Saving valuable time in your dental practice with OMNICHROMA

Saving time is an enormous priority in almost every dental office, and OMNICHROMA by Tokuyama Dental America promises to do just that.

Set to be released in February 2019, OMNICHROMA is a distinctive dental composite that utilizes color-matching technology via a single shade of composite in order to match a wide range of tooth color, giving it a one-shade-fits-all repute in a single application. This product allows dental professionals to save time selecting and layering composite colors, allowing them to better focus on more essential tasks in the care of their patients.

Dr. Richard Lipscomb has been practicing dentistry in southeast Maryland since 1993. Currently, he’s the solo practitioner at his practice, Woodmore Dental Center, as a general dentist as well as a speaker within the dental community. Lipscomb has been using Tokuyama resins, bonding agents, soft reline materials and desensitizers for about five years, and he says he’s been very happy with their products. According to Lipscomb, he was using Tokuyama Dental’s Estelite Sigma Quick composite material  every day until recently when he received samples of the company’s newest resin composite, OMNICHROMA.

Read more: Tokuyama Dental America introduces EsteCem II

What makes OMNICHROMA’s shade-matching abilities so different than every other product on the market?

I don’t think any other product has such excellent shade-matching abilities, at least not to this degree. Most of the common brands of composites out there have some kind of chameleon effect, but this one is more than that. OMNICHROMA actually generates the color of the surrounding tooth, resulting in a perfect shade match, and that’s what makes it so different. You have truer matching abilities with OMNICHROMA.

How would you describe OMNICHROMA’s ease of use?

OMNICHROMA’s ease of use is good; it provides the color matching benefits without making the product itself feel foreign in your hand, and that’s a big plus. Because of the shade-matching ability, you’d think that it handles differently from similar products, but it doesn’t. It’s very similar to Estelite Sigma Quick (Tokuyama Dental America), which I use every day at my office. They both handle very well - not too soft and not too hard. It’s right in the middle, which is good for people who like working with hard materials or soft materials. OMNICHROMA kind of does a little bit of everything and that versatility is really important to a quality product.

Do you think doctors will be able to reduce their inventory and the potential waste of unused composite through OMNICHROMA?

Yes. I’ve been using this product since I received my first samples in August and I use it in the same place I would use Estelite Sigma Quick. With OMNICHROMA’s shade matching ability, there’s less need for keeping other shades around. I realize sometimes there are difficult cases that fall outside OMNICHROMA’s shade range, but I haven’t experienced that yet.

For the most part, the regular basic shades I use most frequently are covered, so there’s less need for other materials, which in turn allows you to decrease the amount of inventory that you have and waste. Because this product can be used as your everyday composite, there’s no way it can go to waste because you’re using it every single day in so many situations and procedures.

According to Tokuyama Dental, OMNICHROMA can help dental professionals save time per restorative procedure. Have you found that it’s saving you time?

You know what? It does, but not in the conventional sense of time savings. As dentists, every morning we get a sense of what we’re going to do that day, and most of the time we have a sense of what that patient needs and the difficulty of his or her procedure. Especially when we’re dealing with anterior teeth. This product takes the guesswork out of choosing and changing the shade. It lightens the mental load.

Trending article: Managing the fear factor

When you have this product, this one shade that’s going to blend in with everything, that’s one less thing you have to think about. In turn, it’s one less thing my assistant has to grab or remember, which allows us both to be more productive. Thus, OMNICHROMA made that procedure easier, which allows me to devote that mental strength to other procedures and helps those procedures go better. In that sense, it definitely helps to save time and increase productivity.

Has OMNICHROMA aided in patient satisfaction for your practice?

It’s hard to gauge patient satisfaction with a product like this because the patients don’t notice the benefits when they aren’t completely tangible. If the composite looks good and it’s comfortable, they’re generally happy. But for me, what works is the versatility of OMNICHROMA. While OMNICHROMA can be in almost any restoration by itself, Tokuyama Dental also offers a supplementary product, OMNICHROMA BLOCKER, that prevents shade-matching interference caused by other parts of the mouth.  I find this benefits particularly large anterior restorations most. OMNICHROMA BLOCKER allows OMNICHROMA to make restorations look good no matter where they are or their size, and being that OMNICHROMA BLOCKER goes with this specific composite material, it works intuitively and there’s no guesswork, which again, takes less effort on my part. I have a composite I know works, and I have the option of OMNICHROMA BLOCKER that I know will always allow OMNICHROMA to generate a perfect match.

What do you hope to see in the future from OMNICHROMA and Tokuyama Dental?

I think Tokuyama Dental does a great job in their research department, coming up with products that actually do what they say they will. They put a big emphasis on improving their products and making them better, so if this is the first wave of this type of product - a product that makes procedures easier for practitioners - then I’m eager to see how they develop this material and this technology in the future. The durability of Tokuyama Dental products I’ve used in the past has been great, and I don’t expect any less from OMNICHROMA.

Thinking about other resin composites I’ve used that have a chameleon effect to them, I think this is a lot better than those in terms of matching ability, so now it’s just up to Tokuyama Dental to get it out there and get it in the hands of practitioners. Once those doctors use it, I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised in terms of how they can use it and its ability to blend.