Implants Improve Smiles and Give Patients Life-Changing Confidence, Dentsply Sirona President/CEO Says

It was another big week and another impressive event from Dentsply Sirona as this year’s Implant Solutions World Summit came to a close Saturday in Miami, Florida.

The 3-day Summit included plenty of lectures, master courses, hands-on education, networking, and some great discussions on the latest topics and developments in the world of dental implants.

Here, Denstply Sirona’s President and Chief Executive Officer Simon Campion answers a few questions from Dental Products Report to provide insight on the company’s strategies around implants, digital dentistry, and live events such as the Implant Solutions World Summit, which last year took place in Athens, Greece.

DPR: Why is Dentsply Sirona so invested in dental implants and how does this specialty fit in with the company’s overall strategy/goals for clinicians and patients?

Simon Campion (SC): Dentsply Sirona has a proud history of innovation that spans across all areas of dentistry. For more than 4 decades, Dentsply Sirona has collaborated with clinicians and scientists to pioneer innovations in implant dentistry that help dental professionals to advance with confidence and achieve excellent results for their patients. That experience led us to where we are today with The EV Implant Family – 3 implant systems with different body shapes that share common DNA, unified by key features such as OsseoSpeed® and EV connection.

Dental implants help to give patients confidence in their mouth and their smile, and that confidence can be life changing. Today it is even possible to create full arch implants.This fits with our company’s vision to transform dentistry to improve oral health globally.

Our focus on dental implants aligns with our broader strategy of delivering innovative, comprehensive solutions that empower clinicians and improve patient outcomes.We believe that digital dentistry is the future and have leveraged our expertise, product and technological advancements to build our DS Workflows that are powered by our cloud solution, DS Core.

These Workflows allow dentists and specialists to integrate procedures and equipment with our end-to-end portfolio. This helps to simplify, reduce risk and easily synchronize with other practice team members and lab partners to provide exceptional patient care.

For implant dentistry specifically, the integration of products like the EV Implant Family, with the DS Core platform enables clinicians to do more – be that increased volume through efficiency or cases of increased complexity and enhance patient outcomes while ultimately providing a better experience for the practice team and patients.

Our goal is to help clinicians not only be prepared for the emerging technologies in dentistry, but to take full advantage of them. We aim to be a partner in the digital future.

DPR: Your company hosts DS World each year along with events like the Implant Solutions World Summit. Why do you feel these types of events are so important?

SC: High-quality clinical education is a part of Dentsply Sirona’s mission to transform dentistry so that we can improve oral health globally. Dentsply Sirona commits significant time and resources to the implants community we serve because we aim to be a true partner, helping professionals to grow their practices and leverage new technologies. And we are mission-focused to empower our customers to proudly create innovative solutions for healthy smiles and the clinical education they need.

This ties into part of the answer above about partnership – dentistry moves forward when clinicians and manufacturers work in tandem – we want to be a true partner to dental professionals. And high-quality clinical education events like the Implant Solutions World Summit in Athens last year, the US Implant Symposium in Scottsdale, the Implant Solutions World Summit here in Miami, and of course Dentsply Sirona World are opportunities to connect and to better understand the needs of our customers and dental professionals as a whole.

We believe that digital solutions will be a part of every dental treatment because digital workflows create opportunities to make treatment easier, safer and more efficient and help clinicians to have more time with their patients.

Our clinical education events bring together local and internationally renowned experts to share their knowledge and give participants new skills/tools to bring home with them.

DPR:Why should more GPs get involved in implants and what is the best way for them to get educated and started?

SC: As populations age, more people will have missing teeth that require dentures or implants. Combine this with a trend toward greater acceptance and awareness of cosmetic dentistry, more patients are seeking implants to maintain their smiles.

That represents a growing market for implant dentistry specialists and an opportunity for GP practices.Dentsply Sirona works to improve oral health globally and to do so, we work in partnership with all stakeholders. We support dental professionals – both specialists and general practitioners.

The depth of our digital solutions in tandem with the training to fully leverage them enables all our customers to advance with confidence and provide optimal care to their patients. The digital transformation is making it easier to add new capabilities to the dental practice.

At the same time, digital dentistry is helping to make the implant process more efficient and safer. For example, Dentsply Sirona offers its Simplant service for guidance from the treatment planning stage to implant placement. We offer the technology, the service, and through our DS Academy, the clinical education to help our customers add an implant capability to their practice.

We have 57 education centers in 35 countries. Dental professionals are taking advantage of these clinical education opportunities: 1.95 million course registrations since 2019 and 9,200 courses in 84 countries in 2023.

Through the DS Academy, dental professionals can also access several clinical education course series including a 23-course implants series that will assist in building and expanding clinicians' digital implant skills and knowledge.

An additional resource: Last year we also launched the DS Academy Campus – a new digital education platform through which dental professionals will find a range of on-demand content covering topics in implant dentistry, restorative, orthodontics, and digital dentistry as well as a number of live webinars on pertinent topics led by notable experts.

DPR: From the patient’s perspective, what can the company do to help them overcome obstacles such as high costs, long healing periods, fear of failed implants or any other obstacles that may prevent them from choosing implants when it clinically is in their best interests?

SC: Our company is dedicated to extensive and rigorous testing to verify and validate product performance. Our clinical research program is robust, with Investigator Initiated Studies being an important component.

Since the beginning of the development of our implant systems we have based our products claims on a solid foundation of pre-clinical and clinical data. We have over 2,000 scientific publications supporting our products and solutions (implants portfolio). This includes data from more than 40,000 patients with over 70,000 implants. And we continue our dedication to research and science with our ongoing clinical research programs. Patients can have confidence in the technologies used by their clinician.

The other way that Dentsply Sirona can play a role in patient confidence is by facilitating communication between clinician and patient through our DS Core cloud platform. Not only are these solutions cutting-edge for their safety and efficiency, but they also help to visualize the treatment planning process.