Digital questions.
The questions practices ask most often about sending cases digitally.
Do you accept my scanner?
Almost certainly. Fairmont is a preferred iTero laboratory and accepts cases from 3Shape TRIOS, Medit, Primescan and CEREC, Carestream, and any system that exports open STL.
If your system is not named, it is still very likely workable — call and we will confirm before you commit to sending a case with a deadline.
Do I still need to send models or impressions?
Not for most cases. A scan is the record, and many cases proceed entirely without a physical model.
Some benefit from one — where contacts and emergence need assessing by hand, where a soft tissue model helps judge an implant profile, or where a restoration has to be checked against adjacent work physically. That is a decision rather than an automatic step, and worth stating if you have a preference.
Deep subgingival margins, edentulous impressions and long spans are the situations where a conventional impression remains the better record.
Can you remake a restoration from an archived scan?
Often, provided the preparation is genuinely unchanged. If a restoration fractures a year later and the tooth is intact, a replacement can frequently be produced without re-appointing the patient for a fresh record.
What changes the answer is any alteration at the site — re-preparation, margin refinement, tissue recession, or drift of the adjacent teeth. Confirm the situation is unchanged before relying on it.
Do I need to mark the margin?
Not required, and genuinely helpful where you are confident of the finish line. You prepared the tooth and can see it; we are reading a mesh.
Where part of the margin is ambiguous, a note identifying which surface is uncertain is worth as much as marking. What we would rather avoid is interpreting an unclear margin silently, because an interpreted margin produces either an open one or an overextension.
What if the margin will not capture cleanly?
That is almost always a field problem rather than a scanning problem — bleeding, sulcular fluid, or tissue collapsing over a subgingival margin.
Repeatedly patching the same region tends to make things worse, because each patch is a fresh alignment and adds a seam. Fix the field, then rescan the region once.
If it still will not capture, that is information: the case probably wants a conventional impression under adequate retraction.
Can I send a scan and an impression for the same case?
Yes, and occasionally it is the right thing to do — a scan for the preparation and an impression for a region the scanner handled poorly, or a scan plus a conventional record as a cross-check on a multi-implant case.
Say which is which and which you want treated as the definitive record. Sending both without explanation produces a query rather than a shortcut.
We are new to scanning. What should we expect?
A learning period. Scanning is a motor skill, and the first several weeks produce slower appointments, more variable quality and more laboratory queries. That is normal and it is the part most often underestimated.
Practices that commit to a defined category of cases and do all of them digitally get past it. Practices that scan occasionally and revert whenever a case looks difficult tend to stay at the beginning of the curve.
Call us during that period rather than after. We would rather look at an early scan and comment than receive a case that has to come back.
How do I send if my scanner has no portal connection?
Export and send the files through a secure transfer service rather than email attachments, which have size limits and no confirmation of delivery.
Name files so they can be identified if separated from the case — patient identifier and arch at minimum. Agree the method once and use it consistently; ad hoc file handling is where cases get lost.
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Send a case
Digital scans and conventional impressions are both accepted. Cases move by UPS and Purolator, and Fairmont works with practices throughout British Columbia and across Canada.