hey it's dr amanda with www.straightsmilesolutions.com
and today we had another great question coming from one of our doctors
asking about how one would want to get started getting
starting ortho in a gp practice and i have these conversations
all the time with doctors and mostly for me i just listen i feel like the
therapist um you know tell me tell me about your practice you know tell me
about you tell me about your town tell me about
the competition talk about the orthodontists that are
nearby you know what why usually they want to do it either they they like
it they think it's interesting but most likely
patients have been asking so what what a patient's been asking for
you know i usually recommend that you make a plan you pick a system to get
started with you know that makes sense for the
demographics that you have i mean obviously if you're a pediatric dentist
um or you're a pedogeneralist you'd probably be doing phase one
or braces or both um if you see mostly older population
in more affluent areas you're probably going to be doing a liners or invisalign
and if you're in a more rural part of the country fly over country
south um small towns um do braces and then later you can you can add
aligners but yeah pick one get trained up you know
there's a lot of cool training courses that you do not
have to fly somewhere and take a class you don't have to take class part of
what we do at straight smile solutions is we teach you based on
your own patience so it's pretty great um so you make money while you're
learning um but yeah just get started find out
you got to think about also you know besides that um
what type of uh armamentarium do you need to invest in do you have what you
need i like to tell doctors that they're thinking about doing this they
really should have at least two things before they even want to get started so
one of them to me bare minimum is going to be
some type of intraoral scanner and the other one's going to be a panoramic
machine or easy access to a panoramic machine
no pano no art though far as i'm concerned because it's just
it's below standard of care ceph is another thing if you're going to be
doing kids um or really hard adults you're
going to need a cf so or you need access to a cf for some
cases at least um but that's pretty easy you can
outsource that if you if you can't add it that's there's
enough places you can go to an oral surgeon's office to do it and other
stuff so um but yeah i mean if you're getting
started with phase one appliances you don't need much
i mean a couple pliers maybe a slow speed
nah you don't need much at all it's pretty easy um and of course you're
gonna need some instructions take home instructions
um you know consent stuff like that that's something that we have um you can
get it in our store if you want or if you're a concierge or a vip client we
give you those um they're included but um yeah not too
much and if you're doing a liners again not too much that you need
just that scanner the pano um yeah and the forms that's about it it's
pretty easy i mean you need composite edge and uh and stuff
like that but i'm sure you already have that stuff in
your office so yeah that's pretty much it it's pretty simple
um you know figure out what you want and then i mean i really think you should
get your especially if you have a young team get them involved and you know what
do they want um do they have friends and family you
know that that we can maybe treat at lab cost initially
um just to get a few cases under our belt you know if the first few cases are
going to be a little bit rough we can use them to take pictures blog
about it and then great if we can get most of our
team and our team families teams families in appliances that's
great you know perfect for pictures and and uh
testimonials and everything and yeah that's pretty much it and then
you know you can grow after that i always like to recommend that my doctors
take a month or two at least to try to capture as many
opportunities as possible because the opportunities are there
they're there in your office every day you might have 10 20 30 40 opportunities
you don't have to tell the patient hey do you mind if i do an orthodontic exam
oh you don't say that that should be part of your every exam that you do on
every patient just you're just evaluating the bite you
know and taking photos like or taking a scan
either way a nice color scan but and capturing that annually just as
data you know as records is incredibly powerful
because as you re revisit it from year to year patients are going to see
the progression of disease they're going to see the progression of
different things that could be improved if you did ortho you know attrition
abstractions crowding even periodontal disease
mobility so much attachment levels so much that we can that we can gather
from that that and patients will be like whoa okay i see
this is getting worse we want our patients able to keep all
their dentition for their lifetime but if their bite isn't good if they're not
going to keep it for a lifetime so it's really
it's an important investment but a lot of times patients have that insurance
and they've just never used it and there may not be that much money at all
you know and the other pushback you're going to get from adults is going to be
time but now if you're using a lot of the
virtual resources that are out there it's really time is really not a huge
issue i mean so much of this is digital it's so much quicker now especially if
you're using a scanner you're going to get a way better outcome on everything
and if you use you know digital bracket placement i
mean everything can be digital it can be very precise
do this very effectively so anyways that's pretty much my tips to get
started hopefully that was helpful don't hesitate to reach out with any
other questions and of course please always subscribe to our youtube channel
thank you