Digital Cleft Care

Each year, 200,000 babies are born with cleft lip and/or palate, many without access to essential care. Without timely treatment, they struggle to feed, grow, and survive. Comprehensive Cleft Care—including surgery, nutrition support, therapy, and care—is critical but complex, requiring frequent procedures that are physically distressing, costly, challenging for clinicians, and environmentally taxing.

Innovative solutions are needed to improve outcomes and accessibility.

To support this, FDI produces educational materials to introduce dentists and dental teams to digital workflows in cleft care.

Learn the patient journey through a digitalization care pathway

Welcome to the Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Digital Dentistry in Cleft Care! It was developed by FDI Digital Cleft Care Task Team, in collaboration with Smile Train liaison experts, and supported by Dentsply Sirona.

The learning outcomes for this 4.5-hour course include to understand the patient journey through a digitalization care pathway and the role digitalization will play in the future of dentistry.

The MOOC is available in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Access to the course

Digitalization is key to increase access to treatments for cleft patients

Digitalization has been adopted in the three major steps of the conventional patient workflow, resulting in three distinct processes:

Digital patient: the acquisition of patient data is digitized (clinical information, x-ray-based information or casts) and can now be stored or archived in the patient’s digital records.

Virtual patient: mental planning of the patient’s rehabilitation can now be assisted with digital treatment planning and on-screen simulation (computer-aided design or CAD).

Real patient: treatment procedures may be assisted with computer-aided manufactured (CAM) devices using milling or 3D printing technology.