Getting Good Outcomes With More Effective Treatment Planning: The Dentist Drives the Bus!


When it comes to treatment planning, as an orthodontics professional, ensuring you are “at the helm” when it comes to your patient’s care is essential. Indeed, dentists need to drive the aligner treatment planning bus, as it were, to achieve good results. However, all too many people assume that, because clear aligners are so easy to use, they should leave things up to their technicians. This is actually a potentially major mistake, and we’ve outlined several key reasons why as follows.
Don’t Just Rely on Your Technicians for Treatment Planning
It’s tempting, especially when things are busy, to simply rely on your technicians for treatment planning. However, your technicians are not thoroughly trained when it comes to orthodontics treatment planning, and usually, their focus is on quantity (not necessarily quality). After all, they have quotas to meet.
In line with this, ensuring that you are telling technicians how a treatment plan should look for an individual patient is vital. To start with, good case selection is clearly essential, as the technicians are unlikely to refuse a case just because it’s difficult; green cases are the best bets here and can work with any aligner brand (you may need to double it).
From there, proper treatment planning is essential. If you are unsure about how to treatment plan for individual patients, partnering with a professional orthodontics advisory team, such as ours here at Straight Smile Solutions, can really help.
Always ensure every case also has an accountability loop (virtual loops are common these days). Patients need very clear instructions and verbiage for their aligners to work effectively and be used correctly. Tracking photos are especially important here, at minimum once every three aligners, to ensure that the patient’s progress is continuing as expected. So, don’t chance it; always keep this in mind to ensure better results.