It has been an interesting couple of weeks when it comes to Six-Month Braces and Short-Term Ortho in general in our office……
We had planned to attend InvisAlign certification in Raleigh on June 12th so we could start offering this service to our patients. Personally, I’m not that big a fan of those clear aligners at all, because they cost more (we have to pay a hefty lab fee, which is why your fee is higher than for brackets), they don’t work in as many cases (quite a few limitations), and they take longer – ESPECIALLY if you lose 1 or more aligners and have to get some remade. However, so many people are interested, we figured…..why not? We can offer it for the situations in which it is a good option and offer the “invisible brackets” for everyone else.
BUT THEN….
On June 1st, Align Technologies (the company that actually runs the operation) sent an email to all of it’s providers in conjunction with a Press Release to the public with some major news. Since we had just signed up, we weren’t even on the list of people who received the emails, so fortunately I found out about this through an online forum for dentists, and oooooooh boy, looks like they stepped in it this time!
Here is the link to the Press Release: InvisAlign Makes a Huge Mistake in Doctor Relations! (BTW – that’s not what they call it, it’s just what most of us dentists think)
Simply put, by the end of this year, an enormous percentage of dentists will allegedly no longer be “qualified” to offer InvisAlign to their patients simply because they don’t do 10 cases per year. Heck, even Board-certified Orthodontists who don’t do 10 cases per year won’t be “qualified” according to Align Technology. What a CROCK! An Orthodontist wouldn’t be “qualified?” And what about the dentists who have done 5-9 cases per year for 5-6 years – are they suddenly “unqualified” too? If all of those doctors have been qualified for all these years, what makes them suddenly “unqualified?” It’s not like quantity automatically equals quality.
Let’s see…..last year we did a total of about 15 cases of Six-Month Braces. Only 4 of them would have been good candidates for Invisalign – if that many. This year, with the current economy, we’ve only started 4 cases total. So do I think it likely I’d be doing 10 cases by the end of this year? Hardly – unless I tried to “push” it on my patients, even if they weren’t good candidates. That’s not my style though; my patients trust me to make the best decision for them, not just spout the company line to get a minimum number of cases.
Here’s the worst part of it, though: did Invisalign actually inform me of this new requirement when I signed up for the course or even bother calling me after they sent out the Press Release? NOOOOOOOOOOO! Does that sound ethical to you? To take someone’s money and then tell them afterwards that I might not even be able to offer the service in 6 months? Oh boy, they got me hot under the collar with that kind of attitude and disdain for one of their potential long-term providers. Through professional online forums, I know that many dentists who took the certification course recently are extremely upset, too, and there is talk of a class-action lawsuit for breach of contract.
Needless to say, I am only 1 of MANY dentists who has cancelled our “certification” course reservations, who are calling for refunds of our money, and who have decided, “Hey, there are other options to InvisAlign for my patients, and they’re less expensive and work better, too!”
More on the newest and most exciting option that we’ll be offering will be coming soon!
