Monitoring your patients’ treatment is essential to ensure the smooth progression through the stages of a clear aligner treatment.
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 patient and you.
Clear aligner treatment workflow:
Full or partial aligners supplied by the dentist
Once you and your patient have accepted the treatment plan, the patient will start wearing their aligners. Aligners are removed to eat, drink, brush and floss and should not be worn during hazardous activities such as trampolining or horse riding.
Monitoring: Ideally conducted every 8-10 weeks
The provider may choose to call the patient into the practice. Alternatively, the patient can be monitored remotely and will then be required to answer questions and upload a series of photographs specific to their treatment.
If remote monitoring is implemented, 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 take photographs 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 sub-optimal due to the patient’s webcam resolution and fisheye (wide angle) lens distortion factor.
It is critical to respect the integrity of the data that you capture and store. Consider the following:
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Where and how are the images and video stored?
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How do you ensure the security of that data?
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How can you streamline that process?
I hope that you find this helpful when considering remote monitoring for your patients.
