Methods: We have developed a ten-question questionnaire and distribute it both by email (200 – response rate 38%) and by personal interview (50 – response rate 90%) to dentists working in different cities and towns of the Central European region. The questions had multiple-choice answers and 5 of them required also percentage estimations.
Results: 85.12% of the dentists use hand-written charts, 61.98% recommend a panoramic before any treatment, while 38.01% use only periapical Xrays. Orthodontists use cephalometrics (36.84%) and the majority use diagnostic casts (84.21%). 28.92% of the respondents take pictures of the cases with digital cameras, but only 57.14% of them send pictures to the dental laboratory. Only 2 out of 121 use a spectrophotometer, 98,34% use visual shade matching and only 7.43% use double shade matching (by both dentist and dental technician). Almost half the ceramic restorations made in the dental labs needed minor color or shape correction (26%) or major changes (21%) – in correlation with the double shade matching, but without a connection with the use of digital photography.
Conclusion: Our study has shown that there is a statistically significant correlation with age and location of the dental office, dentists under 40 and working in big cities tend to use more frequently all modern means of communication. Involving the dental technician in shade matching has decreased the corrections and redo of ceramic restorations.