Dr. Blank Discusses Digital Dentistry And Real Patient Benefits

How Has The Digital Revolution Changed Your Dental Office

Think dental tech means a fancy waiting room TV? We pull back the curtain on the tools that actually change care: digital X-rays with lower radiation and instant sharing, panoramic and cone beam scans that turn guesswork into 3D certainty, and intraoral scanners that end the era of gag-inducing impressions. Alongside Dr. Stephen Blank, we walk through how these upgrades shorten appointments, improve accuracy, and make treatment plans easier to understand and trust.

You’ll hear why same-day crowns are now a practical reality, how we scan a prepared tooth in seconds, design the restoration on-screen, and mill it in-office—often before your coffee cools. We dig into tricky cases too, like fitting new crowns under existing partials or retainers without sending appliances back to the lab, and how digital models preserve the exact geometry so smiles stay presentable throughout treatment. Diagnosis takes center stage as well: we use intraoral photos and live video tours to show cracks, decay, and wear up close, then bring in AI to compare current and past X-rays, flagging subtle changes that deserve a closer look.

Beyond the buzzwords, this is about clarity and comfort. Patients see what we see, make decisions with confidence, and spend less time in the chair. We also share where the field is headed: faster scanners that ignore saliva and glare, smarter software that streamlines design, and feedback-driven updates that solve everyday problems. If you’ve wondered whether dental technology is hype or help, this conversation offers concrete examples, plain-English explanations, and a clear takeaway—when tech gets simpler, care gets better.

Enjoyed the conversation? Follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review to tell us which tech change you’re most curious about next.

To learn more about Dr. Stephen Blank visit:
https://www.PSLdentist.com
Dr. Stephen Blank, DDS
184 NW Central Park Plaza 
Port St. Lucie, FL, 34986
772-878-7348  

Transcript

Welcome And Today’s Focus

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to the PSL Dentist Podcast, where healthy smiles meet real talk. Hosted by Port St. Lucie's very own Dr. Stephen Blank, the one dentist who's been making the treasure coast smile for decades. From one-visted crowns to clear aligners, Botox, and even lifting threads, yep, your dentist does that too. So sit back, open wide, not literally pleased. And get ready to sink your teeth into today's episode.

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Yo, technology has transformed nearly every part of modern dentistry, and today we are exploring how those changes show up in real patient care. Welcome everyone. Frederick here, co-host and producer, back in the studio with Dr. Stephen Blank, your Port St. Lucie dentist. Dr. Blank, how's it going today? Wonderful day. Nice to be with you again, Frederick. Pleasure to have you here. Thanks for joining us. Dr. Blank, shall we dive right in? How has the digital revolution changed your dental office?

Panoramics, 3D Scans, And Implants

Intraoral Scanners Transform Workflow

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Wow, that's a great one. That has been a wonderful thing since I left dental school back in 1982. In the 90s, we switched for uh over to digital x-rays. Before that, it was the old film thing with the cardboard little piece of film stuffed in the mouth, and uh the edges were a bit sharper. And we had to develop them in a developer into the dark room with a fixer and the chemicals and all that stuff. Um, and then later find out, oops, we missed the picture. Uh now we get instant results. I take a picture, if I need a different angle, I can just change a little bit right on the fly and make it happen. Uh the benefit to the patients, it'd be other than instant knowledge and seeing uh the results, is we are able to do it with less radiation. So we have our settings on our machines at a lower level and we can take care of business much quicker and more comfortably. Um and we can also share them. That's one of the things that patients don't always realize. If I needed to send you to an oral surgeon or another specialist, um, I didn't have a way of copying x-rays before. I either had to use duplicate films when we took them or make a duplicate copy in the dark room and they were never so good. Now I can send you a copy of the pictures, I can send another dentist a copy of the pictures and their first uh quality images. It's the same as what I have in my computer. So we're able to share things better instantly. So there's not waiting for the mail. Um, it's you know, send it by email, done. Five minutes later, the other office has them, and they and we can discuss cases on the phone. It it's really good. And that was just X-rays. Um, so that was a real big advance uh in dentistry for the dentists that have adapted that. Almost everybody's gone digital with X-rays. There's still some films, but even the big panoramic things where we had the large films uh they went around the head, that's been replaced with a digital sensor. So now those are digitized. And then in the modern day, the CAT scans, which look like the panoramics but they're three-dimensional, they do the whole head or the jawbone area in three dimensions where we can actually measure for implants and do things that were unthought of before. We used to just hold up something to the sky and look at the lights, go through it, and say, Oh, that looks like it might fit. Now we know. So quality has gone way up, and we can do things that we couldn't do before. So that's really enhanced it for the patient.

SPEAKER_02 3:43

So, what digital tools have made the biggest impact on your, say, your day-to-day workflow?

SPEAKER_01 3:49

Oh, that's a great question. The newest thing that's come, well, it's not new, but the latest version is the ability to scan teeth. Uh, so we use a digital scanner. My first one was on a big giant mobile cart, and it had a fiber optic wand with a real stiff glass cable, um, and it was black and white, and it allowed me to take pictures of your teeth and save them in the computer as a 3D image that was an accurate copy of your mouth. We used to do impressions, and sometimes we still do a rubber impression, but there's uh the the scanning is has changed that. I'm on my third or fourth scanner now. Now they're colored, they're digitized, um, and uh real rapid. Uh the original one I had to spray your teeth with white powder to be able to have the scanner see them. Now we just go in the mouth, the zip, zip, zip, and it can capture the images uh where we can make things from that now. So not just a photograph, but we can print out a model and we use that for the aligner technology, similar to Invisalign, where we can make all the models that are necessary to make the aligners. We can make a crown that way. I do my little drilling thing and clean up the tooth and make it look pretty, and then we scan it. Scan takes about 30 seconds, where we used to do the impression and say, here, just sit still for three minutes until this rubber stuff hardens up. Um, and I hope you don't gag too much. Now we can do it with the scanner, and we're not touching your palate, we're not going down your throat with goopy stuff. Uh, and patients love that. When they find out they don't need an impression, the pressure is off. They're much happier about doing the dental procedure. And uh there's so many other things that the scanner allows us to do um to do dental procedures where it used to be the rubber impressions.

SPEAKER_02 5:40

Wow, that's that's a huge leap forward. Uh, you basically answered my next question. Um, my the question I was gonna ask you was how have digital scanners changed the patient experience compared to traditional impressions? You mentioned speed, no need to like spray that white powder or rubbery stuff. Is there anything else you'd like to add or do that?

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Some things that used to be difficult, and not everybody knows about this unless they need it. But if a patient has some missing teeth and they're wearing a removable partial appliance and it might clip onto a tooth. And if that tooth has a cavity or breaks or needs some care, we used to have to take a rubber impression with their partial in the mouth, pull the whole thing out, send it to the lab and wait a week or two, and then we would get it back and hope that everything fit when we put the new crown in. Now I can scan the patient's tooth in the mouth or with the appliance in and copy what was there before. And I'm able to make a new uh crown in the office with my milling machine, uh, and it'll fit under that same appliance, whether it's an aligner or a partial denture or a retainer, uh, and they're finished in one visit, done. So they're not missing their teeth. If their front teeth were on the removable appliance, that was a bad time for the patient. So now we're it's like that's not even an issue anymore. So we we forget some of the things that make life convenient until we remember what it used to be. It's like, oh my.

Imaging For Diagnosis And AI Support

SPEAKER_02 7:07

True, true. So, with all that said, um, I mean, it sounds like digital imaging has really made things faster, convenient. Even the patient experience seems to be, you know, more pleasant. But I guess if you could just sum it up um in a nutshell, what role does digital imaging play in diagnosis and treatment planning now?

SPEAKER_01 7:27

Very good. The diagnosis is really the key. So when I'm able to do an intraoral uh tour of a patient's mouth, that's what I call that. When we do our exam, I look in there, but when I do it with my video on, that's another digital tool, we can capture those images from all the different sides of the teeth, and the patients can look at them up on the screen. So when I say there's a something on this tooth, a crack line, a hole, um decay underneath the filling, they can see it. They don't scratch their heads saying, I wonder if that guy is honest. You know, is there really something there? They can see the same things that I see. So it makes the diagnosis and treatment plan acceptance easier for me and more comfortable for the patient. They're not second guessing whether they really have an issue or not. They just deciding whether they want to take care of it today or tomorrow. Uh, and that really helps. Um digital x-rays, artificial intelligence is coming into play now. So now computers are able to look at the x-rays just like we do, but they add in different levels of detail. So they can mark decay areas and they can compare it to previous x-rays. So even if the x-ray was taken five years ago, I can compare that one to a current one, and the the artificial intelligence will tell me I'm seeing a change here, or no, that's about the same, no worries. So it helps a doctor uh make a decision. I don't like to rely on the artificial intelligence completely. I use it as a tool to highlight things. And then when I see an area, then it directs me to go back there and check things carefully.

Accuracy, Speed, And Chair Time

SPEAKER_02 9:07

That's amazing. Uh, such advancements. So you have touched on AI and then digital x-rays and all those things. In a more general sense, how has technology improved accuracy or reduced chair time for patients?

Patient Education And Communication

SPEAKER_01 9:22

Accuracy, I think, is a benchmark that's important. Uh, when we went from rubber impressions to digital, the question is, what's the resolution? And the answer is it depends. On the rubber ones, well, if you got an air bubble in it, it wasn't too good. Um, on the digital ones, uh, they sometimes have difficulty, but we can usually see it on the screen immediately and just rescan. So we're able to capture data with more consistency, I believe. And the resolution has to be the same or better, or we're not buying it. So they couldn't sell all these appliances to dentists to use if it wasn't going to replace what we had with something that was better. Then, as far as speed goes, patients way appreciate that. They know they're not in the chair as long for a procedure, or with the rubber impressions, that three minutes of rubber goop in the mouth. Um, I don't have to tell them a thing. They just know, wow, that was quick. I'm done. Even a simple bite registration, after I record top teeth, bottom teeth, and I record how they fit together, uh, we used to squirt some stuff in and say, here, bite on this for a minute. Now I I just scan how the teeth fit together. It's about three seconds. That's a huge difference.

SPEAKER_02 10:36

And speaking of uh, you know, uh relaying this, uh, the benefits to patients and all those things, are there any digital systems that help with communication or with patient education?

SPEAKER_01 10:47

Well, patient education is up on the screen. What they can see, they can understand much better. Um, being able to pull up all sorts of images that we've captured or shared of similar situations to what the patient has. And then, of course, patients go to YouTube. So if they say they need a crown, they go look up what's a crown? How do they do that? Um, so just the whole world has become better. I and dentistry is part of that. So we've uh, you know, everybody in the in the boat goes up when the tide goes up, and we're all taking the ride, and it works real well.

What’s Next In Dental Tech

SPEAKER_02 11:19

That's true. And Dr. Blank, I have to ask you, so you've talked about digital imaging, you've talked about using AI and how you use AI just to highlight things. You don't 100% rely on it. So I'd be interested to hear from you. What advancements are you most excited to see in the next few years?

Closing And Appointment Info

SPEAKER_01 11:37

That's a good one. Uh, they keep coming up with more technology. I think it's it's the simplicity. Like my scanner works just the way it did a few years ago, but not really. It's way better. It picks up teeth quicker, it eliminates the snow and fuzz that shows up on pictures. If there's saliva on a tooth, boom, it just erases it. Um, so the ability to do more things with the same tools just keeps getting better. The software that drives these keeps getting improved. And it also has to do with the computer technology. As computers go faster and faster, um, they're able to put more things into the software for us. So the laptop during my uh latest scanner is a new one because the old laptop wasn't fast enough for, you know, it was working just fine with the old scanner, but the new one can do even more. So we have to keep upgrading from time to time to keep up. So the the ability of the digital technology um, you know, software writers to create things that make our life better is just soaring. Uh, those guys are super sharp. And then there's feedback. Yeah, I go to a meeting each year from all the all the people that own the same milling machine system that I have. And we just share ideas. They give us a presentation, but they also get feedback from hundreds of users on what's working, what's not working. If we could only have a button here, or if it could zoom in and do uh this feature, it would be great. And then we see that sometimes the next month. It's amazing how quickly the pace of change happens. It's great. I I love doing it. Uh, you know, I'm I'm getting up on a couple of years now, and it's like I know some dentists my age that still take the rubber impressions, and I don't want to be bothered with technology. It's like, this is fun. I enjoy doing what I'm doing uh because I get nice results, and it's for me easier to do than what it used to be.

SPEAKER_02 13:33

Yes, yes, 100%. Thank you so much for sharing all of that information, clear and detailed insight, and thanks for sharing how technology is shaping modern dentistry. With that, we do appreciate your insight, Dr. Blank, and for everyone watching at home. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Thank you very much, Frederick. Have a great day.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Dr. Rapp for the PSL Dentist Podcast, where smiles are brighter and laughs are always cavity-free. To keep your smile in shape, call 772-878-7348 or visit psldentist.com to schedule your appointment with Dr. Stephen Blank, the one stop doc for smiles, beauty, and everything in between. Until next time, keep flossing, keep smiling, and keep listening.