Delivering top-quality care while keeping fees affordable for those in need is a big challenge. While many community clinics are just focused on removing or reducing pain, Dr. Ben Kellum and his staff at The Foundry Dental Center are determined to offer full-spectrum care at their clinic. With ten operatories treating over twelve-thousand patients per year, Dr. Kellum spends a lot of his time figuring out how to control costs to keep fees as low as possible.
One of those cost-saving measures has been the aggressive use of digital technologies. The clinic features several mills, intraoral scanning technology, and digital design software. These measures have allowed The Foundry to help keep costs low by handling some of their work in-house, but traditional manufacturing was still required for many of their procedures. Dentures, implant surgical guides, and waxup models were three areas where they saw the potential for cost savings.
Dr. Kellum’s original plan for 3D printing was just to use it for surgical guides. But soon he discovered that it was capable of much more, and that the cost savings were substantial across a variety of applications. Now, The Foundry uses 3D printing every day to help further improve the standard of care they’ve worked so hard to achieve. Read the full story in our Practice Insight.
For more information on The Foundry, watch our interview video with Dr. Kellum as part of our Real Doctors, Real Stories series: