Remote treatment monitoring for clear aligner treatment
Monitoring your patients’ treatment is essential to ensure the smooth progression through treatment stages. Timely IPR according to treatment plan recommendations helps this process. However, sometimes treatment might not progress according to your expectations. The earlier this is recognised, the less damaging it will become. Remote monitoring is becoming more popular. If this is something you decide to offer your patients, it can cut down the number of contact appointments for your patients.
Clear aligner treatment workflow:
1.Evaluation: overall oral health and candidacy for aligner therapy
If the patient is found to have any active periodontal disease, caries or oral health issues these need to be resolved prior to starting clear aligner therapy.Patient to complete valid informed consent
2.Treatment: Full or patial aligners set supplied by the dentist
Once you and your patient have accepted the treatment plan, the patient will start wearing their aligners. IPR and Attachments may be needed - check the Smile Summary: Each aligner set is worn 22 hours/day for 7 to 14 days (1 to 2 weeks) before moving onto the next aligner stageAligners are removed to eat, drink, brush and floss
3.Monitoring: every 8-10 weeks:
The patient will be required to answer questions and upload a series of photographs specific to their treatment. The provider may prefer to call the patient into the practice
Be aware that you need to capture enough information to make clinically applicable decisions. It is preferable that the patient should capture video and photo records.
It is helpful if your patient can utilise someone else to do it for them using an iphone (iphone8 or above) or a DSLR.
You can also consider doing a video consultation, although the image diagnostic quality might be suboptimal due to the patient’s webcam resolution and fisheye (wide angle) lens distortion factor.
Respect the integrity of the data that you capture and store.
Where and how are the images and video stored ?
How do you ensure the security of that data ?
How can you streamline that process ?
I hope that you find this helpful when considering remote monitoring for you patients. Be flexible in your approach. Remote monitoring might be suitable for some patients and not for others.
Next post will be about placing composite attachments
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