Scanners

Smileline connects to the practice's own accounts with 3Shape, iTero, Medit, Alliedstar and Shining 3D. Once an account is connected, Smileline checks it for new scans, copies every file into the practice's encrypted clinical storage, and files each scan onto its patient — by itself when it can be sure who the patient is, or on the Scans page when a person has to choose.

Open the page

Open Settings → Integrations → Scanners. Owners, managers and agency staff connect and manage scanner accounts; the front desk can see them. The page has one card per brand you can connect. A brand Smileline is still waiting for the scanner company to approve is not offered yet. On the test environment a brand may show Sandbox: it is connected to the scanner company's test system, not to real scans.

Connect an account

You can connect several accounts of the same brand — one per site, for example. Each account appears on its brand's card with:

• its status: Connected, Connecting, Needs attention or Disconnected;
• the site its scans are kept at, when Smileline last checked it, and how far back the archive reaches;
• what went wrong, when the last check did not work.

Some brands need one more step after the sign-in:

• iTero: when one login reaches several practice accounts, the account shows Connecting with Choose the iTero account. Choose the one whose scans belong to this site. An account already connected elsewhere in Smileline cannot be chosen twice.
• Alliedstar: the account shows Connecting until Alliedstar confirms it. Nothing else is needed from you.
• Medit: Medit asks you to sign in again every few weeks. The account shows Reconnect by and the date, in red when it is close. Click Reconnect before then so scans keep arriving.

How new scans arrive

Smileline checks every connected account about every five minutes (Shining 3D every 30 minutes), and sooner when the scanner company sends a notice of a new scan. Look for new scans checks at once. An account that stopped working is checked again every 30 minutes until it works, and an account whose scanner company asked Smileline to slow down waits an hour. Missed scans are never skipped: after an outage, Smileline carries on from the last scan it saw. A scan uploaded again at the scanner company arrives as a new file of the same scan, and the copies already in Smileline are kept; a scan the company no longer shows waits in Needs attention on the Scans page.

A scan is filed onto its patient automatically only when the scanner sent the patient's full name and date of birth and exactly one patient of the practice has both. Only iTero sends a date of birth, so scans from 3Shape, Medit, Alliedstar and Shining 3D always wait on the Scans page for a person to file them.

Import older scans

The first import brings the last 90 days. To go further back, click Import older scans on the account, choose the date to go back to and click Import. Some scanner companies keep only part of their history — Shining 3D offers 30 days. Once the import has looked, the account says from which date the company no longer offers scans, rather than pretending the archive is complete.

Reconnect or disconnect

• Reconnect signs in to the account again. Use it when an account shows Needs attention because the scanner company ended Smileline's access, and for Medit before the Reconnect by date. An Alliedstar account reconnects in the region it was connected in.
• Disconnect stops importing from the account and withdraws Smileline's access at the scanner company. Click it twice to confirm. Scans already imported stay in the archive.

Who can do what

Connected scanner accounts are also listed on Connected accounts, with the others.