Collaborate on clear aligners: everyone wins

The clear aligner industry has completely changed in the last five years. DIY brands, technician-driven treatment plans and mass manufacturers have flooded the market.
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But as the market has grown, less attention has been paid to orthodontic standards. This risks patients’ health and creates headaches for dentists everywhere. We built 32Co because we wanted to reintroduce the clinical rigour required for great patient outcomes.
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We’re lifting the veil on how things actually work, and flying the flag for sharing orthodontic knowledge, expert treatment planning, and never overpaying for aligners.
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32Co connects Specialist Orthodontists with dentists as standard for every case. Co-planning ensures reliable, realistic outcomes in a shorter time and with more predictability than traditional clear aligner providers.
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In fact, data shows that regular clear aligner treatments require averagely more than double the initially expected number of aligners. However, treatment plans with 32Co require refinements on average less than 50% of the time. This saves dentists on average £1,000 in wasted chair time and lab bills.
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By doing this, we’ve found that everyone wins – patients, GDPs, orthodontists, practice owners, and indemnifiers. Here’s how:

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The patient

The most important person in the process – patients like to know that they have a specialist taking care of their case. They pay for a premium service and expect premium delivery.
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Once patients understand that clinical collaboration with top experts increases clinical rigour, they feel more confident in their outcomes. Wouldn’t you? And the reassurance they feel is backed up by the results. Patients save time as they need to visit the practice less, while their treatment is finished on time – not a year late.

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The GDP

The majority of dentists we speak to would like to feel more confident in their orthodontic knowledge and clear aligner treatments. Even the most experienced providers often confess that they are forced to trust the ‘system’ and have fallen foul of plans which just didn’t work, but they couldn’t figure out why.
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This doesn’t reflect ability or intent. Dentists have not been given options to upskill for free, have no mentor network to tap into, and have limited visibility into inflexible manufacturer ‘planning protocols’ or ‘systems’. This is a source of frustration. Dentists take on all clinical liability but haven’t been given the tools to succeed.
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We realised this is a major blocker for dentists providing orthodontic treatment, so we created the Starter Course – designed to get dentists treating cases regularly. Connecting a GDP with an ortho 1:1 kills two birds with one stone. GDPs lose their insecurity around ortho and learn how to provide treatment in an informed
way. They understand why actions need to be taken – not just what.
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More support allows for more complex cases, greater uptake of cases and an overall increase in revenue as confidence grows. This may appear a basic point, but we know that most general dentists feel like they should be providing cosmetic treatments. They don’t know that they could be making an additional £50-100k revenue per year, just for doing a handful of cases per month.

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The orthodontist

So, if GDPs and patients are better served by collaborative healthcare, what’s in it for the ortho? Collaborative healthcare shifts the paradigm completely. It gives highly experienced orthodontists an opportunity to disseminate years of expertise and interact with their GDP colleagues.
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The orthodontists we work with love the fact they can share their knowledge with more clinicians, increasing their variability of cases. It also means orthodontists can work remotely – a rarity in dentistry!
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So, collaborative healthcare elevates the patient’s experience, but also the clinician’s; here's how it ultimately leads to increased revenues:

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For practice owners:

Simply put – when dentists provide aligners more regularly, the revenue of the practice snowballs with the increased uptake.
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But if your dentists don’t feel empowered and prepared, cosmetic treatments will never be a regular stream of revenue for the practice. This is often the case at practices that technically provide clear aligners, but don’t see many treatments.
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We work with practice owners to properly introduce collaborative ortho provision. They see that, with an ortho by their dentists’ sides, confidence and cases increase.
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More predictable plans also reduce unwanted refinement chair time. We have worked with high-volume providers who have realised an additional £800 profit on average per case from collaborative planning.

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For indemnifiers

32Co reduces risk for dentists and the incidence of complaints in clear aligner orthodontics. This is why the largest indemnifier, Dental Protection, has exclusively partnered with us to provide their members with priority access for the Starter Course.
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