Summary: Dentsply Sirona, FDI World Dental Federation, and Smile Train continue their partnership to advance global cleft care through digitalization, expanding access to educational resources and protocols.

Key Takeaways:

  • The partnership focuses on digitalizing cleft care treatment and education.
  • New educational materials and multilingual courses will enhance global reach and effectiveness.

Dentsply Sirona, the FDI World Dental Federation (FDI), and Smile Train have signed a new trilateral agreement to continue their partnership aimed at advancing cleft care treatment globally through digitalization.

Expanding Access to Digital Cleft Treatment Education

Together, the three organizations will work to expand and increase access to digital cleft treatment education to support understanding and adoption of the new digital cleft treatment standards. The efforts will complement the Open Online Course they created in 2023 on the topic of ‘Digital Dentistry in Cleft Care’.

Last year, Dentsply Sirona, FDI, and Smile Train developed global standard protocols for digitalized cleft treatment. These protocols are designed to help improve the accuracy and efficacy of the current treatments by providing dental professionals with a comprehensive digital clinical approach across all stages of care.

Creating Comprehensive Educational Resources

To teach dental professionals how to utilize these protocols, the partners created the ‘Digital Dentistry in Cleft Care’ course that comprises presentations, quizzes, short videos and interactive discussion boards. While the course is currently available in English, the partners will add French, Spanish, and Portuguese language versions this year to increase its global reach.

In addition, Dentsply Sirona, FDI and Smile Train are set to produce additional educational materials that will demonstrate selected stages of the digital cleft care workflow with real patients, focusing on aspects such as photographic recording, baby mouth scanning, treatment simulations and device 3D printing. An interactive tool is also available for those starting to use the protocols, which helps dental professionals navigate through the different stages of care and access all the related information.

Enhancing Cleft Care Through Digital Technologies

“Digital technologies like intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM technologies and 3D printing have been a complete game changer for cleft care,” says Andrea Frohning, SVP, Chief Human Resources Officer at Dentsply Sirona. “With the global standard protocols created last year, Dentsply Sirona and our partners were able to offer dental professionals a detailed blueprint for integrating the latest digital technologies into their cleft treatment. Now, we are coming together once more, this time to increase understanding and access to educational materials with the desire to accompany cleft professionals around the world through their learning curve, make protocol adoption even easier and help more children around the world achieve happy, healthy smiles.”