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Earned Placement: How To Transform Your (Practice) Life

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Earned Placement: How To Transform Your (Practice) Life 

Drs. Daniel J. Lill (left) and Damon W. DeArment
When Dr. Daniel J. Lill and Dr. Damon W. DeArment at Shenandoah Valley Orthodontics (SVO) first heard about remote care, they assumed that at best, the technology would be a distraction. They had built a successful practice and great reputation in their Virginia community by providing individualized care, and they didn’t want to waste patients’ time with something inconvenient.

“I had erroneously assumed that the value to the patient was in seeing me,” DeArment admits. “I neglected the fact that in today’s society, what consumers value the most is convenience while still receiving a quality result. This was a difficult reality to accept after practicing for 27 years!”

After incorporating DentalMonitoring in their practice, Lill and DeArment have seen firsthand how much patients enjoy and appreciate the remote monitoring experience. This has reminded them that, although important, patients aren’t just paying for the experience at the orthodontic office, like quality service at a nice restaurant. Instead, patients primarily go to a reputable orthodontist to get their teeth straightened. Patients are searching for value and convenience, and remote monitoring driven by artificial intelligence technology lets their practice provide both.


Start with the why
SVO had become a stressful place. It took time to come back from the pandemic, and after that, the practice lost an associate doctor who had been working there for five years. This didn’t mean that the practice stopped growing—net production grew 12% in 2021 and 22% in 2022—but now two doctors were handling what had been a three-doctor practice load.

When they joined the Smile Doctors orthodontic support organization, Lill and DeArment wanted to reduce their overall individual workloads by incorporating best practices and relieving some of the administrative and marketing duties they had been responsible for as practice owners. “We were taking work home on the evenings and weekends,” DeArment says. “We needed something to change—and quickly—to relieve the stress we both felt and the impact it had on our personal lives at home.”
DentalMonitoring


Organizational success
Fortunately, Smile Doctors had embraced and encouraged the adoption of technology. “The answer to our busy clinical workflow and overscheduled lives was adopting DentalMonitoring,” DeArment says. There was hesitation, but they were able to hear from a fellow Smile Doctors practitioner, Dr. Josh Adcox, about what DentalMonitoring could do for a busy practice.

“We were heavily influenced by Dr. Adcox, someone we truly respected and who had already incorporated DentalMonitoring in his busy practice,” DeArment says. “He kept saying that with Dental- Monitoring, you can ‘do more, with less … but better!’ ” The idea was too inspiring not to go for it.

“We believed that if we could convince our patients to try DentalMonitoring, we would be able to stay better connected with them, monitor their care more closely and book fewer in-person appointments,” DeArment says. The practice learned quickly that reducing in-person appointments was the key to selling their patients on the technology, because patients don’t want to miss work or school to go to the orthodontist.


Productive appointments
The AI-driven solution had immediate positive effects on the practice schedule. “We no longer saw patients in the office for aligner or elastic checks, retainer checks, growth guidance or between-phase appointments,” DeArment says. By using information gleaned from the patient’s weekly scans, DentalMonitoring allowed the team to triage repair visits—many of which did not need to be seen in the office. Previously, if a patient thought they had an emergency, the best way to handle that was to bring them into the office; with DentalMonitoring, the doctors are already informed about the situation and can make the best clinical decision for their patients. Now, the only appointments on the SVO schedule are productive ones: aligner deliveries, debands, initial fixed appliance deliveries and adjustments, new-patient exams and the occasional repair.

In 2021, SVO scheduled a monthly average of 266 appointments for checking retainer, elastics, wires or aligners. After implementing DentalMonitoring, they were able to reclassify these appointments as avoidable visits because the DentalMonitoring AI provided all the clinical information the doctors needed without an in-office appointment. In nine months of using DentalMonitoring, the number of avoidable in-office appointments dropped to 188 appointments per month, saving an average of 29 hours a month.

“It opened our schedule from seeing eight new patients a day to being able to schedule 14 to 16 new-patient exams per day,” DeArment says. “If no IPR or attachments are needed when delivering an additional aligner series, the patient can stop by the office and pick them up, or we can mail them to their homes and restart these patients’ monitoring without an extra office visit. We have reduced our one-doctor schedules from 80 patients a day to 50, and our two-doctor schedules from 120 patients per day to 70 per day.”

Because there is less demand for the doctors chairside, they have the freedom to spend their time getting their Invisalign Clin-Checks developed and approved, as well as using DentalMonitoring to customize patient treatment (14-week routine checks, elastic checks, deciding if patients are ready for debanding or need additional aligner series, troubleshooting poor aligner fi t and providing coaching to the patients).
DentalMonitoring
DentalMonitoring


Life changes
Today, Lill and DeArment can leave the office knowing they’re caught up on clinical responsibilities and can focus at home on their families.

“DentalMonitoring was singularly responsible for giving us more time with our families and generally enjoying life more fully,” DeArment says. “We also no longer felt the need to hire a full-time orthodontist to replace our lost associate. We were not only able to manage our current workload but actually grew our production with less effort than in the past.

“We did eventually add a parttime orthodontist, one day a week, but we were still able to replace 175 doctor clinical days by incorporating this technology.”


Patients love it
What do the patients think? “We received nearly overwhelming positive response,” DeArment says. “Most were impressed by the technology and felt they were fortunate to work with an office that was on the cutting edge of modern health care delivery.

“Our younger patients thought doing the scans was cool, but the parents were even more enthusiastic, knowing that we were keeping their child accountable and were monitoring their treatment more regularly, with the ability to intercept problems in real time and make treatment more efficient. But mostly, parents enjoyed the convenience of reducing the number of in-office visits.”


Staffing up and staffing down
One of the first steps to succeed with DentalMonitoring is assigning a very organized team member to monitor the DM dashboard, respond to patient questions and communicate progress reports, both verbally and by video. The DentalMonitoring implementation team helps practices choose the best person for this role.

Shenandoah Valley Orthodontics had two full-time team members in their lab, mainly tasked with submitting Invisalign cases and printing models on 3D printers. They decided to outsource retainer fabrication and free up Ashley Huntley to work part time on the DM dashboard.

“Ashley is incredibly organized, tech-savvy and dedicated to ensuring remote care succeeded in our practice,” DeArment says. “She was the perfect choice to serve as our remote care coordinator.” As the practice grew, especially in aligner share-of-chair (currently around 80%), the role expanded from part-time to full-time monitoring of the dashboard, checking scans and communicating with patients through the DM app.

“Concurrently, because we were seeing fewer patients in the office, we were able to devote another clinical member to our remote care team on a full-time basis without having to replace Ashley’s position on the clinical team,” DeArment says. The practice had another clinical team member leave six months after it implemented DentalMonitoring, but because of the reduction in in-office appointments, there was no pressure to hire a replacement.


Dynamic scheduling
With DentalMonitoring successfully implemented in the workfl ow— transforming sta ng, the practice schedule, doctor days and patient convenience—the SVO team was ready to pursue dynamic scheduling. This is the essential step in reaching maximum efficiency through remote monitoring.

Dynamic scheduling means patients leave each appointment without another appointment on the books. This goes against established wisdom, but by monitoring patient progress through weekly DM scans, a practice can set patient appointments based on individual progress and biology instead of standardized intervals. This is not on-demand scheduling, as if the patient were in charge of their treatment; instead, this is clinically driven scheduling based on the information coming from a patient’s weekly scans that have been analyzed by the industry’s most powerful AI. With dynamic scheduling at SVO, an in-office appointment is scheduled when one of five situations is observed.
  • A patient finishes their current aligner series and needs to be scanned for additional aligners or scheduled for a deband.
  • Teeth are not tracking because of noncompliance or tooth eruption, and a new scan needs to be taken with additional coaching to get back on track.
  • Broken brackets, poking archwires, poor oral hygiene or increased gingival recession needs to be addressed.
  • A patient in growth guidance is ready for active treatment.
  • There is a pattern of nonscanning (three in a row) and the patient needs to be seen to recommit to treatment success.
Monitoring aligner fit, adjusting elastic wear, coaching and addressing patient concerns are all handled through the app, DeArment says. “We set goals within the app for classification, midline correction and crossbite correction, which allows the AI to facilitate our care by prompting us to evaluate the case closer once we’re notified these goals are met.”
DentalMonitoring


Smile journeys
Lill and DeArment transformed their practice life through DentalMonitoring, and yet things are still very much the same. SVO is still treating its patients with the highest clinical standard of care, but that standard has shifted because DentalMonitoring allows the team to deliver excellent treatment results while increasing the speed and convenience of treatment.

When they compare where they were before DentalMonitoring to where they are now, it’s clear that these two doctors have a lot to smile about!

LEARN MORE ABOUT DentalMonitoring
To find out more about DentalMonitoring, visit dentalmonitoring.com.
Orthotown Magazine
September 2025
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