Real Time ROI: Preat Corp.'s eFiber

The lab

After working in larger, high-production labs for several years James Davidge and his wife opened James Dean Prosthetic Arts in California about a year ago. The two-person removables lab focuses on quality and using only the best materials available. They have about 40 clients and are focused on finding out of the box ways to provide high quality prosthetics.

The product

The translucent unidirectional e-glass fiber provides solutions to everyday challenges. Provisional implant restorations, non-metallic Maryland bridges, long-span bridges, repairs of full and partial dentures, implant overdentures, and thin areas of acrylic resins and composites can be easily strengthened without compromising esthetics. eFiber’s impregnated unidirectional e-glass fiber is stronger than multi-directional light cure mesh, braided fibers, and metal because of the fiber’s ability to bond with acrylic resins and composites. It’s the only reinforcement you can grind and polish, allowing technicians to place the reinforcement in the optimal position to stop a fracture before it begins.

The results

When James Davidge talks about eFiber and all its benefits, he keeps coming back to one key point: it’s invisible.

“You would never know it’s in there,” he said, adding that it has no bulk and is light weight. “If you want the most esthetic restoration possible, the most lifelike gingival and tooth set up this is it. If you see a big metal framework or mesh, it’s an eye sore and it instantly stands out as being a prosthetic and that’s what I want to get away from.”

Because it’s invisible, there’s no esthetic disadvantage to using eFiber, Davidge said, but the other benefits it brings make adding it to your routine a no-brainer. One of the biggest benefits is the peace of mind it brings to you and your clients. It’s designed to stop fractures before they happen, and is placed in the prosthetic’s stress points, adding insurance that the prosthetic won’t break. That’s key to happy clients and happy patients, especially when they’re paying you a lot of money to complete a case.

“If I’m doing a huge case, the last thing I want in the world is for that thing to break and for me to have delivered a substandard product,” he said. “The last thing a dentist wants is for a patient to come in and say ‘I just spent a fortune and here’s the two pieces of my denture.’ It would be almost foolish career wise to not put it in. Why wouldn’t you want extra insurance, strength with no esthetic disadvantage, no weight, no nothing? By not putting it in you’re taking a big risk on your quality control. I’ve never had a prosthetic I’ve put this in break.”

Davidge doesn’t have to worry about a clinician coming back to him with a broken case, and that means he doesn’t lose the time and money it takes to fix a case gone bad, not to mention that clinician’s trust in his work. Once he’s done with a case he moves on to the next one confident that both doctor and patient will be pleased with the result.

Another benefit? eFiber also is easy to use. The company has come up with a whole system to let technicians know where to place it, how to place it and why they should place it there. Technicians don’t have to come up with their own technique to get it to work, and they don’t have to worry about a lot of components or steps to get the job done. It only takes a few minutes to place and it isn’t technique sensitive. It bonds to both composite and acrylic, which means Davidge never has any trouble bonding the latest and greatest teeth to the denture base. And it also means eFiber isn’t restricted to just removables; you can use it for crown and bridge as well.

For the time and money it takes to add eFiber to your removables, Davidge said he can’t see why any technician wouldn’t use it. He feels good about providing it and he’s seen what he describes as a fantastic return on his investment. And for those technicians who aren’t using it, he knows for a fact they’re re-doing cases, he said, and dealing with all the stress and revenue loss that come with remakes.

“This is a 2 minute investment in your day,” he said. “It’s very quick, very easy to use to not have the catastrophic result of your appliance breaking. That’s a downward cycle. You have to deal with a lot more negativity than if you just put it in and forget about it. I can’t sleep sometimes because I’m thinking about a case. This is one less thing I have to think about. That’s good enough for me.”