In Hand Dental Chief Medical Officer Dr. Kurt Hoffman recently appeared on the Dental Tech Show with founder Dr. Aaron DeForest to talk about all things In Hand Dental! They discussed the origins of dental tech, how In Hand Dental got started, and the applications for the app.
Dr. DeForest started the podcast, “Monitoring Clear Aligners Gives BOTH Patient & Dentist What They Want”, talking about the misconceptions he once had-and that many have–about teledentistry. He gives the example, “it’s just a video call with patients” as a misconception. He goes on to talk about how there are multiple levels of teledentistry, and how In Hand Dental uses nearly all of them!
Dr. Hoffman speaks about developing the software: do you know the original story of In Hand Dental? Our CEO, Mike Gassman and Dr. Hoffman met because their sons were friends. Mike was in the virtual medical/physical therapy space.
They all had dinner, and when they were talking about an app Mike had developed, Dr. Hoffman quickly saw the implications for dentistry. (You can read more about that story here)
In Hand Dental is used to monitor tooth movement remotely, and according to Dr. Hoffman, that’s probably where it’s most robust. But it has a lot of other features like virtual conferences, video, IM features, and even lead generation features.
Most of the power is in actually tracking tooth movement and the orthodontist planned treatment as it progresses.
You can use In Hand Dental mainly with digital treatment planned cases, whether aligner treatments (FYI: it works for all aligners and aligner companies), or anything where you’ve designed the progress digitally and want to monitor progress remotely.
When you can use In Hand Dental effectively for remote monitoring, you can start to see the biggest return, monetarily, because you are able to reduce chair time in the office, and fill that with new patients.
A key takeaway from Dr. DeForest about dental tech:
“It turns your patients’ workflow into almost a better experience than you could really have without software, which is something people don’t really think about with teledentistry. You almost only think about the communication aspect. When I was learning and going through your app, it allows the patient to say how often they are wearing the aligners, and then if they are happy with the progress, and happy with how they feel about it. Which, this is something for me, it makes sense, technology-wise: now you are learning more about your patient and how they are feeling.
If they are NOT happy, you look at the treatment and say ‘it’s going great, this patient should feel great!’ -then you can intervene and ask them why they aren’t happy. And you can stop a problem before it really occurs on a mass scale versus just waiting for the problem to hit your doorsteps, like your patients leaving a Google review when it’s all said and done, saying they aren’t happy.”