With AMA: Healthcare 2026 on June 4th putting 3D printing in healthcare under the spotlight, voices from across the industry are weighing in on where the technology is heading.
The term “digital twin” has long been synonymous with sprawling factory floors, aerospace assembly lines, and industrial automation, virtual replicas of physical processes generating continuous feedback loops. But Ankush Venkatesh, Intrapreneur of Additive Manufacturing at Glidewell Dental Laboratories, believes the concept deserves a more human application. Speaking at AMA Health 2025, Venkatesh argued that in healthcare, the most meaningful “physical twin” is not a machine or a production floor, it’s the patient.
“The twins really get as close to the traditional sense of the word, which is referred to humans and the end customers or the patients in the healthcare arena. The framework remains intact: collect data, consolidate it into a usable representation, generate insights, and feed decisions back into the real world. What changes is the subject at the center of that loop, a person, not a process,” said Venkatesh.
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Dental as the Digital Vanguard
Venkatesh points to dental as one of the further-along sectors in healthcare when it comes to adopting the technologies that make patient-centric digital twins possible. With over two decades of additive manufacturing applications, from implants and crowns to dentures and mouthguards, the dental industry has developed a relatively mature ecosystem of FDA-approved materials, connected lab networks, and increasingly digitized clinical workflows.
At Glidewell, that infrastructure is already in active use. “The patient’s anatomy is the starting point for everything; digital representations of that anatomy feed directly into how we design, refine, and manufacture restorations at scale,” said Venkatesh.
He describes a landscape where clinicians can navigate multiple variables in real time, cost per device, lead time, and patient comfort, while choosing between in-office fabrication or sending cases to specialized manufacturers elsewhere. “The stickiness of that ecosystem, that network, and the ability to make flexible decisions as a clinician when it’s most appropriate or most convenient for them,” he notes, reflects years of infrastructure investment rather than any single technological development.
The Device in Every Pocket
What makes the patient’s digital twin vision increasingly actionable is not a single breakthrough device; it is the smartphone already in every patient’s pocket. Venkatesh argues that the camera and connectivity capabilities now standard on consumer phones represent an underappreciated clinical tool, one with 10–12 megapixels of imaging capability that would have been prohibitively expensive or simply out of reach just 15 to 20 years ago.
“Intra-oral wearables like ORB Sport and devices in that category are the kinds of smart wearables that we’re seeing now, and it’s really just the beginning of getting the hardware into the oral cavity where the ability to measure some of this data and then actually use that data is just really interesting,” Venkatesh said. The throughline across all of it is the smartphone, less a medical device than an access point, quietly making clinical-grade data collection possible outside the clinic.
That connectivity opens the door to something broader. Venkatesh’s vision extends well beyond oral health, toward converging data streams, wearable accelerometer data, sleep metrics, cardiac readings, and custom footwear sensors, all contributing to a unified, longitudinal picture of a patient over time. “We sit at a point where the data coming from clinical workflows and the data coming from manufacturing are starting to converge, and that intersection is where the most interesting decisions about patient care are going to be made,” he said.
Whether that vision is realized, however, depends on resolving questions the technology has so far outpaced. Venkatesh acknowledged that the direct-to-consumer wave has created a regulatory grey zone around patient data. “We are still somewhat in the ‘wild west’ of data compliance frameworks,” he said, drawing a line between the relatively governed world of dental labs and the murkier territory of consumer wellness apps and wearables. Updating those frameworks to reflect the volume, sensitivity, and commercial value of this new data layer, he suggests, is one of the sector’s most consequential challenges ahead.
The Infrastructure Already Exists
The concept of a patient digital twin does not operate in a vacuum; dentistry has been building its foundational layers for years. Glidewell’s approach reflects a broader industry direction: using digital representations of patient anatomy not just to fabricate a single restoration, but to create a feedback loop between clinical data and manufacturing output that improves over time.
That direction is visible across the sector. Formlabs and 3Shape have built connected platforms where a clinician can scan a patient, plan treatment digitally, and print patient-specific devices within a single workflow, a closed-loop process that mirrors the digital twin feedback model Venkatesh describes. Stratasys has pushed further with full-color, multi-material printing that captures both geometry and shade simultaneously, with each iteration feeding more precise data back into the patient’s digital record.
The direction dental is heading in is less about any single platform and more about whether these fragmented digital threads can be woven into something continuous, connected, and truly representative of the patient over time.
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Featured image shows AMA: Healthcare 2026. Image via 3D Printing Industry.
