With clear aligner design and production in-house, you can do whatever you want

Dr. Christian Groth is a leading advocate for producing clear aligners in-house. He believes that the benefits to both patient and practice are numerous. From turnaround time to costs, Dr. Groth considers his decision to produce clear aligners in-house to be one of the most important he’s made at his practice.

Dr. Groth says, “an open clear aligner market is going to benefit everyone from doctors to patients. In the sense that the more options available, the more they will drive innovation, drive product development, and as a result, we will have better products: a better range of products that come down in price so that we can offer more treatment to more people.”

Don’t miss Dr. Groth’s two lectures at the 3Shape IDS booth.

Dr. Christian Groth:

“Clear aligners are changing what we do. Because it’s bringing a whole new segment of patients to our office. There’s a lot of people that want to have orthodontics, but they don’t want to have metal braces and so; we have options now to offer treatment in a much more aesthetic and streamlined fashion. Clear aligners are the primary way we do that.

In my practice, moving aligner design and production in-house has been one of the greatest things we’ve done. It affects a lot of things we do; turnaround time is a major benefit.

I can literally, scan a patient in the morning and if I wanted to, I could have aligners designed, models printed, and aligners fabricated by the afternoon to deliver to that patient. Turnaround time is great.

But most importantly, what it really comes down to is having ultimate control. When you have clear aligner design and production in-house, you can do whatever you want to do. You can do it in the timeframe you want. You control the costs. You control the whole process, which is something that we have not been able to do in the past.

In terms of in-house aligners, I believe that there are two key benefits for patients. One is the ability to treat simple movement cases… relapse cases, and patients that have already been through treatment in your office. These are relatively straight forward.

The other is movement after deband. Everyone has had patients where you have small spaces, or small rotations that you want to take care of, but you don’t want to do that with brackets and wires. Either because hygiene is an issue, they are overtime, or the patient simply wants to get their braces off. You can easily design and manufacture a small number of aligners to get these movements taken care of and they are not done in fixed appliances. These are services that we could not offer before.

Getting started with in-house aligners can be as simple or as advanced as you want to make it. If you want to go full on, with bringing the design and production of aligners in-house, you can do that with software like Clear Aligner Studio. You can do it by bringing a 3D printer online and you can fabricate in-house.

However, if you want to go a little bit slower, you can simply outsource the design portion of this, and you can outsource the manufacturing portion, just to deliver the treatment portion to your office.

You can mix and match, whichever you want to do it, depending on you and your staff’s skillset, and what your space requirements are. You may not have space in your office to all this, but you are still going to want to offer these products to your patients.

So, the beauty of these options is that you can do anything, as little or as much as you want to.”

Bernhard Egger:

As a follow up to Dr. Groth’s comments, we asked a laboratory for their take on producing clear aligners.

We spoke with lab owner, Bernhard Egger who is using 3Shape Clear Aligner Studio. He replied that “Clear Aligner Studio has a tremendous impact on the efficiency in our laboratory. The amount of time necessary to spend on a specific case has reduced probably 30%.”

If you would like to offer clear aligners to your patients and customers, get control with 3Shape Clear Aligner Studio.