There are many options out there for education in Dental Sleep Medicine. From weekend courses, online courses, seminars, webinars, multi-week programs and min-residencies, there are a lot of options for Dental Sleep Medicine education. For most of these programs, passing is determined by the completion of a required number of hours and a score on an exam. With one exception, none require that a board review a dentist’s cases. Dentists are becoming “Diplomates” without ever having treated a case and this is harming the entire field of dental sleep medicine.
Physicians go through intensive training, and even after they have graduated, they must complete a residency, where their cases are all reviewed by a senior physician with years of experience, because results in the real world are different from results on an exam. Physicians want to refer to someone they trust with the life and care of their patient. A practitioner who will provide medically appropriate treatment, verified with efficacy testing, who has a proven record of successfully treating OSA with oral appliance therapy. Therefore, board certification without case review is harming the reputation of Dental Sleep Medicine.
We believe in this so much that we found the only group that requires case review in DSM and The Academy of Clinical Sleep Disorder Disciplines. The ACSDD is a not-for-profit organization that offers a rigorous 13 CE online course program, which qualifies a dentist to submit cases for board review. A multidisciplinary board reviews twenty cases, including five in detailed narrative forms to evaluate the appropriateness, quality, and efficacy of treatment.
It’s the elephant in the room. It is the number one reason dentists give up. Even in the best-case scenario, it takes forever to get paid and is wildly inconsistent. Insurance companies are not in the business of paying out money.
Solving this problem has been the biggest challenge we have faced, and I have personally dedicated countless hours to resolving it. Now through several acquisitions Nexus Dental Systems can offer a full suite of medical billing capabilities that will bring consistency to reimbursement.
Whether IN-Network or Out-Of-Network, this billing solution provides every one of our clients with a customized protocol and a clear pathway to optimal reimbursement. Our system includes comprehensive training for your team, proprietary and integrated billing software, and access to our billing network.
Teams need help for many reasons, but the common issues we have seen are poor understanding of the importance of dental sleep medicine, resistance to change, and lack of a clearly defined protocol supported by the dentist. The truth is that most dentists are extremely busy. No matter how many weekend courses, seminars, and online courses you have taken, it is unrealistic to think you can translate that into an actionable protocol for your office, and then train and mentor your whole team on it while maintaining a full dental patient load. There are too many processes, systems and details that need to be ironed out, and the team is already busy with their existing workload. There is no quick fix.
The solution is whole team training that includes custom protocol development and ongoing coaching. Someone who knows the systems and can create step-by-step guides for each team member based on the reality in your practice. This is exactly what N3Sleep was founded to address: fix these problems so dentists could help people and save lives. The N3Sleep team has experience with all the software, systems, and tools most dentists may have already purchased. The N3Sleep system is not a separate process added onto your existing workload, it is integrated directly into current protocols.
To succeed a dentist needs to reach the patients who need help. Your first sleep patients will come from your existing dental patients. They are already in your office; they just need screening and a referral for testing. Since 2016, DreamSleep has been creating informative and effective patient outreach materials for the dental office, social media channels and innovative screening events.
DentalPlay is the perfect complement: a vast library of informative and medically accurate 3D animations of sleep, oral surgery, cosmetic, implant, orthodontic and periodontic procedures. These are available for streaming to a tablet chairside or added to your office video system and customizable with your logo. On-demand access to these videos make your team be more effective when explaining procedures to patients
