- Hey everyone, how're you doing?
So in this video, let's talk about the elephant in the room,
which is the cost of dental implants.
It's probably the most expensive thing
you can have done at the dentist.
And one of the main reasons why a lot of people
don't have dental implants is because of the cost of it.
Now, if we look at the cost of a dental implant,
and I've put together a quick spreadsheet,
it's made up of mainly four main things.
And if we look at this little pie chart I've got here,
we've got the cost of the dental implant itself,
but I'm not talking about just the implant,
because you need several components as well.
You need things like a healing cap,
you need an impression post,
and then you need the final tooth,
which is in the green bit, which is material costs.
Now this will vary a lot
on the different types of implant used,
and I tend to use the premium quality implants,
because I know if it was my body,
I wouldn't want a cheap implant in there.
And some of the implants which I use
cost between four and five hundred pounds.
And if we're charging, say,
between two and three thousand pounds,
that's a massive chunk of the cost of implant treatment,
is just that implant itself.
But surprisingly, it's not the biggest cost,
because you can see on this projection that I did
for a single tooth implant,
it's only about 13% of the total cost.
Now, the big cost is really the clinical time.
And that's the time you're in the chair,
and the time which is booked out
for you to have your dental implant treatment.
And this is the bit which I'm gonna show you we can reduce
quite a lot, and help pass that saving on to the patients.
The next bit, the material cost, is the cost of things
like surgical drapes, which we have to set the room up
in an aseptic kind of environment.
Not every dentist will do this,
but I think it is very important,
so doing all of that and the cost of making the final tooth,
that's all in the material cost,
and then we've got practice profits.
This is not necessarily the money the dentist takes home,
but in some cases the dentist is the practice owner.
Every business needs to make a profit so they can carry on
providing their service to every customer.
So, let's look at the clinical time,
because this is one area which,
by improving clinical efficiency,
we're able to drive down the end cost
of a dental implant to the patients,
without compromising and using a crappy implant system
that no one's heard of and is gonna cause problems
later down the line, without rushing things as well,
and without having to cut corners,
like not using surgical drapes for your implant treatments.
Now, I'm gonna show you a typical kind of pathway,
which was used, say, five, 10 years ago,
and all the really old-trained dentists,
this is the tried and tested, almost a gold standard
of treatment, or it's thought of as being that.
It's reducing risk at every single stage.
So, let's say you're in a situation,
you've got a tooth, it has to be removed,
and you want to replace it with a dental implant.
The first thing that needs to happen is
that tooth needs to be removed in such a way
that we don't damage any of the surrounding bone.
This takes a little bit longer,
and normally we'd book maybe 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes,
depending on the complexity of that tooth extraction.
Then we would have to wait for about three months,
that's how long it takes for bone to regrow into the socket,
into the hole that we've left by taking this tooth out.
And then we can place our dental implant.
And remember, in between there we're gonna need
to take CT scans and models and things like that.
So, there's probably another 20-minute appointment
booked in in between.
The implant placement appointment is normally booked
maybe an hour and a half, hour, hour and a half,
depending on the complexity, of which the surgery time
is maybe 20 to 30 minutes.
The rest of the time is going through the consent,
making sure you know the pros and cons of the treatment,
making sure you know the risks
associated with the treatments.
You get all the paperwork before anyway,
but we do go through it on the day with you.
In addition to that, there's all the medications
that we need to numb you up, and we need to set the room up
in this whole aseptic environment
with green drapes everywhere.
And then we perform the procedure,
then we have to go through you aftercare instructions,
give you your aftercare medications,
and tidy the whole thing up.
It does take a bit of time.
So all in all, that appointment, an hour and a half
is booked for your implant placement,
of which the actual treatment time is 20 to 30 minutes.
Next after that, two weeks later I like to see my patients
for a review, and what we call a suture removal.
So, a lot of the time, I don't use dissolvable sutures,
because I think the non-dissolvable ones
are actually better, but it does mean we need to see you
again for this suture removal appointment.
It's a quick appointment, I wanna make sure
that the implant is nice and healthy,
there's no sign of any infections,
and we can take out the sutures.
We can then let you go for another three to four months,
and let this implant integrate with your bone.
And this is the traditional time,
three months in the lower jaw
and four months in the upper jaw, for this implant to heal.
In the meantime, quite often if it's a cosmetic tooth,
you'll have some kind of tooth replacement there
as a temporary measure.
Then we'll book an uncovering appointment.
The uncovering appointment is where
we will make a tiny little cut in the bone
and put something called a healing cap, which sticks out,
and this helps shape the gum.
Two weeks after that, we can then take our molds,
our impressions, like you would if you've had a crown,
and send this off to the lab, the lab will take
two to three weeks and they'll send this crown back,
and then we can book you in to have a fit appointment.
So after this, we'll also have a review,
but I've just skipped that.
Just this surgical time here
is about three hours, 45 minutes.
That's half a day is spent just on this implant tooth,
replacing one tooth with a dental implant.
It costs nearly 1,000 pounds a day to have a surgery open,
and that's before you've paid the dentist.
We need two nurses, quite often it's a reception
and the actual nurse, we've got all the drapes,
and that figure of 1,000 pounds a day
includes all the fixed overheads of running a surgery.
So, that's added nearly 500 pounds
to the cost of your dental treatment just in surgical time.
And also, doing it this way means that
from the time you were told
and you decided to have your dental implant,
to actually getting your dental implant
could be six, seven months.
That's a long time.
Now, let me show you certain efficiencies,
which we've built in, and certain protocols
that we've built in to dramatically reduce this time
and therefore reduce your cost,
not by a massive amount, but it does reduce your cost,
and we're not compromising on the quality of implants
or the actual surgical procedure in any way.
So, the first thing, you come and see me,
we take our scans, our models,
and quite often I'll have a surgical guide made.
I've done a separate video about surgical guided treatment
and you can, I'll put a link of that somewhere here
so you can check that out as well.
But what we can do in a lot of cases,
not every single case, but a lot of them,
is take your tooth out and place the dental implant
in its most ideal position all in one visit.
The visit, because we're combining multiple things
all in one go, we still only really need an hour and a half.
Remember, that hour and a half before, of implant treatment,
most of it was actually non-treatment.
But taking the tooth out and putting the implant in,
doing it all in one go means that instead of
20 to 30 minutes, we're talking 30 to 40 minutes,
an extra 10 minutes or so to take this tooth out.
And then two weeks later, I will still see my patients
for a review, make sure everything is okay still,
no sign of infection, no adverse effects
of having the implant treatment,
we will remove any sutures that we've placed,
but at this appointment we'll also take an oral scan.
And this is like an impression but it's completely digital,
and what this means is, after two weeks
we can actually start the process of making the final tooth.
And remember, this is two weeks of having your tooth out,
and if we use a special implant,
so the implant is the Straumann
with the SLActive coating on it,
there's studies to show that we can
actually fit the final tooth on that implant
after four weeks of placing the implant.
This is amazing, compared to six to seven months,
the traditional method, it means that we can actually go
from having a bad tooth to having an implant
with its final tooth in four weeks.
I rarely do it in four weeks, I give it a little bit
extra time because I still don't 100% believe it,
but what this process has done,
just by thinking of what's happening at each appointment
and trying to combine as much stuff as we can do
in one appointment, we've reduced the clinical time
by over an hour.
And therefore we can pass this on to the patients.
But also, what our patients really love
is the fact that we've reduced this overall treatment time
and number of visits down to absolute minimum as well.
So, the time from the tooth being removed
and implant being placed, that all happens in one day,
to having your final tooth, could be as little
as four weeks, which is really amazing.
It's just a little bit more than having a crown.
In addition to this, there's only one appointment
in these appointments where you need anesthetic,
there's only one appointment where we need
to actually take the scalpel out.
So, a lot of patients don't like being cut up for no reason.
So again, we're minimizing on all of these things,
all of the really bad things associated with dentistry.
And also, if you're working, you're busy,
you probably don't wanna take out loads of appointments
for dental treatments.
So, we've streamlined it into these three appointments.
It's not always three appointments,
because there is assessment appointments before,
and there's possibly a review afterwards as well.
But we've dramatically cut down the number of appointments
needed to actually give you a tooth.
Now with this, quite often there are techniques
which we can do to increase the patient journey
and accuracy, for example the guided surgery,
which I referred to a little while ago.
This adds extra cost to the treatment.
Doing a protocol like this, we may need
to actually increase the cost a little bit
by adding bone grafting materials at a certain stage,
and I talk to patients on a one-to-one basis about that.
So, the cost-saving may be about 500 pounds
from our traditional way of doing it
to this more effective way of doing it.
But then if you're having multiple implants,
if you're just having one implant
this is a typical kind of projection,
but if you're having multiple implants,
the actual surgery time needed to do three implants
compared to one implant doesn't increase
by a massive amount.
Our fixed costs will definitely increase,
but for this reason, what I tend to do is
if you're having multiple implants,
we actually reduce the cost of any subsequent implants
after the first one.
Because I think it's a fair thing to do.
And using these techniques,
what I really don't like doing is cutting corners,
because it means a substandard result at the end,
and I want any patient, any dentist who you see
in the future to look at my implant treatment and think,
"You know what, that's been done really well."
It's just a matter of personal pride,
but I want my patients to have the best quality treatment,
so I don't wanna cut corners on using cheaper labs,
using cheaper materials, cheaper implants, all that stuff,
but by me being more efficient, if my patients can benefit,
that's pretty cool.
And I'm not the only person doing this.
There's a lot of big implant practices who are using
the same kind of techniques to help bring down
the cost of dental implant treatment.
Because ultimately, if we can bring down
the cost of dental implants for our patients,
it means more patients will take up treatment,
it means we're gonna be more busy.
So, it totally makes sense.
So, I hope this has helped explain
why dental implant treatment is expensive,
it kind of does that, but shows you areas
where we are looking to actually reduce the cost
of the treatment for our patients.
If you've got any questions, comments, as always,
leave them below, I would love to hear from you.
Take care.