When parents first hear about DentalMonitoring, the most common reaction is some version of “that sounds great in theory, but what does it actually look like in real life?”
Fair question. Most orthodontic marketing tends to lean on the technology and skip past the part that matters most to a family. What does this mean for our actual week? How much time does it take? What do I have to do as a parent? When does my kid have to come into the office?
I want to walk you through what the DentalMonitoring experience actually looks like. Not in the abstract, but in the actual rhythm of a week. This is what your family’s experience would feel like if your child were in active treatment with us.
A short setup before we start. DentalMonitoring is an FDA approved, AI powered remote monitoring system. Patients use a small phone mounted device called a ScanBox to capture short scans of their teeth at home. The scans upload automatically. The AI flags anything worth my attention. I review every scan personally. That’s the framework. Now let’s talk about what this looks like on a Tuesday in your kitchen.
The Scan Itself
Your child will scan once a week. We typically build the schedule around whatever evening fits your family best. For some families it’s Sunday before the week gets going. For others it’s Friday after dinner. The point is that it’s predictable and built into your routine, not something that hijacks your calendar.
When it’s time to scan, your child opens the DentalMonitoring app on their phone, slides the phone into the ScanBox, and uses the cheek retractors that came in their kit. The app walks them through it. They bite into the retractors, the app guides them through a sequence of angles, and they tap to capture each one.
The whole thing takes about 60 seconds.
It is not glamorous. It does not require a parent to be involved. Teen patients generally do their scans on their own. Younger patients sometimes want a parent nearby for the first couple of weeks, and after that they’re typically independent.
When the scan is finished, your child taps to upload. That’s it. They put their phone down and go back to their evening.
What Happens After Upload
This is the part most parents don’t see.
Once the scan uploads, the DentalMonitoring AI processes it. It’s looking for a specific set of things. Are the teeth moving the way we expect? Are the aligners fitting correctly? Is there a wire poke, a loose bracket, a sign of inflammation? Has anything changed since last week that I should look at?
The AI flags whatever is worth attention. It does not make clinical decisions. It surfaces what needs to be reviewed and routes the scan to me.
I review every scan personally. This is built into my clinical workflow the same way that traditional in-office visits used to be. I block dedicated time for scan reviews, sit down with the data, and work through each patient case. When I’m reviewing your child’s scan, I’m seeing the same information I would see if they were sitting in my chair, just delivered to me through the app instead.
The review typically happens within a day of the scan being uploaded. On a normal week, the result is a confirmation that everything looks right and that we’ll see them again next week. That confirmation comes through the app as a short note. Your child sees it. You can see it too if you’re connected to their account.
When Something Comes Up
This is the part of the rhythm that matters most.
On most weeks, nothing unusual happens. Your child scans, I review, we confirm progress, your week keeps going. That’s the baseline.
When something does come up, the workflow changes immediately. If I see a bracket that’s loose, an aligner that isn’t tracking, a wire that’s poking, or anything else that needs attention, I send a message through the app. Sometimes that message is a quick fix you can handle at home. Sometimes it’s an instruction to call the office and schedule a visit.
If it’s something that requires in-office care, we get you in. The whole reason our schedule has room for clinical needs is that we aren’t filling our days with routine checkups that didn’t actually need to happen. When your child needs to be seen, the calendar can accommodate it.
You also have a direct line to our team if something feels off between scans. If your child says their wire is poking on a Wednesday and their next scan is on Sunday, you don’t have to wait. Message us, send a quick photo, or call the office. We’ll respond.
The point of DentalMonitoring isn’t to replace human contact. It’s to make the human contact happen when it matters.
What’s Happening on Our End
While your week is going on, here’s what’s happening on our end during the same window.
Our team is reviewing scans daily. I personally review every patient in our practice. When I see something noteworthy, I flag it, document it in your child’s chart, and either send a message through the app or have my team reach out directly.
We’re tracking patterns over time. One scan tells us what’s happening this week. A series of scans tells us how the treatment is progressing, whether the original plan still fits the case, and whether we need to make adjustments before the next in-office visit. By the time your child does come in, I already know what we need to do.
That changes the in-office visit itself. When your child comes in, we aren’t catching up on the last four weeks of unknowns. We’re executing a specific plan that we already know is needed. The visits get shorter, more focused, and more productive.
What This Looks Like Over a Course of Treatment
Zoom out from any single week and the pattern becomes clearer.
A typical orthodontic case at our practice lasts somewhere between 12 and 24 months depending on what we’re addressing. Over that window, your child will scan dozens of times. Each scan is about a minute of their time. Each one gives me a current data point about their case.
Across that same window, the number of in-office visits is roughly half of what a traditional schedule would require. Your child still gets the same outcome. You still get the same close monitoring. But you don’t lose hundreds of hours of family time to appointments that exist only because the calendar said so.
This is what we mean when we say we built our practice around busy families. The technology isn’t really the differentiator. The difference is that we redesigned the entire clinical workflow around the recognition that your time matters too.
The Question Most Parents Eventually Ask
After a few months in treatment, parents often end up asking some version of this question. “What did people do before this?”
The honest answer is that they made it work, but it cost them more time than it should have. They took off work. They missed games. They sat in waiting rooms for appointments that were genuinely necessary in the moment but that could have been spaced more thoughtfully if the technology had existed to support better timing.
The technology exists now. It’s working. It’s how we treat the vast majority of our patients at Varble Orthodontics, and it’s part of the reason families across Creve Coeur, St. Peters, and the wider St. Louis area can fit treatment into a life that already has too much in it.
What This Could Look Like for Your Family
If reading through this week has made you think differently about whether orthodontic treatment fits your family’s reality, that’s the right reaction.
Your free VO Smile Assessment is the place to start. It includes a full 3D scan of your child’s teeth, a custom treatment plan I’ll design personally, and a clear walkthrough of what their actual week would look like if we moved forward. If DentalMonitoring is right for the case, we’ll show you exactly how it would work in your specific situation.
Book your VO Smile Assessment at our Creve Coeur or St. Peters office. We’d love to meet your family.
