The new standard of care

Dr. Ryann Christensen discusses how DentalMonitoring has transformed her practice

When I started using DentalMonitoring in my practice, I knew I had found a digital solution that could help solve many of the issues I was dealing with at Christensen Family Orthodontics in Fresno and Kingsburg, California. My busy practice was growing 19% year over year, which meant a busy, overbooked schedule. Also, I was working late nights and wanted to use office hours for ClinChecks and treatment planning.

The DentalMonitoring AI analyzes and notifies me and my team about what is happening to each patient after every scan. Using this information, I can closely observe treatment progress and keep the patient on track to complete treatment on time while often reducing in-person office visits. I have been able to leverage the clinical data from remote monitoring to create efficiency for myself and my team.

“Using this information, I can closely observe treatment progress and keep the patient on track to complete treatment on time while often reducing in person office visits.”

One of the immediate sources of relief from implementing DentalMonitoring has been in shifting many of the check visits and re-evaluations from in-office appointments to remote monitoring. With weekly remote monitoring, I have been able to identify the correct time to bring patients back into the office and shift some appointment intervals back.

Weekly notifications from DentalMonitoring eliminate surprises in appointments and helps us to accurately prepare for every in-office appointment. This means that the CFO team can schedule precisely, knowing ahead of time if they will need to change a patient’s archwires or repair a debonded bracket instead of being surprised when the patient sits down in the practice chair. By eliminating surprises and reducing daily appointments, my team and I no longer need to stay late or work through lunch hours to catch up with the day’s work. Instead, we now have 2 hours a week dedicated to catching up with things that need to be done.

One of my goals was to find a true solution for oral hygiene compliance issues. It is disappointing to reach the end of treatment and have a perfect bite and a perfect smile, but the patient has white spot lesions. When I only see patients in the office, there are only so many times I can encourage them to brush their teeth. But DentalMonitoring allows me to motivate patients to improve their oral health, without additional processes.

DentalMonitoring monitors the oral health of patients in weekly scans. When the AI observes an issue, it automatically messages the patient about the issue and encourages them to improve their brushing. The automated messaging system frees up me and my team, while still conveying the friendly tone that my patients expect when interacting with my practice.

I can open up the DentalMonitoring dashboard to see a patient changing their hygiene routine from week to week. I’m able to see evidence of the notifications working. Patients often have poor oral health scores because they aren’t used to brushing with braces, but as they receive regular reminders through the DentalMonitoring App, their oral health score improves. The exciting part is that much of this learning can now happen in between appointments, where before, the patient’s oral health wouldn’t be observed until they came to the office for a regularly scheduled appointment.

This information was provided by DentalMonitoring.