Digital Work Flow

HQ dental is proud to call itself a fully established digital dental laboratory. Where other laboratories try to catch up with the digital revolution, HQ have tried and tested procedures in place to receive digital impressions and provide excellent aesthetic and fitting restorations. We now receive and process files from all major intra oral scanners.

We offer digital lunch and learn appointments, group lectures and even one to one demonstrations at our clinical suite situated within our laboratory.

Where our journey began…

In 2014 we invested in our Cad/Cam department, this enabled us to manufacture “in house” substructures. “Zenith” HQ’s branded zirconia has been a massive success with 1000’s of restorations successfully fitted.

Since taking full control of design and manufacture of crowns, accuracy of fit has improved with failures and ill-fitting crowns being greatly reduced. Cutting out third party milling has drastically reduced production costs, which we have passed on to clinicians and patients. Find out more here: Ceramill Motion 2.

In 2016 HQ partnered with Carestream and invested in an intra oral scanner, becoming one of the first labs to offer a “scanning service” to clients. This has been a great success, attending practices to scan patients where conventional impressions were not possible, providing a comfortable patient experience coupled with an accurately fitting restoration. This has also given clinicians the benefit of seeing the digital work flow and all its advantages.

Our investment in a 3D printer completed our digital work flow.

In 2018 such was the demand and expectations of this digital service we realised our printer and print materials needed to be upgraded, Purchasing the next generation Nextdent 3D printer immediately enabled printed restorative models of superior accuracy.

Our print material portfolio also increased, this is an evolving topic that we will keep you fully notified on:

Printed dentures, temporary restorations, custom-made special trays and the most exciting development is the printing and designing of implant placement guides for guided implant surgery. We are currently working with several implant planning software companies enabling HQ to print the surgical guides that so many of our clients are asking for.

Several model scanners have also been purchased with an array of design software packages to help with the speed of work flow and design of all implant possibilities. Implant angulated access no longer causes problems as we work hand in hand with all implant milling companies.