E1.11 | Scaling Your Practice with Digital Custom Braces
Brandon compares and contrasts traditional braces to digital custom braces, explains the ways custom braces can help differentiate your practice from others, and offers suggestions for integrating custom brackets into your practice without any drastic changes to your current processes.
Featured Guest
Dr. Brandon Owen | President & Founder, KLOwen Braces
Website
Focus
There’s no denying the fact that life has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Regular trips outside the house, which used to seem trivial, now feel like a major event. Orthodontic visits are no exception, and despite the clean atmosphere of a medical office, patients understand making the trip is a calculated risk.
While many orthodontic practices focused on advertising their facilities, the expertise of their staff, and the benefits of getting braces in the past, reducing the need for in-person visits now takes priority, even on the other side of this pandemic. KLOwen braces are a great solution to add to your lineup of treatment options, offering both the selling point of enhanced personalization and a reduced need for in-person visits.
Key Takeaways
- Understand how custom braces are more effective than traditional ones
- Learn how to use a digital process for braces
- Discover how digital checkups and consultations can add efficiency to your practice
Transcription
Richie Guerzon: Hey everyone. Today we have a special guest, Dr. Brandon Owen. Dr. Owen is an OBO certified orthodontist and the president and founder of KLOwen Braces. He is a first-ever winner of the AAO orthoinnovator award, and an active member of the Midwest angle Society. He was offered the lead in digital braces development for three of the four largest orthodontic bracket companies before signing with GAC Dent Supply as their lead consultant for digital and lingual Orthodontics. Brandon was the first orthodontist in North America to do in office digital indirect bonding, and the first dentist in North America to do a cad cam 3D printed Night Guard. We’re excited he's with us. Welcome to the show.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Thanks a lot. And thanks for having me.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah, absolutely. So, Brandon why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Dr. Brandon Owen: I grew up in Montana. So one of the smaller population states in the country and ended up finding my way up to Minnesota for both dental school and residency. And Montana is very isolated. So I hated having to drive 10 hours per concert or to go see a sports game. Great Falls where I grew up is the farthest city from any major city in the entire country.
Richie Guerzon: Oh wow, I’ll be Googling that later.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Seattle was like 13 or 14 (hours away), Minnesota, Minneapolis was 14. You're literally like we're in this abyss of no metropolis for a long, long way.
Richie Guerzon: Do a lot of people own planes? It sounds like you have a plane.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah, my dad got a pilot's license. And my brother actually is an F-22 pilot or used to be. Now he's some top-secret- I can't hear anything about what he does. Yeah, it is definitely something big in our family, but after going to Minnesota in Minneapolis, we were like, well, we love having the big city amenities. My wife's from Alaska, we'd miss the mountains. Colorado is just kind of that optimal fit and we're up in Fort Collins. We've been here since 2006. We have- we had three kids. We lost our oldest son back in 2011. After that, I actually developed a lung disease sarcoid. And so because that I have to use oxygen now when I exercise here in Colorado. The elevation is really tough for me. The cold weather really affects my breathing. So actually I sold the practice back in August. So I sold KLOwen for full time for the last nine, ten months and we're- this July in the midst of this whole kind of chaotic virus outbreak were transferring down to Texas. So we'll be right outside Austin, Texas and (?). So we're really excited. Lots of major life changes, selling a practice, getting ready to start a new practice. Yeah, and so, you know, as I said, as you kind of mentioned, I had this great idea for additional custom braces solution. 3M, American, in GAC densify all had interest in it. I ended up being a consultant for Densify for a while. Yeah, and when they went through in a bit, they went through a general manager turnover, which when the general manager leaves the whole corporate Suite tends to follow and yeah, of course they said we’re going to table your project for the next two years plus and I said, not a good idea with digital. So yeah. Anyway, I went off on my own. I found some great partnerships, manufacturers, and software companies Partnerships with 3D printing companies. So I was able to kind of bring all these small components together and really deliver something pretty cool and unique.
Richie Guerzon: So what, does the name have any significance?
Dr. Brandon Owen: Okay. Oh, yeah. So our son who passed away. His name is Keller Logan Owen. So KL is in memory of him. So perfect pretty cool to put something positive behind something that wasn't so positive.
Richie Guerzon: Absolutely. So why did you really decide to start this new brand?
Dr. Brandon Owen: Well, I would have loved to have taken the route of you know, letting one of the big companies take the development down, you know by the by the horn and just been able to get a royalty, and help them grow the brand as kind of an evangelist. You know, it's just the companies- unfortunately, they really want now if you're like a norm, a 3M, or an American. They want proof of concept beyond proof of concept. We actually want proof of business. They want to see what is going to invest a lot of money in something like a bracket system. It seems like right now they really are just wanting to see this works, and then it's more of an acquisition type of a thing. So they offering me contracts but it was just a bismal like what the compensation structure was. Yeah, they're projecting in revenues and my percentage of that was like- anyway, so ended up being something I wish it would have worked out that way, but in retrospect getting to go through this and have control over the process, and it's been awesome, I’ve really enjoyed it.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah as an entrepreneur, I like that control aspect of things. Gonna steer the ship the way you want to. Totally appreciate that. So what was it like getting this AAO award, the innovator award?
Dr. Brandon Owen: It is awesome and amazing. I was actually over at the international Dental Symposium in Germany at the time, and it was a rainy day. I was supposed to be out seeing the sights because it was my one free day. And instead it was raining. So I was like, you know, I gotta buckle down and get this this application submitted. It was getting to be the deadline. And it took me eight hours because I had an iPad and my iPhone, I didn't have a computer or anything. I recorded like this 30-minute webinar to submit as an application, but it didn't record the sound the first time on the iPad. So then I had to I had to time my speech with the slide transition. So it took- anyway, so I was like, I'm never going to win this thing. I can't believe why did I waste a day in Germany doing this stupid application and then you know as I was flabbergasted, there's so many cool companies right now. So many new innovations coming out right now. So it was a huge honor and it was great too because my mentor Rick Larson who taught me at the University of Minnesota. I changed my practice the way I practice orthodontics more than any other person was it was the president of the AAO so it was really cool to be able to get to receive the award for him to kind of bring things full circle.
Richie Guerzon: All right, so tell us now that we've done this innovation, can you compare custom bracelets from traditional braces if someone out there isn't really sure what the difference is.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Oh, for sure. And so, you know, the really crazy thing to me is we've actually had custom research for quite a while. Some of the execution maybe wasn't as on point as it could have been, and so never really got that broad adoption. But also if you think about custom braces and custom anything is it tends to be really expensive and it tends to take a long time to make and so if you look at traditional braces, you can grab them off the shelf and we put the same set of braces on every person that walks to the front porch. And yeah and the downside to that is people aren't the same and even within the same person, the primo on the right side is often not the same shape and size of the primo on the left side. So even within the same patient you got variation.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah, there's not perfect symmetry there.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Not at all. And so we put this one-size-fits-all braces set on people, and then we as doctors and up spending one to two hours over a course of 12 to 14 months making it custom by putting bends in the wire or doing bracket repositioning the labor. The lift of that is immense, right? All of the doctor time is focused on making the non custom solution custom via ending and reposition. That's where 60% of my day, when we did the time the studies was doing manipulation of a non custom solution for the patient to make it somehow. And for all the orthodontists out there, I mean if you ask them how many if you had an all Invisalign practice how many more patients could you start per year in all Invisalign practice versus an all fixed Appliance back? It's probably three or four racks at least right? And so people are willing to spend eighteen hundred dollars a case or you know, if you’re a platinum, diamond, elite or whatever the new terms are. Whether maybe $1,300 for those cases because of the casting the scale and because the customization and the digitization makes their outcomes good, it makes their efficiencies fantastic, and you get to delegate everything. So I like to kind of compare what's happened with custom braces versus traditional braces is, if you think about where we have custom braces today, it would be like walking into a shoe store and the shoe person say I'm going to measure your foot and every dimension, and in six weeks, we'll have a perfect pair of shoes for you. It's going to cost you a thousand bucks. It's going to take a month and a half to get it back. In the shoe world, that doesn't exist that business model is not something that offers the best, reasonable value for you, not a price, right? And then on the other end of the spectrum if you think about conventional braces, it's like walking into a shoe store that said hey, we only have size 20 shoes. We're just going to pack it full of foam and you're going to walk out today with an ill-fitting shoe. And so when you look at like big industry, you've got really smart engineers that optimally figure out how can we offer the best fit with the highest value for the lowest price point? And so, I was looking at all these custom braces solutions and using all these custom region solutions like Insignia, and Incognito, and Harmony, lingual, Liberty, and all these other ones that it was just fun for me to get to see them. But I was also looking at what they were doing in terms of a profitability structure and every digital custom braces system to date has lost one. It's very difficult because you have to do- you price the scale. Yes you price for- you might make $50 on a case or $80 on a case. But you're selling it for $1,000 into your margin is only 10%. So I just felt nobody's hit the right recipe. And again, it's that cobbler that was measuring the foot. Is how do you make something custom without having it be so time-intensive, meaning six week turnaround, and without being so expensive and that's when I came up with the idea of a modular custom solution. What if you had enough half sizes and iterations you could fill in the gap and offer a hundred percent customization with a Lego kit. And so with the leg of can 27 pieces, you can move the teeth digitally anywhere in three dimensional space. The software the orthoselect software, you click a button and in a matter of 30 seconds, it'll pick the custom prescription for the patient. So in the last one or two degrees, the last tenths of millimeters were always less than a quarter millimeter between the tooth surface and the bracket surface with our Lego kit. Yeah, we don't have to worry about bond strength issues. We have a very thin layer of composite but we build in the last one or two degrees within that composite base to just like when we add Invisalign attachments to the teeth. You can see the contour of the tooth so, you know, okay, I need to add a little bit more composite here. So when I see that on and actually set the glue, it's actually building in the last couple degrees the last ten for the millimeter’s prescription.
Richie Guerzon: So are you talking about indirect bonding, is that how yours works?
Dr. Brandon Owen: So Jason Code really led the charge here, but so I can't take credit for it. But I really love that he said it's not really indirect bonding because we're not doing a brace to a model first. The only time we bond is directly to the patient's tooth. So digitally guided bonding is the terminology that he's really kind of crafted, and I like that so much more. I think with indirect running the issues that I always had because I did- that was my whole practice system has been direct bonding and I rolled with that. I had never done direct bonding in my clinical practice. But the issue we always had is okay, you gotta build composite and then you got a flowable composite liner. Hopefully you got that surface cleaned off when you had the separator pulled away from the model, and now I've got a weaker adhesive layer between the filled composite and now the tooth, so we have another breakage potential of course, but for me getting a filled composite layer, straight from the bracket all the way to the tooth’s surface. It's a way better solution. So so no, it's not indirect bonding, it's digitally guided bombing. But essentially it's indirect on its way you put the braces on the teeth at the bonding appointment is very similar to what you would do with a direct bonding.
Richie Guerzon: So what are the other options for custom braces? How would you compare and contrast?
Dr. Brandon Owen: There's so many awesome options now, so Insignia came out decades ago, and it's amazing with the technology that existed back then, that they were able to do this at all. Some of the problems that I had when I was using Insignia where the IDB trays rocked a little bit, and so if you're doing a custom brace solution and you can't get the braces exactly where they belong, you know, it's not ideal. I think they've made their brace a lot better over the years. They went from this little like milled styrofoam into it, to now 3D printed hard plastic. Another thing that I had problems with Insignia, and they rectified these as well, is they used to use a 1925 wire in the bracket, which is like a 2329. And so even though the software would try and create from one tooth to the next, what the couple should be, it never got it perfect because as soon as we start wearing elastics the forces that we apply to the teeth throughout orthodontic treatment are unpredictable, so a computer wasn't smart enough to know so really when it comes to digital braces, I think what we finally have learned is you’ve got to fill the slot. You got to put in a big wire that totally engages that bracket. So you actually deliver on the setup that you've done right? You’re taking time to give a digital set up, you’re taking time to do a custom prescription, you’re taking time to be in direct bonding or digitally guided bonding, and get the brackets right where they belong. You need to let the wires actually fill the slots of the teeth, so the teeth go where we want them to go.
Richie Guerzon: Okay, so when you say digital, tell me all the reasons it's digital. What are the digital components of this process?
Dr. Brandon Owen: So digital input so you scan instead of taking an impression. So we start with that, and then you incorporate that file into a software Orthoselect right now is our first partner, but we will eventually have other software Partners so you can use KLOwen braces with potentially with like youlab, sure style, or three shape, or on except- so there's a whole bunch out there that would be able to include our brackets and their software to offer a customized solution. And then within that, you do digital cleanup, you segment the teeth digitally, you do it digital ideal setup. And then once the doctor can go in and you can actually move the teeth, you don't have to text us back and say, “rotate,” you can actually use the doctor go into the software and manipulate the teeth however you want. And once you're happy with the bite you can actually click a button, and in about 30 seconds is automatically going to calculate the best bracket for each tooth. So it’s actually calculating the least volume between the bracket base surface, and the tooth service. So in 30 seconds, we generate a custom prescription for that patient based on the doctor’s setup. From there, we do a 3D printed tray. So we're not printing model, we directly print the tray, and then everything is color-coded with our system. So the software prescription will spit out a form that you can print in the patient's chart, or where you can just print it out in your lab and it basically will just tell you what the Red Bracket and the upper right seven and blue bracket in the upper right six.
Richie Guerzon: So you’re really trying to error-proof the process as well as make it really efficient.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And there's other companies out there like, Light Force, is a newer company that their 3D printing a bracket on a ceramic. Alfred Griffin is a great guy. He's the CEO and founder of that. They’re filling the slot. I think they're doing everything right as well, and it's great to have a ceramic option to the compliments are metal brace option. John Van was embraced didn't have a custom bracket, but they're doing some custom that wires that really allow lingual treatment to sing much more efficiently and easily than I was able to make it happen with any of the other systems which were very labor-intensive from the staff side. And Ensure Smile is a wire bending company that you can still use your stock brackets and then you usually cycle through your first two or three wires, and then you order the customization. So it's pretty neat that we have lots of options down to customize treatment, while reducing the doctor touch points. That's the big thing is, if we can if we can reduce office visits, we can reduce the time in the chair, if we can reduce- the big one is doctor’s time because it’ll help our practices so much more right?
Richie Guerzon: And so these are some of the main benefits of custom braces from a doctor's perspective.
Dr. Brandon Owen: It's doctors saving time is number one. I would say because that's why people are willing to pay so much for Invisalign, is we can see more patients. It'll help us scale a practice without having to bring on more staff who associate doctor adding more Clinic days. None of us want to do those things as we get to like that that tipping point where like, wow. I am growing. We got demand for our services, and now I've got- do I hire more team members, do I earn more, do we add more clinic days, Do we bring on an associate? But with digital custom you can expand your capacity 2x, 3x without having to do any of those things. Which for me, and for most people I talk to HR issues HR management of a big dental team is a challenge. So being able to do more with less I think is probably the biggest saving grace. The other one I really think of is product- cut practice differentiation. Is what we've seen in our practices that have been using us now for the last six, seven months is their conversion rates have gone up because when they promote hey, we do custom races. Everybody else is using technology back from the era of VCRs and rotary telephones. That's where braces are, the last real breakthroughs in technology are from the era of the rotary telephone, maps, you know, looking driving down the road and having to use a map to navigate where you're going.
Richie Guerzon: I didn't realize that, I thought it is more recent than that. Okay.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah, so you think about though- what technology is if I saw a rotary telephone today? I'd be like did I really just see that? It’s so antiquated. That's the level of technology we're using right now in braces for our standard, is really the Andrews bracket prescription and the nickel titanium wire. That was the last big breakthrough, but the cool thing about that breakthrough, is it allowed us orthodontists to double our capacity almost overnight. Yeah, so they call the 1980s the Golden Age of Orthodontics because of nickel titanium wires and bracket prescription. We went from being able to see 20 patients a day where we had to do all these crazy wire bending mechanics. Yeah an hour to shape some of these wires, to all of a sudden, “Hey, we don't have to put nearly as many bends in the wire,” so the results got better almost instantly because we could start focusing on the minor details earlier in the process. The revenues went up like crazy. And so the early adopters of that bracket prescription really were the winners. They got to say, hey, we are the first ones using a bracket prescription, less pain for the patient, less time and treatment, better results, and that those guys really sung and in the long run, it really drops the price of Orthodontics. So that technologic inflection really allowed us to treat cases, you know, think of the early 80s, a set of braces was about $4,000. You buy a car, and so if you kind of translate just inflationary cost with that $4,000 price from early 1980s. It would be like a 20 or $30,000 set of braces, but because of the time restriction because of wires that have shape memory, we are able to address much more of the population and I think digital is going to have that same effect. I think the early adopters you're going to seize the new golden age of Orthodontics. People are going to kill it. We’ve already seen offices, you know, one of our mutual customers Laura Milnor in Fort Collins has explosive growth because she did the share a chair, and really made the commitment to digital.
Richie Guerzon: Oh, absolutely. I do her metrics every month enough that chart looks phenomenal.
Dr. Brandon Owen: It's amazing fun for us to know. You know, we always thought that we can really optimize businesses for the practices that were choosing to partner with us to actually see it happening, and happening well beyond our expectations across the board. So we think this is an awesome time to be an orthodontist. I would say get ready for the next Golden Age if you're willing to embrace new technology and use it well. I think you're going to see better revenues, better future for the specialty. And then the cool thing in the long run is this going to help us compete against the smile direct? I mean what if you know 10 years from now, or 20 years from now instead of being $5,500, you know with inflation going up to sixty five, or seventy five hundred dollars. What if it was still $5,500 10 years from now because we were able to see more patients help more people without sacrificing the outcomes at all, and I think that's a big thing is for me, this isn't a shortcut. It's making outcomes better, while being more efficient. It's not either/or.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah so the outcomes are better using the custom bracing system.
Dr. Brandon Owen: So across the board, if you look at studies on Sure Smile, if you look at incognito studies and Insignia studies, they tend to show anywhere from 25% to 40% reduction in treatment time, and reduction in visits, and they all across the board have anywhere from 10 to 30 percent ABO score improvement using this.
Richie Guerzon: And so what are the main benefits from the customers point of view because these are things that, as a marketing guy, these are differentiators I could put in an ad, I can put in the copy, I can put on the website.
Dr. Brandon Owen: For sure, so the three big ones are reduced time and treatment. Even if you ask an orthodontist what question they feel more than any other in the week, 10x right, ten times more than any other question is when am I getting these braces off. You know, if you can say, “hey, I can reduce your treatment even by two or three months,” and you know, we're working on the metrics for our system to show what those things will be. Yeah, but we know it'll be at least as efficient as what they were showing with the Sure Smile and Insignia studies based on early progress photographs that have been coming in. So less time in treatment.
Richie Guerzon: That's a huge differentiator in treatment.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Another big one is convenience. Less time in my office, fewer office visits. You know, if you think about what's involved from a parent at the you know, two household income, two working parent family to come to an orthodontic adjustment. They've got to leave the office, drive 20 minutes to the school. They get to the school. They got to wait 10 minutes for the principal in the principal's office. We begin to get down to the front desk and you drive across to the orthodontist office you sit there for 40 minutes while the wires are bent, get back in the car, drive back to the school, back to the back to you know, it's a two or three-hour block of time, and what if we could cut off those visits? What if we could be more of that on demand, you know such an on demand consumer society right now. That the more I think we can help lighten the load there. So fewer appointments, less time bracing. The last one is really less pain and inflammation if we are moving A to Z with a custom solution. You only really feel soreness. The pain cascade really only kicks in the first couple days that you start moving that tooth, as long as you continue down the same path. It's all of these course corrections that we do when we reposition braces and put bends in the arch wire to generate the new pain cascade. Exactly so, you know, I always like to tell patients with conventional braces. It's like I'm going from A to D, to K to L, to N to P. We’re ping-ponging all around with the tooth positions, and then finally after two and a half years, we got the tooth where I wanted after about two hours of me bending the wire to get that tooth there. But what if every tooth instead went in a laser focus for me to see. How much energy can I put in as the doctor, next to none right? It's how much time do I have to supervise an Invisalign patient? It’s a quick 30 second, “yep, things look great or something's off. Let's do a scan and do a mid-course correction,” but as a doctor, I'm not spending any time with that because of the customized approach. Invisalign is doing that optimal move for me, get the teeth straight for me to see, and so with wires and braces it’s even more efficient at moving teeth. Why don't we build in customization to that so we can really take advantage of the efficiency, and so it's a less pain. I mean you can say, “hey we aren't going to be moving your tooth nearly as far in June.”
Richie Guerzon: Yeah. I mean you just say less pain, you could talk about it in the office. That's a huge differentiator. Is the cost any different for the patient?
Dr. Brandon Owen: Most every office that we're seeing is (?), so they just charge, but whatever they would charge for their normal set of braces. The nice thing about you know, our platform is because we're an on-demand kind of modular custom. Our price point is about half of any of the other competitors, or even a fourth of some of them. So average case fee for us with most of our doctors that are using this as less than $400 with everything. The IDB set up, the software, the braces loaded ready to go. You can actually buy a 3D printer and start printing in your own office, and you can get the cost down to less than like three hundred and fifty dollars per case. And so, the differential between like conventional braces and KlOwen, you know, might be a hundred or two hundred dollars. And if you're using some premium brackets, and we actually have the same price, but if we save you one visit, I mean if you think of the overhead from a from a patient visit as you know, somewhere between a hundred and two hundred dollars every time a patient sits in your chair to pay for the X-ray machine, to pay for the lights, to pay for the staff member, to pay for the disposables. That's what it costs. You know PD most analyses somewhere between a hundred and two hundred dollars per visit so I can save you two office visits, KLOwen is paid for itself. Or Lightforce, or any of those, but if we can actually save you four or five visits now, actually you got higher net profit at the end. So you don’t even have to upcharge with us.
Richie Guerzon: Not to mention, if you have those type of differentiators, and from a marketing point of view, I'm going to be able to get you more braces customers because I have so much more ammunition, you know, sometimes I'm working with the client and I'm like, what are your differentiators and they tell me everything that everyone tells me. They don't actually have some so, you know, I have to play with that copy and play with that brand a little bit, and it's not as easy because people see through a lot of that stuff nowadays. You need to have legitimate things that differentiate you from other practices.
Dr. Brandon Owen: I totally agree, and the coolest thing, too about custom braces is patients and parents get it instantly, you know a self ligation. You're like, well these doors help us save blah blah, you know, there's this whole narrative that goes behind it. And at the end of the day, you don't even know if the patients actually believe you or not. We say, “hey, we're using custom races for your son and daughter which means we're moving the teeth straight from start to finish. We're going to spend less time in braces. We're going to get just as good, if not better results based on all the custom braces systems that have come before hand.” And you say that, and in about 20 seconds and parents are sold. So we've already seen conversion rates skyrocket when you get the shoppers going from our customers, you know, when you when you see it Shoppers conversion rates going up to ya know 80, 90 percent is because of the custom message, so you're totally right totally. I mean, why use something great, if you're not going to promote it?
Richie Guerzon: Absolutely, and it's nice that even though it's something new, explaining it to someone isn't difficult because often when there's a new advancement you have to tell the whole background story of what it is, and the customers don’t really understand the value. But if you're saying they're getting the value very quickly that's going to be that's going to make a huge difference on conversion.
Dr. Brandon Owen: And it was really interesting. I actually did a little study of patients and we presented like a clear bracket for the same price, the self ligating bracket for the same price, and custom braces for the same price for a solid week and you know, I say, “Whatever you want. The clear cool. You can have the colors. They don't break. They don't fall off as much because that's what three ends promoting with the clarity advanced as yeah your D bonds,” you know, you've got these brackets to help unravel the case faster because it's less friction. So we did the whole explanation. Nobody picked anything except for the custom option. Every single person did the custom option. They just get it. It's obvious, like in today's world of it’s custom. Yeah, that's what I want.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah, exactly you had- there's that word in general has great connotations about any type of product or service. So why do you think people have gotten so used to this one-size-fits-all idea? Why is it so acceptable?
Dr. Brandon Owen: You know, I think it probably was good cause. Number one, inertia is really challenging right? If you're in an office and you're seeing 50, 70, 100, 120 patients a day. And you’ve got the systems down. It's so challenging to say wow, you know, if you're super successful to sit back and say, “why would I need anything else? I'm making a great income my systems are so streamline now, there's no reason for me to change in adopting,” I’d say probably shouldn't if you've got you've got a well-oiled machine that's producing like crazy don't lock the system, you know at least initially, so I think that's one thing it's just we're all so busy. We all are so busy. Just getting through the day with patients that we don't have time to think about. Okay, what could I really do to help my practice to help Implement new things that will help drive us in the future?
Richie Guerzon: Right now everyone has time right?
Dr. Brandon Owen: So I think right now people are actually looking for, “how can I come out of this and actually make this experience for my practice be a positive thing two years from now.” Because of this shutdown, we brought in new technology because we took the time to do the training and implemented these things in our offices, we're doing this and if you actually looked where we just would have kept the other track we probably wouldn't be where we are today. And so I think there's going to be offices that come out from this much better off, and I think that's an exciting proposition. I know it's all gloom and doom right now, but there's opportunity here. I think there's-
Richie Guerzon: I totally agree and that's really been our overall message throughout this series. I mean we're talking about from a marketing point of view. But look at everything. This is the time to sweep out the dust out of those corners to put some light in dark places, really take a hard look at your practice. What are the things we can do to make it stronger and better? So when we come out of the gate, not only do our 2020 numbers that we stayed what we wanted them to be when we did the original forecast, but you know, 2021, 22, we're growing faster than we thought we ever would because the practice is a better practice.
Dr. Brandon Owen: I totally agree with that, totally agree with that. So do you have any kind of stories about the results of the system that you'd like to share significantly and it's been really fun because so we really launched back in September and so going back to the adoption is okay. We've had digital braces systems in the past that maybe haven't delivered a hundred percent. I mean mines down this is I still had to bend wire on every single one of my cases. Which is a little bit frustrating because I spent time on the computer doing the setup, and I spent a lot of money and so I think having proof in the pudding, I think orthodontists would become a little bit more cautious when somebody is making all these claims, and I think that's awesome. I don't think many of the claims that we see when we walk around the AAO trade show holds true whatsoever. I think in a good way, people are a little bit also standoffish. They want to see proof in terms of photographs in case progress. So I think that's the other big barriers. We really were based in- I did 13 different digital IDP Solutions, 13 different custom braces solutions over my career. Probably more than any other orthodontist alive. So I was able to take I think the highlights and the high points from the warnings that we use and leave out kind of the weaknesses. And so when we put this together, I knew we were going to have something that performed as well. If not better than any of the predecessors, but just because I knew in my heart and you know people shouldn't take my word for it. So it's been fun getting testimonials from our customers saying my practice is growing. I'm spending less time. I'm getting better results that ever seen before so those testimonials have been a lot of fun for us to be seeing these last couple months, and then getting a ton of or Advisory Board sending us pictures in. And so the best though for me was back in August, I flew out to the University of Detroit Mercy. And we bonded a couple cases with some of the residents, and I was asking the residents of how many cases, how many sets of braces have you put on? And they’re like, “this is our very first one,” and all that is good. So, you know, so I've been you know doing some consulting with them and they're office army is one of my good friends as are the (?) who were his predecessors there, but he came out and spoke at a digital braces Summit that I hosted and showed the case the two cases. I didn't even know he's going to show them, but he put up my slides and I'm like, oh my gosh, these slides look better than I could have done after two-and-a-half or three years of clinical practice. And these are first-year, first time bonding orthodontic residents doing getting results that most experienced clinicians couldn’t achieve, and so when I saw what we can do with a novice orthodontist using a custom braces solution, and where they can get in just 6 months is like this is this is massive. This is huge because what can I do for an orthodontist has been in practice for 10, or 20, or 30 years? I think absolutely it really elevates our game. And so that's-
Richie Guerzon: That's the value to customer wants to see, it happens faster, it doesn't it doesn't hurt as much. I mean, these are the things people really care about when you're getting braces.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah, and it was it was really neat too because you know as I was mentioning before inertia is a very challenging thing for us to overcome. I use this bracket system. I've used it for however many years. My team has all these systems in place with these systems, and the bracket system. And so when you go to a resident and you say “Hey, try this,” they don't have any of those free to preconceived notions and you know, when you when you kind of debrief some of the residents that we partnered with and you ask them, they're like, “oh my gosh, why wouldn't you do it this way,” right? From an external view it seems obvious right? It's kind of like I grew up skiing. I grew up snow skiing and in college, I was like, okay, maybe I'll pick up the snowboarding because everybody says snowboarding is easier to learn than skiing. But if you're already a good skier, like I've spent the whole day on my on my butt, like anything like this is terrible. I gave it one day and I was done, and so that's why right? Is if you have learned one or the other, you know, by all means you can kind of see this one is going to be an easier one, I like this more. But for the rest of us who have been rooted in the way we've done it and being a decent skier converting to something where you're terrible for a while. It's a tough thing. And so there definitely is a learning curve. I don't want to sugarcoat and say that this is something that we recommend that you can just plug in your practice and all of a sudden overnight, you're a hundred percent all in with no hiccups along the way.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah, so if someone was adopting this, you wouldn’t suggest they just switch over completely. What would that first 6 months look like?
Dr. Brandon Owen: We really want it. So we want people to try to keep it with one or two assistants. So you get someone who's doing bondings at least every two or three weeks. Because then they'll get experience and then they could become the trainer for the rest of the team. It's really the bonding, bonding is tricky if you can get through the bonding appointment and if you do the steps the right way, it's very easy to do, but that's the biggest kind of hurdle. Everything after that is just advancing through your wires. And we all know how to do that assistance, know how to tie in arch wires. And we know how to start wearing rubber bands is the doctors, and direct that. So but the other nice thing is this is not a lift for the doctor really at all. He trained the staff. It's all delegated to staff. We train the clinical team for you. You're not training the clinical team. We trained a digital assistant for you to manipulate the software so you don't have to go in and spend all this time working. That's why we train your treatment coordinator. It's really a partnership between us and your whole office because doctors are too busy. We know that they don't want to lift up and have to pick up another half hour of work in their week on top of what they've already been doing. So we want this to be staff-driven, and that's I think a big part of it, but also because it's a new system change your staff will- if you go all in. They're going to revolt. I mean change fatigue is a very real thing. It's a big corporate suite like it. Yeah, it's thrown around. I'm on that. I was on the board at Delta and Colorado so you learn this whole new terminology from upper level executives that that you probably never come out.
Richie Guerzon: I remember when I first started working at Boeing years ago, I was there for a little while. Like different world.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah and it’s all these little catch phrases that people say over and over, and it started becoming I think a game for people as okay who's going to talk about value, how many times we're going to hear value proposition and differentiation, you know, all these like catchphrases that it's just people started taking-
Richie Guerzon: I do the same thing with marketing. I see people's eyes glaze over, and I’m like wait, I need to go back through all these little phrases.
So how do you think virtual consultation might fit in this? Because you're having less visits, are any of them going to be virtual, or would you just say if you want to keep the same amount of visits, you can insert virtual visits.
Dr. Brandon Owen: No, I mean I will tell you that when you're using something that's custom, especially virtual teledentistry follow-ups, initial consultation visits I’m still a little on the fence with you know, I think now it's awesome. Why not use that to interact with new patients. I've always loved that personal connection with people, maybe you can get it. I haven't done a virtual education exam ever before, but perhaps I could get a really good link. So I think I'm more excited for teledentistries on the monitoring side. Why checkup patients if they're expansion progress is good by having them come to the office. If you can get the same amount of information with a quick photograph. If I can, if I'm just using a custom braces solution, you get to our heavy working wires, and I can have a patient send me a retracted view of the right side, or the left side just to check rubber band cooperation. Why wouldn't I take advantage of that? It's saving them the time, and energy, and money, and it's helping my office efficiency. So we don't have to have patients coming in for unnecessary visits. So if we don't need to see the patient physically, you know, my rule is always been I can get just as good of a result for this patient seeing them virtually as I can seeing them in person, and I may see them in person. And that's my rule. Well I want to see them if this is going to elevate, but there's so many things with custom appliances like Invisalign. We're using Rhinogram, or dental monitoring. I can get everything I need in terms of the information with that patient. So why waste their time? Why waste my overhead expense when they come in?
Richie Guerzon: And so you can even further drive down those number of visits.
Dr. Brandon Owen: You know, my goal is really to be less than nine visits for every braces case that we see, and that's very achievable using teledentistry monitoring. And the other cool thing is we can actually be better I think monitoring. Instead of seeing a patient every eight weeks because you're trying to beat your intervals out. Keep your chair time efficient. What if I could do a quick 30 second check in once a month and catch that, oh that bracket wrote sooner, or oh this patient's not brushing very well or oh, they're not wearing the rubber bands as much and so it's really simple if you just do like a quick little check mark box, if you have a patient send in a picture for AP, you know evaluation for instance. All it is, is you're doing great. You're making great progress. Keep going with the rubber bands, click a button and it automatically populates that. Look like we've made much progress this month, can you please really increase because this is the last thing we’re waiting on to finish your treatment. Click a button, automatically sends that message to them, or something looks fishy, I'm not sure if you're biting the right way or there might be loose bracket. You mind giving the opposite call and letting me come in and take a look sometime this week. Awesome, right? I could monitor patients I think batter so I don't think it detracts from the outcome, I think it actually elevates the outcome and efficiency of the practice.
Richie Guerzon: So that's exciting to hear that it's making things better. You're not sacrificing something.
Dr. Brandon Owen: If you're smart about it. Now, I think if you're using an analog system where you have to do those course corrections in the bends along the way, and you need those numbers of visits, then it's not as valuable anymore to me because oh shoot now I saw your- so I think I think that's where teledentistry- and why I love it so much. For aligners, is a digital custom solution monitored via teledentistry- fantastic. You can't get better efficiency than that, and better profitability with that. Analog I still want to have to see that patient so many touch points. So virtual to me becomes less of a value proposition. There's my catchphrase again. From both an orthodontist’s perspective and from the patient's perspective if you're just prolonging treatment.
Richie Guerzon: So why choose KLOwen, and what would you say are the main reasons?
Dr. Brandon Owen: You know, I really liked it. We're a lab supported service now when people start us. Yeah, you have to use our lab. So basically you're sending us the skin, you're getting a set up, and you get mailed out the kit two weeks later ready to go we’ve already loaded the IDB trays. I love that we have the option to evolve to an office for orthodontics, meaning you can actually by the end of this year the software upgrades that they're doing with us- Northwest select. You will be able to scan a patient no matter where you live in the world. As long as you have a Spray Pro, Envision One, or a 3D printer. Anywhere in the world, you can scan a patient to bonding custom braces in three hours or less, that's unheard of, unheard of. That's what's exciting to me. And then also, we're the lowest price point of any custom solution whether it's Invisalign, Aligners, lingual Solutions, labial solutions, wire bending. We're less than half price of our closest competitor. So when you talk about getting chair digital, it's a lot easier, we actually have tons of offices that have already gone all-in with us because it's not affecting, you know, instead of if you did 20 cases of Invisalign in a month, you're writing a check for $13,000. Yeah, you do 10 cases of KLOwen in a month, you might be writing a check for three so I just think it's the most valuable of the digital custom because we offer a hundred percent customization, 7 to 7. It's not a semi-custom. It's a hundred percent custom all the way back at the lowest price point possible. So I think in terms of a value, and in terms of a timeline turn around, and that you got that captive customer. We can start your custom braces today. I just think awesome, right?
Richie Guerzon: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah from a marketing point of view, I can tell you you're making my job a little easier.
Dr. Brandon Owen: But the cool thing that Lightforce is doing is, “hey, if you could tell your patients, you know, we have some doctors that are using Embrace light for KLOwen.” So pretty much- and then Invisalign. Every patient that comes to the door as a digital custom patient, no matter what appliance they choose and so why not get your share a chair 100%? And now we have enough solutions that can get you there. And so I don't know that I necessarily say choose KLOwen as much as what's going to be able to allow you to get the efficiencies, and allow you to expand your capacity, and scale your practice and it might actually be a combination of multiple ones of those solutions.
Richie Guerzon: So yeah, I agree anything that's going to increase efficiency, bring more value to the customer, all that is going to increase your profit, and make the business grow faster.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Like I said, we knew this was going to happen, but it's actually been fun to actually have our doctors sending us proof that it is happening. That's been really rewarding, and we've actually take we were so busy just doing fulfillment these last four or five months. Just keeping up the man, that we didn't have time to really reach out to our customers and get these tests. So for us this has been great to go and really engage them saying, “hey, let's see what kind of results you're getting. Let's see what kind of impact this is having on your business and your conversion rates and your efficiencies.” And so it's been awesome. It's been awesome for us just to get these stories coming in.
Richie Guerzon: And early adopters, we're not going to be driving down the prices of orthodontic treatment really anytime soon. So they're going to get the benefit of that profit right now, right?
Dr. Brandon Owen: I think it's- like I said, if you if you really look at what Andrews and the bracket prescription did for us in the 80’s, get ready for the same thing to happen in orthodox. It did not drive prices down overnight. It's just because we could get more efficient because we had people like practice consultants which you know, it's crazy that orthodontist in the 1980s were making more than anybody with basically zero business sense, right? We none of us had any business interests. And so, they way we were able to keep our cost of treatment below that inflation growth so much is because we had people like dental consultants that would tell us how to actually run a business, and so we were able to still make tons of money doing orthodontic treatment. So it didn't happen overnight. It was more of a we're going to be able to see our pool of total patients that are going to consider orthodontics grow. And if that growth happens, that's when the price points are going to kind of just taper down a little bit. So you’re right. This is not a threat of oh, you need to lower your prices tomorrow by a thousand dollars a case. What I will tell you though is when I open my next office, I'm signing up for any PT or EPO that pays more than $4,000 per case because my cost, my revenue per visit if I'm always patient nine visits or less at $4,000 or less, is way better than conventional treatment at my full cash fee. If I’ve got someone paying me $6,000, but it takes me 18 visits to do it, my revenue per visit is low.
Richie Guerzon: So you really need to calculate that so you understand it, and for sure, and so why not? Like if you can see more patients, if you can double or triple your capacity, and you've got this valve that all you have to do is sign up for an insurance plan and all of a sudden you've got this huge pool of patients rushing in to see you, they would rather not go to the corporate chain down the road. That's the only one on their list. They'd rather commute private practice. You've got a patient pool on demand pretty much right now. So I think it's an opportune time to really be looking at technologies that can optimize your efficiencies and leverage your probabilities. And I think it's fun to me. I think this virus, you know, is terrible as it is, has really had- look, I like to look at the positives and things, and I think it's gotten us to adopt things like this, you know virtual meetings that maybe we were slow to update before and you know, teledentistry, which is very slow on the uptake before. I think this is really showing people that well this this is a pretty good platform and there's really good workable solutions available today, that I never would have tried had it not been for this. That I think they're going to continue to use and it's going to actually help them be better orthodontists as time goes on.
Richie Guerzon: I agree. I think people have a perception that it's going to try to replace real interaction with people with our 3D world, but I don't think that's what's going to happen. I think we're going to have more time to actually interact with our family and friends in real life.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Well, I look at the people of the world who, you know, use digital technologies like this to leverage better relationships with their patients. So it's what you make of it yet. I mean by all means, if you're given a tool and you're not using it the right way, it's not going to do much for you. But if you really figure out how to use that tool to best build the outcome that you're looking for. It's going to be really powerful. So totally I think I think being able to stay in touch and monitoring my patients every month instead of every eight weeks, that's a value add amount of value attractor, and not making them come to see me, and get away from their busy schedule has calling us fill our schedule. I don't know anybody that just sits on the couch for five hours a day. We fill our lives with with things, and so we can make it more convenient-
Richie Guerzon: And the stronger that relationship, the more likely they're going to tell their friends about you, of course, you know. That's just natural.
So I hear you have a webinar going on tomorrow. You want to tell us a little bit about that, and what it's going to be about?
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yeah. So it's just the overview with a lot of videos, a lot of like the cases that we're getting back from our early users, a lot of the business kind of evaluation of how it can really impact the practice to look at a digital custom solution. So it'll be tomorrow night. And if you go to KLOwenbraces.com, we've got the link kind of for you to register there, and I think you guys will be sending out an email for us too.
Richie Guerzon: Yeah, a little recap email, and put it all in there. If anyone has any questions, I’d ask him now. We do have one, is there any kind of starter package if a doctor just wants to try it out?
Dr. Brandon Owen: Yes. We didn't want to make this very high commitment to start up. You can do as little as 1K, so you can actually sign up and do a one case starter package. The issue though, is the training that's involved is expensive for us. So it ends up costing you I think almost thirteen or fourteen hundred dollars to just do the one case, and most of that is and you get back a bracket. So if a bracket gets broken, you’ve got the bracket to actually fix it. So we have to give you some inventory we have to do some training. So the better option is to do a 5k starter pack, and you get everything that I talked about including the lock, is unlimited training on the software for your staff, your key treatment coordinators. Again, it's an interaction and that's $24.95 for five cases. And again, you find we really recommend that because you can't really get a good experience out of one case, but if you hate it after that, you can stop using us. It's not like you have to commit to an annual subscription for the first year, like some of the others who are, you know, I think we have this huge, kind of connecting point that we just tried to make it enough so you can get a good sense of it, and we think that five hundred dollars a case- and actually if you use all of those cases within the first two months, we’ll give you a sixth case for free. So it's really cases for $2500 for the people who take advantage of that. So again, we think it's a great value, there's no better price point for a customized solution out there. The other big thing is a lot of the custom solutions will limit themselves and say make sure the case is, you know, not an extraction, not a surgery, any case is varying with us. If you want to do the standard surgeries- we're doing everything. So if it's a more complicated case, we want to walk you through the logistics of it, but there is no case that- this is braces, if you know how to use braces you can use this system. So we really want you to be able to manipulate and have this be something that's not just say, “oh sorry, you don't qualify.” It's really more, “oh, yeah. This works really well for everybody.” We got mid-course corrections skins available. If you have a canine has impacted, bring it down. If you want to do add it to the digital set up, you can scan the arch again. We just segment that one tooth out and we can make you an individual IDB chip for that one too. So that's possible. You can do mid-course correction. If you don't like the torque that you chose for the prescription initially, you can actually digitally reposition those teeth. You get a new IDB tray for those individual teeth. Your assistance pop off the old brackets put the new ones on. So we really think we're the closest to true straight wire that has probably ever existed because of our ability to do course correction because of our ability to fill the slot for a 19 and a half slot bracket, you know, they didn't get to mention. So when you put it in 1925 wire, there's very little clay. It's less than 5 degrees of a slot. So when you actually put your last wire in, the teeth in the marginal ridges, in the lingual cusps, everything will go where you want them to go.
Richie Guerzon: That's awesome. So just talk to us a little bit about the training. Is it like this, is it in person, is it online videos?
Dr. Brandon Owen: We try to do everything online, and we've been doing it for the last nine months. And so this is kind of an standard protocol for us, but it's worked out really really well. So typically we’ll do an introductory meeting with the whole team because you know is it's not just getting the doctor on board. It's getting the clinical staff on board, its getting the treatment coordinators for sure on board, and making sure that they have the tools to help convert the cases. So there's a ton of marketing material that we provide our doctors with, and then so it's usually the whole team first and then it's a clinical training right before the bonding actually happens where we mail you 3D printed model. You actually get to glue braces using the digitally guided bonding trays on a 3D printer model before you do the patient because it just takes the stress away. Being able to realize that okay, I can do this. I know the workflow, the hands-on experience is awesome. We can do that virtually and then a lot of follow-up. Now that you've got some cases bonded, here's the wire sequence. Don't forget to put the prescription in the chart. So we do kind of a series of three or four automatically, and then if you want to do any more than that, we always are available to treat any new team member and UTC comes in, we’ll spend a half hour on on Zoom with them.
Richie Guerzon: Well, it sounds like a winner to me, from the patient's point of view you get more value, from the doctor's point of view getting more value, really helping these practices grow. I appreciate your time. I definitely learned a lot and everyone to recap we’ll send it out tonight. It'll be on OrthoThrive’s site. And I think we'll be talking to you soon.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Awesome. Thank you guys so much for setting this up, and inviting me to participate.
Richie Guerzon: Absolutely Brandon, take it easy.
Dr. Brandon Owen: Take care.
Richie Guerzon: Okay. Bye everyone.