Skip to content

Whip Mix Blog

Check Out the Baker’s Dozen Ideas from Digital Forum 2021!

If you weren’t at Whip Mix’s 9th annual Digital Forum last weekend, you missed a lot! What we learned through lectures, breakout sessions and networking with other attendees was invaluable, practical information about scanning, designing, manipulating CAM software, milling, and 3D printing.

This year’s forum, Educate, Collaborate, and Make Your Mark in Digital Dentistry, featured quite a few notable speakers who provided many eye-opening takeaways. Here are our top 13 takeaways:

  1. Only 14.6% of dental labs plan to invest in new equipment in the next six months.
  2. When a lab has an established team of experts, it becomes a greater source to dentists.
  3. One day in the not-too-distant-future, all dentures will be 3D printed.
  4. A strong relationship between the doctor and lab is a necessity in digital dentistry.
  5. Feeling middle-aged and useless? Don’t. You are a geriatric millennial. Essentially, geriatric millennials act as a bridge. They’re young enough to perform like digital natives, but old enough to understand the “old ways” of communication: “Geriatric millennials can read the subtext of an SMS just as well as they can pick up on a client’s hesitation in their facial expressions during an in-person meeting. They are neither ignorant of technology nor so engrossed in it that a voicemail inspires fear.”
  6. Looking for “easy”? Forget it. Think “Simple”.
  7. You can make a copy denture from a cone beam scanner and a .stl file.
  8. Dentists should scan with an intraoral scanner before they numb the patient. It will be much more accurate.
  9. Analog dentistry is never going away. It will become a partner with digital technology.
  10. Full arch impression scanning is not reliable in some scanners.
  11. Expand your lab services and consultation to provide clinicians with what they need beyond “making teeth”. When working on full restorations use creative digital solutions.
  12. Hire great team members and empower them with knowledge. As a business owner, it can bring comfort to be able to step away for projects, presentations, and business development.
  13. Whip Mix has the best technical support in the industry!

These takeaways are a tiny fraction of the useful and insightful information that the attendees of the Digital Forum received. If FOMO has struck, registration for the 2022 Digital Forum is now open. If you register before November 12, 2021, you can lock in 2021 rates. Click here to register!

Chelsey Phillips

Chelsey Phillips is the Growth Marketing Specialist at Whip Mix where she crafts data-driven marketing strategies. She grew up in the dental arena attending various dental shows throughout the country and has worked in the industry since 2014. She has a passion for communicating with dental markets and supports Whip Mix by using data-backed insights to grow our viewership, improve engagement, and assist our audience.