday’s quality differs from Wednesday’s — can you confidently answer that your lab is taking steps to make those pain points rarer?

Despite how foundational the dentist-lab relationship is to our industry, in my nearly six decades as a lab owner I’ve recognized there’s almost always a disconnect. The dentist isn’t sure of what’s happening in the lab and the lab has little insight into the practice, which can lead to misaligned expectations and undesired outcomes.

In this special innovations issue of Chairside^® magazine, I’m pulling back the curtain on how Glidewell is partnering clinicians with engineers and scientists to create meaningful improvements for the practice. As we develop new technologies, materials and processes, we’ve entrenched the clinical perspective at every level. We only consider an innovation successful when it improves the everyday dentist’s experience.

We’re not only relying on our in-house clinical team’s perspective, but also on the voices of the tens of thousands of dentists across the U.S. who work with Glidewell each year. The feedback our customers provide today guides the progress of tomorrow.

The real differentiator is the size and scale of our operations here at Glidewell. We have 83 CDTs, 15 Ph.Ds. and five dentists in house.

Where other labs might be limited to making improvements to a handful of services, we have the privilege of being able to enhance much more: the raw materials, the software, the artificial intelligence systems, the manufacturing tools and workflows. Beyond that, we’re expanding the educational opportunities available to practitioners — knowing that any impact of a new material, protocol or tool is dependent on a dentist’s ability to easily incorporate it. That’s why we offer so many different free and low-cost courses today.

As you read this issue of Chairside, I hope you see how the innovation happening at Glidewell is centered on your success.