hey it's dr amanda with straight smile solutions straight smile solutions.com
and we've had a ton of videos on scanners if you go if you want to see all of our videos and
content on scanner some of it's a little outdated maybe over five years old but um you can go to my
youtube site street smile solutions youtube site scroll down there's playlists somewhere towards
the bottom there's one on scanners so um again i'm not partial to any particular scanner however
i went to a really really great lecture and it was actually hosted by dandy um dandy is a lab
company that basically i call it lab crowdsourcing company it's kind of cool it used to be called
shoot i forgot what it was called ortholy maybe i think but anyways um they did a really good
impartial lecture on um which scanner to get and i thought i was gonna come in and have them be like
super pro three shape but they actually weren't they were pretty impartial and
they went through the pros and cons of all the major scanners from your prime scan to
your three shape to your eye tarot to your um medic with the top four that they talked about
so i feel like it's pretty fresh in my mind and i understand the benefits of and you know the
cost of each one and you know it's like there's no wrong or right answer and i see a lot of you like
super stuck on this so ultimately what they said and i think everything they said was true
they said first of all what are you using for you know obviously if you're an orthodontist
and you do invisalign which most orthodontists do you get an eye tarot
you know now you might have more than one scanner in your office because remember iteros
they're not cheap they mean they're not expensive but they're not cheap but there's
a lot of additional expenses that you need to account for and actually my husband is a gp
and he just bought the five light high tarot um we haven't gotten it yet but you know trust me he was
stalling on this for a long time but he finally sucked it up um fact of the matter is if you're
going to do invisalign you have to scan you're going to get so frustrated with impressions not
only is it expensive not sustainable not good for the environment but you're going to get
rejected and it's not going to be as accurate so it's it's a no-brainer so unless you can
and what we did for a really long time is that we luckily where we live there's radiology clinics
that charge a really cheap price to use their eye tarot you just send your patient there and
they scan you matter of fact my daughter's getting scanned this friday because the itera hasn't come
in yet for her refinement real convenient um takes like three minutes they're super fast um and by
the end of the day it's already uploaded into your invisalign account and you can go ahead and do the
refinement so um you know there are workarounds and i know a lot of general and pediatric dentists
that share eye tarots with other doctors you know they'll just come in and get a scan and basically
these doctors have turned their offices into racial virtual scan shops and then they build
the doctor right so there's workarounds if you don't have the volume yet to support the itero um
whether you like i said you outsource or you have a friend that you can use or whatever but anyways
they have additional expenses so there's you got to think about training you got to think about are
there monthly fees you got to think about how much do the tips cost are the tips disposable
or autoclavable these are all things you need to think about how many uses do you get if you
do have to autoclave them how fragile are they so invisalign is a pretty i taro has a pretty
high monthly fee and i think it's somewhere upwards of a couple hundred dollars a month
as well as the tips are disposable which i don't love that they're disposable i mean i think it's
bad for the environment um and they're about four bucks each so as much as i'd love to say please
scan every single patient it's free to take photos so better for you to just take invisalign photos
using the photo uploader on every single patient because those photos are incredibly powerful
and you can use them later and if you want to download it you can always there's a way to uh you
can grab a screenshot and upload it the composite into your own system i recommend having a backup
um in your own system but anyways um expensive the itero you know um i'm not gonna quote the
price well i will i think the two is somewhere around low to twenty thousands and the three is
somewhere around thirty thousand you can package it and pay more to have five years of the monthly
fees bundled up front so that way you can finance it at low to no interest which is what i recommend
and then at least you're covered for five years it's done right um tips like i said
four bucks a pop i do know some doctors that give the patient their tip to take home
and they tell them you get one tip with treatment i'm just giving ideas to save money
if you bring your tip back otherwise it's four dollars each time you have to get a refinement
i mean i think it's a little chancy but i do know people that do that or if they're
keeping the patients boxed for their invisalign they throw the tip in their box so there's lots
of things you could do so it's not so incredibly expensive but yeah if you're gonna do invisalign
you know you get the itero that's it's a no-brainer if you're not gonna do invisalign
then there's other options um you can use the itero for everything else it maybe isn't quite
as good as the prime scan or the medic or the three shape if you're thinking about doing um
uh restorative work or edentulous work it wouldn't if you're doing a dentist work i would not get
the iterator that's out so you know like full dentures or major partials or things like that
if you're doing croths removable cross don't get the eye tear so um but i know a lot of doctors
honestly that have two scanners they have one for their invisalign and one for everything else
the general and pediatric dentist and i know even orthodontists that have two scanners
one for their invisalign and one that's more open for everything else so you don't have the the cost
that you know the tips um and things like that and remember also invisalign does charge about 25
to outsource their scans to another lab that's not theirs um that's my understanding and so not even
all crown and bridge labs or profs labs um all ortholabs will take invisalign but we'll even take
itero as a result and if they do they might assess that fee onto you so these are things where you
want to talk to your favorite lab and be like hey first of all do you even take itero second of all
do you assess the fee on to me for each case if you're getting charged an extra 25 bucks for every
retainer that you send out every expander you send out every crown that you send out that's not worth
it so that's definitely not worth it so you need to kind of get that clear first but yeah i mean
i i think if you're gonna do invisalign you get an eye tarot that's it's a no-brainer and if you're
absolutely not doing it you absolutely don't get the itero so that that's how i lead with it and
then from there i i think if you're gonna do a lot of volume with anything that's not invisalign
like i said like retainers expanders functional appliances growth modification appliances crowns
bridges implant restorations partials you know you know everything you need to scan for um everything
else i would probably get a cheap medit or a three shape to be honest um unless you're doing profs
work and then maybe you want to get the prime scan but um the medi definitely has a huge kind
of going going off topic it has a huge learning curve i know tons of doctors that have one that
returned it so once you get a hang of it it's fine but it is not self-explanatory and the problem is
if you have the same staff over and over again that finally know how to use it you'll love it
but you know if you've got new stuff coming in or you're trying to cross chain people in the front
desk it is not easy to use it has a huge learning curve and it's frustrating and it can take you
hours initially to learn how to do it so you may not want to deal with that you know um whereas
the itero and the three shape are so intuitive that i can train a monkey to use them basically
my kids can do it and i like to say if i can teach people how to take an impression with a direct to
consumer home kit you know random consumers i can definitely teach any dental team member front desk
back office treatment coordinator doctor how to do a night tarot or at least a three shape because
literally all you do is wave the dancing in front of the teeth and then wherever you missed you go
back and do it over minute or two real easy real fast so and i do have a really great itero demo
that i just posted yesterday um so it's only probably a few videos behind this one on my
youtube and you can see how fast they did the itero scan it was very very very very fast
so anyways regardless you do need a scanner so all right go for it thanks