Читать книгу Digital Dentistry - Группа авторов - Страница 26

The need for education in digital dentistry is also very clear for dentists, who might have a key position in the dental team. The role of the digital dentist is to plan, execute, and coordinate the dental staff while delivering digital treatments. Ideally, the digital dentist needs to make decisions, and thus has to fully understand both analogue and digital dental procedures. A growing number of studies are increasingly supporting satisfactory clinical outcomes with digital technologies. As a result, the reliability of CAD‐CAM restorations is creating a growing demand from practitioners and students to learn about digitalization.

To support this trend, dental schools are increasingly improving their schedules with new information on digital technology for dentistry students. The student can be presented with concepts of digital dentistry applied in several areas of dentistry, but they are rarely allowed to conduct clinical cases, nor to receive more in‐depth information.

Some academic discussions suggest that digital dentistry will advance to be a major field of study. One of the reasons for this is that the dentist needs to master new knowledge, skills, and training to conduct dental treatments [9]. This suggests that digital dentistry should be considered a separate specialty degree in the field of dentistry. On the other hand, others believe that digital concepts are merely a new way to resolve traditional problems, and therefore digital dentistry is to be considered a subfield derived from the main specialties (i.e., digital prosthodontics using the principles of conventional dental prosthodontics). Either way, digital dentistry represents a large field of study for young dental professionals and more experienced practitioners.

Most practices that decide to purchase their first digital equipment are generally given technical training that could last some days. However, this initial education is likely to be an introduction to the theoretical concepts, technical features, and capabilities of the equipment and/or software. At this initial point, further education on courses, books, and scientific publications helps to fill the gaps in training while the equipment is used in a dental clinical routine.

Typically, the initial production of digital dental work will focus on basic procedures but over time, as the digital dentist becomes more and more experienced, a mind change is likely to occur and a digital way of thinking emerges, providing new insights into planning and executing current dental procedures in novel ways. The dental clinic may thus be organized by digital dentists with expertise in digital technologies to organize and supervise the creation and outcomes of dental treatments.