Pearls for Your Practice: Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill, Wisdom Dental Billing, and Xpanders

Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill by Pulpdent

Last week I was doing my least favorite procedure: a quadrant of Class II composites on a teenager. I hate them. They’re always a little fussy with anesthesia, they try to check their phones mid-procedure, and—worst of all—those restorations will likely need to be redone in their twenties. If only there were a material that helped prevent recurrent caries in high-risk patients. If only it made placement faster so I could get in and out while Mr. Beast TikToks play over my shoulder. If only it made shade selection easy.

Well, we do have a material that does all that: Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill by Pulpdent.

Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill is a resin composite restorative that’s ideal for high-caries-risk patients. It’s a self-leveling bulk fill resin that promotes natural remineralization and helps prevent microleakage. By supporting adjacent tooth structure and resisting recurrent decay, it protects your work—and your sanity.

It can be used as a base or as a full-contour restorative. It’s dual cure, so you get unlimited depth of cure, and it has excellent wear resistance—better than other bulk fill flowables on the market. It also has low shrinkage stress, making it even more effective for bulk fill applications.

One of its best features is universal shading. Pulpdent’s “ShadeFusion” technology gives it optimal chroma and translucency, allowing it to pull color from surrounding tooth structure. That means it blends beautifully—no more agonizing over shades. It’s simpler, faster, and cleaner.

In terms of bioactivity, Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill releases and recharges fluoride, calcium, and phosphate, promoting mineral apatite formation to defend against microleakage—the Achilles’ heel of resin composites. It even modulates biofilm activity, making the restoration surface less pathogenic. That’s a huge plus for high-caries-risk patients.

It’s compatible with any traditional adhesive bonding system. Some clinicians use it on every posterior composite. Others save it for their high-risk patients. Either way, Activa Bioactive Bulk Fill is a powerful tool in the fight against caries. Double to deep center field!

Wisdom Dental Billing

Costs in my practice just keep climbing—supplies, lab fees, and especially staffing. We recently added 401(k)s and healthcare coverage, which bumped up expenses again. These days, every new team member costs more than just their salary.

But here’s the thing: not every task needs to be handled in-house anymore, especially billing. It's become one of the most time-consuming and costly roles to staff internally. That’s why I started looking into Wisdom Dental Billing.

Outsourcing billing to a team of experts like Wisdom can streamline collections and insurance processes—without adding headcount. It’s a smart way to reduce overhead, collect more efficiently, and free up your existing team to focus on what they do best: caring for patients.

Wisdom Dental Billing is a full-service solution that handles every aspect of dental billing and insurance, helping practices get paid faster and more completely. Many clients report a 50% reduction in 90+ day accounts receivable within six months.

Their services include:

• Insurance billing

• Insurance verification

• Patient billing

• Fee schedule updates

• Ledger audits

• Pre-determination submissions

With this level of support, you may be able to reduce or even eliminate the need for an in-house billing position, or lighten the load for multiple team members. Each practice gets a dedicated U.S.-based account rep—no vacation time, sick days, or turnover to worry about. And no need to pay benefits!

The vast majority of practices see increased insurance revenue with Wisdom. For me, even just outsourcing insurance verification would be worth it. It’s unconventional—outsourcing isn’t something we dentists typically embrace. But billing? That might be the best place to start. Let your clinical team stay focused on patients. Let Wisdom handle the billing.

Single to the left field corner for Wisdom Dental Billing!

Xpanders by ArtCraft Dental

I don’t extract many teeth in my practice. It’s not that I dislike oral surgery—it’s just that my patients tend to have a better experience with an oral surgeon, especially when they need sedation. That said, sometimes emergencies happen and I have to jump in.

Case in point: a patient called with pain around a maxillary first molar. It had a cracked distal root and was clearly unrestorable—and mobile. I thought, “Easy enough!”

Thirty minutes later, I had broken the crown and was struggling to remove the roots. Then my assistant remembered we had just ordered Xpanders by ArtCraft Dental. Five minutes later, I was packing the socket and waving the patient goodbye.

These are hands down the most atraumatic elevators I’ve ever used. With minimal effort, I was able to get maximum lateral movement by entering the PDL space. Once the roots were sectioned and mobilized, the rest was easy. The physics of extraction just worked.

Xpanders have a double-pronged diamond-coated working end that grips the root securely, creating two-point contact between the crestal bone and the root’s cervical portion. A simple twist locks one prong against the bone while the other pushes the root laterally. The bucco-lingual socket expansion makes it much easier to grab with forceps or Rongeurs.

The Xpanders kit includes four elevators:

• Anterior set: one straight elevator (great for canines/incisors) and one curved elevator (perfect for premolars, plus better operator access).

• Posterior set: “in” and “out” models with different angles to help with sectioned molars in hard-to-reach areas.

Every general dentist should be able to manage an emergency extraction. Even if it’s not something you do often, having tools like Xpanders on hand makes a huge difference.

Triple into the right-center power alley for ArtCraft Dental!

Editor's note: This article appeared in the May 2025 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a complimentary print subscription. Sign up here.