In dentistry, no one wants to talk about remakes. Why would we want to? They’re stressful for patients and clinicians alike and no one wants to dwell on them longer than is absolutely necessary.
While all that’s true, we’ve come to believe that there is massive value in taking a closer look and engaging with clinicians to ensure we learn and improve from our mistakes. Following our recent podcast episode on the topic we picked out some key points that we felt were worth sharing so clients can better understand our process.
First Things First: Get The Patient Smiling Again
When a remake occurs the first priority is always the patient. Treatment delays cause inconvenience, disappointment and added stress so step one is to find the fastest and best solution to help them achieve the outcome they expected. Only once that’s done or at least in process do we start a deeper investigation into the root cause.
Remove The Ego From The Conversation
In a profession where all parties care so deeply about their work, it’s tempting to become defensive when problems arise but in our experience we see much better long-term outcomes when clinicians join us in taking a step back and looking at the case objectively. If we work together to understand what happened, we can agree a protocol to prevent it happening again.
Naturally the technician and dentist see the same case through different lenses. While a technician may see technical limitations in an impression/scan, the clinician will recall working with a challenging patient, limited access or difficult clinical circumstances. Both of these are valid perspectives but the key to success is understanding that finding a solution is more important than arguing over who is right or wrong.
How CosTech Handles Remakes
Every case we receive back for remake goes through a structured review process. Instead of just remaking it and moving on, it’s assigned to a senior technician or director who will assess it against a checklist to log apparent cause(s), contributing factors and opportunities for improvement. Typical categories include the following:
While we do reserve the right to charge for remakes, in practice things are more nuanced. Dentistry is rarely black and white and we evaluate each case on its individual circumstances. Our objectives are fairness, practicality and achieving the best outcome for patient & clinician.
Optional Side Quest: Portal Feedback
We wholly encourage our clients to engage with the free CosTech Portal and specifically to use the optional Case Feedback feature to provide a star rating and ideally a comment. This being the internet the vast majority of ratings are 5-stars with no comment and while that’s fantastic to see, some dentists give such incredibly useful feedback alongside their ratings.
We read every comment on the Case Feedback page and we love it when clinicians give us a bit of explanation on things like the following:
These provide invaluable information that we take forward with the given team. Every comment is reviewed and positive feedback is shared with the specific technician(s) involved because recognition matters. Knowing a restoration made a patient smile or exceeded expectations provides a genuine boost for our team. Equally, constructive criticism helps identify opportunities for improvement before they become larger issues.
Spotting Trends In Remake/Feedback Data
Every remake and case rating that comes through is an important datapoint and as statistics nerds who love a good spreadsheet, we constantly sift that data for trend analysis. When pairing this with digital workflows and the ability to pull up design files, milling machine records, etc… we have a powerful tool which has helped guide us to our current level of consistency and quality.
Being able to review data at a high level while also drilling down into specific case history has been instrumental in pushing remake rates down and keeping them there. In fact our latest lab-fault remake rate was down to 0.27% for the year across more than 76,000 cases.
Reducing Stress For Dentists
Economic implications aside, the most important outcome of a better approach to remakes is instilling confidence in our clients. We’ve had a recurring idea among our team that the last thing a dentist wants when opening one of our cases is a surprise. When opening a case in front of a patient, the dentist needs to be confidence in the knowing the restoration will be a predictably good fit with excellent aesthetics and that’s our aim.
This was borne out in a recent online review we received where a clinician said that since switching to CosTech their “stress levels have dropped significantly”. That was one of the most meaningful compliments we could receive, it got the team buzzing and is exactly what we’re aiming to achieve.
The Takeaway: Communication Matters
We can summarise this blog post in one of David’s favourite sayings:
All feedback is good
If you have any thoughts or concerns about lab work, either as a one-off or recurring issue, please talk to us. And if something is working exceptionally well, we’d love to hear that too! We’ve gotten to this point by embracing a client-directed approach to improving our service. Your collective feedback helps us become a better laboratory, transforming lives one smile at a time.
