Tusko was built by a dentist whose own cases kept going missing.

I graduated from James Cook University in Australia in 2019 and came home to White Rock to work with my dad. He’s been building smiles here for over 30 years.

After about three years, I bought the practice from him.

I wanted us fully digital. It took some begging to get my dad off goopy impressions, but now he loves it.

Today we scan everything. I mill same-day crowns in the clinic and 3D print night guards.

Front teeth, implants and dentures still go out. I use three labs, each one my favourite for something different.

A normal day is two chairs, hygiene exams and emergencies in between. All I hear is “Dr. Joel, Dr. Joel, Dr. Joel.”

That’s where cases slipped. If my assistant took a scan for a night guard and nobody wrote it down, the patient came back a week later for a night guard nobody had made.

Then a lab would call about a pontic for “Linda.” I’d seen 45 patients that day. I had no idea who Linda was.

Emails from one lab, texts from another, the front desk calling me over to the phone for a third.

Even as a millennial, I hated zipping files, emailing them, then typing the patient’s name into a spreadsheet.

And if a lab texted me on a Saturday, I couldn’t answer until I was back in the office with my cases in front of me.

My head was exploding. The only way it was going to work was if everything lived in one place, and it was easy to send and receive from there.

So I built that. One place where every case lives, with the Rx, the scans and every message on it.

My team and my labs work from the same case now. Now we’re opening it up to other practices and labs.

I built it so nothing depends on anyone’s memory again. Mine included.