How to send iTero scans to your lab, and where cases get stuck

Sending an iTero scan to a lab takes three things. Connect the lab to your practice once, in MyiTero. Pick that lab as the destination when you fill in the Rx. Send the scan, and it reaches the lab within minutes.

Align’s own figure, from its integrations page, is a mean of 4.6 minutes from sending to the lab receiving it, over 10,000 scans.

When a case takes longer than that, the cause is usually one of three. The lab is not fully connected yet. A bite or an opposing arch is missing. Or the Rx is too thin for the lab to start from.

This guide covers each step from Align’s documentation, checked in November 2026, with the five places a case gets stuck marked along the way. Menu and button names change between scanner software versions, so treat the steps as a map and check your own screen.

Before your first case: connecting a lab in MyiTero

A lab has to be connected to your practice before it can appear as a destination on the Rx. Align lists a self-service Connect Lab tool on its support page, described as a way to “sync digital prescriptions with preferred labs,” and MyiTero is where the connection lives.

The route through MyiTero, as one lab’s help article walks it: log in at MyiTero.com, open Settings and then Practice settings, choose My Labs, search for the lab by name, and click Connect. If My Labs is not there, the practice’s iTero administrator has to add it or give you permission.

The lab then shows at the top of My Labs with a pending status. It stays pending until the lab side completes the connection, and it changes to Connected when that is done. Only then does the lab appear in the Send To field on the Rx.

That is a secondary source, so confirm the steps on your own screen. The point to take from it is the word pending. A lab you have added is not yet a lab you can send to.

Align says more than 20,000 labs worldwide are iTero-enabled, as of 31 March 2024. If your lab is one of them, connecting is a few minutes on each side. If it is not, see the last section.

Sending a case: from the Rx to the lab destination

On the scanner, the Rx comes first. Align’s Element 5D manual says “the first step in the scanning process is filling in the Rx,” and that fields marked with a red asterisk are mandatory.

1. Enter the patient’s first and last name. Spell them as the lab will see them. The next section explains why.
2. Pick the case type. For a crown, bridge or anything a lab makes, that is Restorative, which the manual defines as “a scan that you need to send to a laboratory for modeling or milling.” A tooth chart opens, and you select the tooth, the restoration, the material and the shade.
3. Choose the lab in the Send To list. The manual puts it as one line: “from the Send To drop-down list, select the lab to which the scan should be sent.” A lab that is still pending is not in the list.
4. Scan. The prep arch, the opposing arch and the bite. Your intraoral scanner stitches them into one digital impression.
5. Review, then send. The manual says to view the case “to ensure that no data is missing,” then sign to authorize the order and tap Confirm and Send. The patient’s profile page then shows the status of the order.

What makes a complete Rx is the subject of the lab prescription checklist. The scanner enforces its own mandatory fields, and a lab needs more than those.

What the lab receives, and where

The lab does not need an iTero scanner. Align’s lab page says the lab receives the scan “within minutes directly in your exocad software or in the complimentary MyiTero cloud portal.”

So there are two places a case lands.

• The MyiTero portal. Free, in a browser, with every scan sent to the lab. The lab reviews the scan, and Align says it can do so while the patient is still in the chair.
• Lab software, through an integration. Align’s integrations page lists exocad for design and lab management systems “including MyLab Connect, Seazona, and Magic Touch.” A case sent to an integrated lab arrives in the system the lab already works in.

Either way, the lab gets the scan and the Rx as the scanner recorded them. The file formats behind that are covered in STL and PLY files for dental labs, and the native iTero file is what the lab opens in exocad, with an STL export where another system needs one.

On the practice side, the scan can now reach the chart as well. In February 2026, Henry Schein One announced a direct integration that imports iTero scans into patient records in Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend and Dentally, with Dentally covering practices in Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. The release describes importing scans into the chart, and says nothing about lab cases, so that is all we claim for it.

Where cases get stuck

An iTero case, and the five places it stalls

A flow of five steps for an iTero case, with where each stalls. Fill in the Rx: stalls when the Rx is thin, or the patient name does not match the lab’s. Scan: stalls when the bite or the opposing arch is missing. Send to the lab: stalls when the wrong lab is picked, or the lab is still pending. The lab receives it: stalls when the case is waiting in a portal nobody checks. The lab designs: stalls when a question about the Rx goes unanswered.

1. 1

   Fill in the Rx

   Stalls when the Rx is thin, or the patient name does not match the lab’s.

   Practice

2. 2

   Scan

   Stalls when the bite or the opposing arch is missing.

   Practice

3. 3

   Send to the lab

   Stalls when the wrong lab is picked, or the lab is still pending.

   Practice

4. 4

   The lab receives it

   Stalls when the case waits in a portal nobody checks.

   Lab

5. 5

   The lab designs

   Stalls when a question about the Rx goes unanswered.

   Lab

The lab is still pending. The connection was started and never finished. The lab is not in the Send To list, so the assistant picks another, or saves the scan and means to send it later. Check My Labs for the word Connected before the first case.

The wrong lab was picked. A practice with three labs connected has three entries in the list, and two of them are wrong for this case. The scan arrives at a lab that was not expecting it, and the lab that was expecting it waits. Write the lab on the paper or digital Rx as well, so the two can be checked against each other.

A missing bite or opposing scan. The scanner catches most of these. The manual says that missing segments or bite scans are flagged before post-processing: a missing prep or arch, a missing bite, a bite scanned from one side only, or a discrepancy between the left and right bite scans. The bite section is highlighted in red, and in some cases “you will be warned that the case may be returned from the lab if you do not fix the issues.” Fix it while the patient is in the chair. A bite registration taken a week later is a second appointment.

A thin Rx. The scanner’s mandatory fields are the patient, the case type and the tooth. A lab also needs the shade, the material, the margin preference, the due date and the contact for questions. A case with a scan and nothing else starts a round of questions, and why dental lab cases go missing shows where those rounds end up.

Patient names that do not match. The lab’s own system has a record for the patient, and the scan arrives under a name that differs by a hyphen, a nickname or a typo. The same lab help article above says that when the practice name and patient name do not match exactly, its system will not pair the scan with the case. Other labs’ systems vary, and the fix is the same: use the chart name, every time.

What the lab should check the moment a case arrives

A lab that reviews the scan on arrival catches four of the five problems above while the practice can still fix them that day.

• Both arches and the bite are present, and the bite closes on both sides
• The prep, the margin and the contacts are readable on the scan
• The Rx names the tooth, the restoration, the material and the shade
• The patient name matches the lab’s record, or a new record is made
• The due date leaves time for the work, and for delivery
• Any question goes back to the practice today, in one message

The last line matters most. A question asked the day the scan arrives gets answered while the dentist remembers the patient. Sending intraoral scans to a dental lab covers the same checks for other scanners.

If your lab isn’t iTero-enabled

A lab that is not connected to iTero can still receive your work, but not through the Send To list. The scan has to be exported and sent another way: a scanner portal, a file transfer link, or email. Each of those is a place the case can wait, and scanner portal or shared case explains what a portal does and does not tell you afterwards.

The better fix is on the lab’s side. Align’s lab page describes becoming an iTero-enabled lab, after which the lab receives scans in MyiTero or in its own software. For a lab, that is one setup that every iTero practice it works with can then use.

Dr. Joel Gaudet, a dentist in White Rock, BC, put the requirement this way:

“The only way it was going to work was if everything was on one platform, and it was easy to send and receive from that platform.”

Dr. Joel Gaudet, Wave Dentistry

In Tusko, iTero scans arrive in New Cases on their own, and the practice assigns each one to any of its labs. How it works shows the case from there, and the digital crown workflow follows one case from scan to seat. Labs can see their side of the same case for labs.

iTero is a trademark of Align Technology, Inc.