Kristin Hohman serves as Associate Editor for DPR. 

Kristin Hohman

 Turnkey Dental Sleep Program/Aligner Sleep Appliance

 Any practice wishing to expand offered services to the arena of sleep diagnostics and treating snoring and sleep apnea.

 Delivering care to the under-served sleep-deprived population.

 Roughly 70 million Americans suffer from sleep-related issues, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have labeled sleep disorders has a national health epidemic. Despite decades of research, sleep disorders often go undiagnosed and untreated. A large part of this is because the health care community remains uneducated and uninformed about sleep issues. Sleep disorders affect people across a wide range of demographics. Some sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, can be life-threatening and require immediate treatment. 

Since deep sleep rebuilds our body’s immune system, helping patients sleep well is more important now than ever before.

The majority of sleep-related conditions are connected to breathing problems and issues related to the oral cavity, putting dentists well-trained in sleep medicine in a unique position to evaluate, treat, and manage these patients. The SleepArchiTx Certified Provider System provides a turnkey solution, including the expertise of board-certified sleep physicians, experienced sleep diagnosticians and treatment planners, social media marketing, and a portfolio of sleep appliances and billing services. SleepArchiTx offers comprehensive education for both the administrative and clinical teams. Sleep specialists provide interpretation and diagnosis, as well as treatment recommendations for oral appliance therapy (OAT). Most importantly, SleepArchiTx provides ongoing support to truly implement dental sleep medicine in your practice, as well as social media marketing tools and patient education videos to drive case acceptance. 

SleepArchiTx also offers a wide range of innovative appliances, including the Aligner Sleep Appliance® (ASA). ASA is an FDA-cleared and patented solution that, when combined with clear aligners, enables clinicians to simultaneously straighten teeth, fix bite and occlusion problems, and address patients’ sleep disorders. It is customized to fit each patient type in Class I, Class II, and Class III cases. Said to be the only commercially available sleep appliance that can fit over existing clear aligners, ASA offers 8mm of mandibular advancement repositioning the lower jaw to create maximum reduction of soft tissue obstructions in the oropharynx.

Articles

An introduction to this turnkey sleep program and aligner sleep appliance.

5Ws* SleepArchiTx

Tell us a bit about you and your practice.

 I graduated in 1999 from the School of Dentistry at Oregon Health and Sciences University. I was in the military for 4 years and then I came back and join my dad's practice in McMinnville, Oregon and I’ve been here since 2003.

 How did you first learn about SleepArchiTx?

Actually, I was kind of interested in [sleep medicine] for myself. I was having trouble sleeping and so I’d gotten tested independently and I had a low enough number that they wouldn't recommend anything for me but and I did try a CPAP, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, I don't think I'd ever be able to use a CPAP, I move too much when I sleep.’ So, I started looking at sleep appliances.

I learned about SleepArchiTx through an Invisalign course with Dr. [Payam] Ataii, and he talked about how he incorporated SleepArchiTx into his Invisalign treatment. I had been interested in doing some more sleep stuff and I read some articles on it. So, that's what prompted me to first start looking into it.

What made you start using SleepArchiTx in your practice?

 I liked how they worked with Invisalign and I liked that people can be wearing their Invisalign retainers and still be able to wear the SleepArchiTx appliances. So, that was a big reason. And I'd worked with Dr. Ataii, and I liked him and trusted him and he's a good mentor. That's kind of how I got started with it.

What has it been like using SleepArchiTx?

 It took us a little bit of time to get used to the system, but now that we have the different steps down it, it flows pretty well. And patients seem to appreciate it. I don't always recommend something to patients, but sometimes they'll then talk to their physician about it first. It’s nice to know that even if they don't use the product that we're talking about, that we can actually be changing lives.

 How has using SleepArchiTx benefited your practice and your patients?

 I would say it's been very positive. Just like any other treatment, it hasn't worked for every single one of our patients. But it's definitely helped every single one of our patients. Some people did end up going with a CPAP afterward. But again, I feel like we help them out anyway, as far as to start talking about sleep helping their overall health.

It prompted us to start screening every patient, so we do screen all of our patients for sleep now. So we have an opportunity to talk to them all about sleep issues and what is going on in their lives, especially now with COVID. And the issues with CPAPs and COVID—it's been nice to be able to give them another option and be able to talk to them about it.

Dr. Amy Wark, owner of Wark Dental Group in McMinnville, Oregon, shares her experience with SleepArchiTx, which recently won a Cellerant Best of Class Technology Award.

BOC Winners in Practice: SleepArchiTx

Dr. Jonathan Penchas of Midtown Dentistry in Houston, Texas describes his experience using XVWeb from Apteryx Imaging.

Tell us a bit about yourself and your practice.

 I'm a specialist prosthodontist and I’ve been practicing for 29 years. I own a group of five practices called Midtown Dentistry in the Houston area. We have six doctors working, and they're located within a radius of 150 miles from each other. We do all types of dentistry.

 How did you learn about XVWeb from Apteryx?

 I’ve been using XVWeb for about 5 years. Over the years, we needed a software system where we could discuss X-rays between the doctors, refer to specialists, and do it in an economical way and do it in a safe way. So, in an encrypted way that’s safe, but that instantaneously we could read X-rays or have other specialists read them for us.

Before, we were using a closed system, which meant, if we moved to different software, different electronic medical records, there were always fees and technical difficulties with moving from one system to the next. And it wasn't as cloud-based as this is. Apteryx has been the leader, they were probably the first in the U.S. market in X-rays that are cloud-based.

We needed all the things that XVWeb could do. The competitors were just starting into it and they were putting roadblocks, meaning they were not software agnostic. This was truly the only open system, where we could use it, and use any dental medical records we wanted.

What has your experience using XVWeb, and how has it been most useful to your practice?

 They've added even more and more features that allow us many workflows that are beneficial to our clients and to us, both on the dental side, and also financially for efficiency and cost control. On the dental side, we're able to email and communicate with our specialists and doctors between the offices so my associates can, after taking an X-ray, immediately send that to me, not just an X-ray but also a panoramic and a CT scan. That's a relatively new development, but we can now view CT scans, and we can view them from anywhere in the world with the software that's enclosed in XVWeb.

 How has using XVWeb benefited your practice and your patients?

A great benefit is that you can access images from any internet-connected device—any connected tablet, cell phone, etc.

But, it's also very efficient. My insurance group sits in a different building and they can pull up all these X-rays. So, you can see all of the workflows of a Business Insurance Group, accounting, etc. We can email encrypted images without having to download it, and then load it to email and make sure it's encrypted. We can put a password on the file so I can send it to a doctor's office but only the doctor can see it with a password. So, it's very work-efficient and fast, and yet still OSHA protected, HIPAA protected and legal all built into this one platform.

For our patients, having a medical record that has everything in one place is very beneficial. They can go from office to office and they're not holding the X-rays in their hands and another clinician isn’t having to re-take images. XVWeb images come as a DICOM file. So basically, any dental professional can open these files with whatever software they're using, and they can see the X-ray.

Dr. Jonathan Penchas discusses why his practice chose XVWeb from Apteryx Imaging, which is one of 2020's Cellerant Best of Class Technology award winners.

BOC Winners in Practice: Apteryx Imaging's XVWeb

 XVWeb can be used to access, enhance, and optimize clinical images from anywhere with internet access— inside the practice, at home, or on the road.

Images are available through XVWeb 24/7 via computers, tablets, and smartphones. Even without an internet connection, this software can be used to acquire images and store them locally, syncing with XVWeb once internet is restored.

 XVWeb is a cloud-based dental imaging software suitable for practices of all sizes. It includes image hosting, storage, data backup, support, and updates. Clinicians can review and plan treatments from any location on any device with internet access. XVWeb 3D includes an online image portal where referring doctors can securely log-in and view images you choose via the web, allowing for efficient case collaboration. This is open-architecture software, which allows clinicians to integrate XVWeb seamlessly into most practice management systems.

XVWeb 3D is hosted in a secure Microsoft Azure data center, which ensures a high level of security and HIPAA compliance. Collaboration is safe and secure. And in addition, data backup, hosting, and security are all included, reducing the practice’s dependency on onsite services and saving money on IT expenses.


XVWeb integrates with most practice management software—from the practice management dashboard, the patient record is available in XVWeb in one click. The software works with most types of radiographs, including full mouth series, bitewing series, intraoral/extraoral camera images, pans, and Ceph X-rays.

Once a patient record is launched, XVWeb offers a variety of tools that can enhance your experience, such as the enhancement tool, which can be applied to a single image or a series of images. The enhancement tool can be used with specific sensor brands or it can be customized to create your own filters. A spot enhancement tool provides an exaggerated density filter and images can be compared side-by-side.

An introduction to this cloud-based imaging software available on any device at any time.

Author | Kristin Hohman

Articles

5Ws* SleepArchiTx

BOC Winners in Practice: SleepArchiTx

BOC Winners in Practice: Apteryx Imaging's XVWeb

5Ws* Apteryx Imaging's XVWeb