Hi-Quality Dental Prosthetic Artistry: It's Coming from China
Date: 12/01/2006
GAINESVILLE, GA — There are approximately 14,000 dental labs in the United States, each fiercely competing for the attention and business of the nation’s dentists. Dentists have much to gain by this. Because when it comes to prosthetic devices, the main areas of competition concern beauty, quality, turnaround time and price, each vital to a practice and its patients.
Unfortunately, competition over price has led to compromises in the integrity of lab work. A blind eye turned toward degraded workmanship – such as metal substitution in dental appliances – can ultimately threaten the viability of a lab and the dentists who use that lab. But compromised materials are only one way that costs may be cut. A more viable way to minimize costs is by outsourcing to cheaper labor sources, such as China.
The Chinese are well known as highly skilled artisans. Chinese lab technicians are particularly meticulous, and their work is consistently impressive by any standard. As a result, outsourcing prosthodontic work to China is quite common when labs decide to become price-competitive on crowns, bridges and prosthetic devices. But lower pricing involves potential liabilities.
Chinese labs may or may not use FDA approved materials, as they have a different governing body. Changes in material in China may fall below the radar screen of U.S labs outsourcing to them. It is therefore difficult to guarantee the uncompromised quality and integrity of appliances from overseas.
Since the relationship between a dentist and a lab is based on trust, this unknown factor can threaten that relationship. Delivering what is promised to the patient is ultimately an ethical matter. Unfortunately, without adequate quality control, aesthetics and crown fit can suffer, and when cheaper, non-precious metals are substituted for gold in the porcelain-to-gold process, the U.S. lab, the dentist and the patient are none the wiser.
A First in Quality Offshore Dental Lab Work
The search for a solution to this dilemma caused one smaller American lab, Southern Craft Dental Laboratory of Gainesville, Georgia, to tackle the issue of how to guarantee beauty and quality while keeping down the price and turnaround time. Although Southern Craft also turned to Chinese artistry, there is one key difference: they wholly own and monitor their own Chinese facility. Thus far, they are the only U.S. dental lab to accomplish this feat.
Opening an American lab in politically restrictive China is no easy task. In fact, a number of U.S. labs, including some of the larger ones, have tried and failed to do so, finding out the hard way that money in and of itself won’t open the right doors. But Bates and his partner, Kamil Karroum, taking advantage of the right set of circumstances, managed to pull it off.
It began with a fortuitous visit to their Gainesville facility by Taiwan national Michael Huang, who came to train Southern Craft’s personnel on perfecting Empress crowns and bridges. Impressed with his work, Bates befriended him and inquired into the unusually fine artistry he was seeing in the Chinese work. Over the next year, through various dialogues and visits to China, Bates and Karroum decided to work with Huang to attempt to open the first U.S. owned lab in China. Huang and some of his office personnel had relatives in the local government of Xuhai, the town in which they wanted to open the lab. Through these connections, Bates and his partners were able to obtain the needed permits that finally resulted in its opening.
The lab, called American Sky Dental Laboratory, is capable of providing the gamut of dental prosthetics: crowns, bridges, partials, dentures, and implants. To ensure that quality remains high and consistent, one of the owning partners is at the Chinese facility at all times. The partners travel back and forth between the two facilities, and maintain a tight relationship, each working under the same standards and guidelines.
A recently installed system of cameras allows for easy inter-office communication. Questions and answers to and from the Chinese lab are open to view via a web cam, so dentists and/or labs can observe the interaction by accessing the site through a website.
Competitively Priced Dental Aesthetics…Without Compromise
The Chinese lab offers considerable improvement in turnaround time over its American counterpart. The company’s U.S. location would normally take the standard two to three weeks, sometimes four, to complete a case. With the Chinese lab, they can overnight a case from Gainesville on a Monday and receive it back the following Tuesday, just a little over a week later. The price difference is, of course, substantial. The savings don’t come on materials—Bates buys materials such as porcelain and gold himself and ships it to the Xuhai facility to ensure its genuineness—but in labor.
The margin between US and Chinese standards of income is so great, however, that Bates is able to pay the Chinese technicians very well, far more than standard rates, and he provides free housing and insurance as well.
Bates has already taken the next steps to keep his operation abreast with the times. Very soon, for procedures using the new material zirconia, a model will be able to be computer-scanned in Gainesville and emailed to Xuhai so that by the time the model makes its 2-day trip there, the zirconia will have already been milled and will be ready to receive porcelain. The milling for this material, unlike gold, is performed by machine, is much faster, and much less labor-intensive.
For customers that are still China-shy, Southern Craft still maintains their 10,000-square-foot facility in Gainesville, staffed with 28 technicians, and can still perform all needed work there, albeit at the higher price.
“All dental laboratories state that they can produce high quality products, but the proof is in the pudding,” Bates concludes. “I just ask doctors to take a look at what we’re able to do now and draw their own conclusions. I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised.”
For more information, contact Southern Craft Dental Laboratory Inc. in Gainesville, GA, at (800) 532-7554 or visit www.scdentallab.com. Bruce Boyers is a freelance writer based in Glendale, California.