Does your treatment seem to fall behind on non-cooperative patients? Are your patients and families upset because they are in treatment too long? Are your referring dentists upset with not knowing how treatment is progressing? If so, maybe this pearl can help.
With the advancements in braces and archwire technology there is a trend to have appointments as many weeks apart as possible. This is good because the patient comes in less and there is a slight decrease in the number of patients seen per day.
But this trend toward long appointment intervals (over 8 weeks) is getting out of hand and run-on cases have increased dramatically. Lets face it, if you have an appointment interval of 10-12 weeks, and the patient isn’t cooperating, your treatment will be 2-3 months behind by their next appointment—not good!
In the past, a simple check on the progress of treatment every 6 months was realistic—it is not very realistic today. But, a periodic review in the projected middle of treatment or at a specific stage of treatment is realistic and very helpful for reducing potential run-on cases.
Triggering the review is the difficult part and requires that you code the Tx Chart. Some computer software systems even have a review date system built in and are very helpful for indicating when a review is needed. If so, you can pick out a significant date in Tx (10, 14, 18, etc., months) when you should have a certain level of tooth movement completed (i.e., leveling, rotations, retraction, etc.) and use that date to trigger your review.
Other than keeping your treatment on track and informing the patient/family of their progress, an important aspect of a review is to get the patient back to their family dentist for an exam and cleaning and to tell the dentist the status of treatment (so that he/she can intelligently respond to the patient/family when asked).
Not having a review is a recipe for disaster, but at least one review/start can head that off. See the attached PDF’s and Word® files to set up your review system.
