August 4, 2026

Only 86,400 Seconds in a Day

Why the fastest full-arch day isn't the fully digital one

I went fully digital to scale my practice. Then I realized the bottleneck was never the technology. It was time.

By Dr. Bruce Smoler, D.D.S., F.A.G.D, F.I.C.O.I.

There is exactly one resource in my practice I have never been able to buy more of, negotiate for, or print faster. Time. There are 86,400 seconds in a day and not one more. Once I really sat with that number, it changed how I run my surgery days.

Going fully digital

Let me back up. I went fully digital about four or five years ago, and the timing was not an accident. It was during COVID, and I had just decided, what the heck, this is my last hurrah, I am going to do this the way I want to do it. We went from three offices down to one, which at least meant all my headaches came from a single location instead of three. Part of that reinvention was going all in: we brought in the Yomi, hired our first CDT, and dove into the digital world. I bought a printer that cost around $40,000 and arrived in a giant crate, and let me tell you, when that thing showed up I was sure I had finally made it. Normally I think I’m it anyway, but back then I really believed it.

Let me be clear: I am not down on digital. We still run it every day. But you tend to buy all of this equipment before you fully understand the depth of what you have signed up for. I cannot tell you how many small flubs and mishaps we had, not because digital is bad, but because the digital workflow has a hundred little details, and the moment your attention slips on one of them, something is off.

The bottleneck nobody likes to admit

By 2022, we were really cranking. Two teams, two surgical rooms, pushing as hard as we could. Post-COVID, it was the best things had ever run for us. And yet we kept hitting the same wall, and it took me a while to name it honestly. The digital workflow has beautiful processes, but it was bogging us down on time. When I finally looked at our sedation days and asked how many patients we could actually help, I found we were losing a couple of hours per case to inefficiency.

A lot of that is hurry up and wait. And it is not only the printing and the scanning. It is the photogrammetry. We run two different units because patients have different mouths and different abilities, and it is never as quick as you want it to be. The cruelest part is that it is slowest exactly when you have the least time to spare.

I will own the workaround a lot of us quietly use. Colleagues set up nice recovery rooms where patients hang out and watch Netflix. We added cable for the same reason, so people had somewhere comfortable to wait. It took me too long to see that for what it really was: a justification for not being efficient, dressed up as hospitality.

The light bulb

What finally clicked was a cost comparison I had been doing backwards. For a couple hundred dollars of componentry per arch, I could skip the digital workflow at the time of surgery and reclaim enough time to fit in one or two more arches. The speed and efficiency of the Smart On X protocol was worth far more than the cost of the parts. Framed that way, it was a light bulb going off. Why wouldn’t I take another look at the analog pickup I had set aside?

So that is what we do now. We let digital handle what it is good at, and at the chair, where time is the whole game, we go the Smart On X route. Time becomes the critical feature, and you simply cannot beat the time efficiency of that protocol.

It shows up most on the days that go sideways. We placed a couple of implants and a revision late in the afternoon, and suddenly it is four o’clock and I am asking myself, now what, make everyone wait? We reached for Smart Denture Conversions and made it work. Having a couple of aces up your sleeve is the difference between giving a patient more stability that same day, or sending your whole team home late.

The real multiplier is the team

None of this scales without a team, and this is the part I care about most. I do not do the computer work myself. That is 100%, my team. I will review revisions and check our Yomi workflow, but I am a guy who wants to empower the people around me. Unless you are a one-person show, you need a team, and the protocol has to be something they can truly own.

That is one of the quiet advantages of the analog pickup. My assistants do conversions, and they do them well. I can be across the office on another case, walk past right before they convert and pick up, say yep, that looks good, let’s go, and keep moving. That is what scaling actually looks like day to day.

It only works if you stay involved enough to train and check the work. You want team members who understand what a job well done looks like, who are not so rigid they cannot function, but who genuinely care about the details. When a digital case comes back and the photogrammetry is off, you have to know whether it was truly seated, not just trust a number on a screen. You inspect what you expect. And if the doctor does not know what is needed, there is no one to train the team in the first place.

Final Thoughts

The honest version of my story is that this was a progression, not a conversion away from anything. I did not beat digital, and I did not abandon it. I just stopped pretending I could outrun the clock.

I still get 86,400 seconds in a day, the same as everyone else. Digital still has its place in my practice, but I no longer let a print queue own the clock at the chair. Those seconds go to patients now, and to a team that grows more confident every time we run the protocol together. That is the only kind of scale worth having, because it is the only kind the clock will actually let you keep.