Dental Sleep Medicine in Restorative Practice Part 5: Selecting Appliances 

By Todd Sander DMD 

This article is written for dentists who are thinking about or just starting a dental sleep medicine practice. I do both restorative dentistry and dental sleep medicine, and by sharing what I do, I hope to help others with their planning. 

There are many other types of appliances you can consider and I am always looking at them. But to become most efficient, I have narrowed down the types of appliances I deliver. Most commonly, these are Dorsal and Herbst appliances. Both are titratable, as the patient needs more advancement over time..  

The dorsal appliance resembles a custom-fitted mouthguard, worn only during sleep. It uses advancement blocks with an orthodontic screw to advance the jaw. There are many manufacturers, and it is easy to deliver. It doesn’t impinge on the tongue, so patients find it comfortable. It is fairly durable and repairable, especially if milled out of acrylic. This is my go-to type of appliance for most patients because patients respond favorably to them. 

A Herbst appliance is more durable for parafunctional patients and fairly comfortable. Patients are sometimes intimidated when they first look at this type of appliance but I always point out that the advancement bars are in the dead space of the cheeks, and they won’t feel them. There are many types of Herbst appliances with different types of advancement arms. 

I sometimes deliver an EMA appliance or a TAP 3 appliance. I have found that the screw and bar assembly of TAP appliances can impinge the tongue a little. My preference is to use appliances that provide more room for the tongue to move forward. Milling and 3D printing have introduced many low-profile, stable, and comfortable appliances that deserve investigation.  

Whatever appliance you decide to use, become knowledgeable and proficient with it. You want to convey confidence to your patients. The more they trust in the appliance, the more compliant they will be with wearing it and the sooner they can achieve improvement of their sleep breathing issues. Oftentimes, they will feel better within a week or two and report this during their first recall visit. When they report improved symptoms, we can move on to confirming the treatment position with a home sleep monitor and refer them back to their physician. Treatment position can also be confirmed prior to appliance fabrication by using a MyTAP temporary appliance.  This can improve the initial treatment position and is necessary for non-titratable appliances..  

With most patients, we take two steps forward and one step back as we titrate an appliance to an effective treatment position. Sometimes I need to send an appliance back, so I’ve become used to taking a bite registration myself and sending it to the lab to reset the appliance in a more forward position.  Using a MyTAP to determine treatment position ahead of time helps prevent this. We prepare our patients for this possibility and provide encouragement to stay on course. Working as a team with our patients, we will get there! 

Personal Finance Tips for New Dentists 

Kelly Brady, MBA 

Here are a few thoughts I hope are helpful for young dentists starting out in their careers. 

I Would Make Buying Disability and Life Insurance a Priority. 

I recommend that you have personal disability insurance and that you make sure it has own-occupation and guaranteed renewable features. Disability insurance protects you from the financial risk of losing your income if you become sick or disabled and you cannot work. Own-occupation policies allow you to claim disability insurance benefits even if you can earn an income doing something other than your most recent job. 

Personal disability plans have add-ons that vary from state to state and company to company. The most expensive add-on is the COLA or cost of living adjustment. That will nearly double the price of the plan. If you struggle with wanting to pay the premiums, then don’t get this add-on. The price can be kept low by buying a plan that has a 90-day period before coverage kicks in. 

If you have dependents or you expect to buy a practice, I recommend that you buy term life insurance. At some point in the future, you’ll probably need to pledge life insurance against the practice. If you do not own a practice yet, I recommend that you avoid whole life, permanent life, and universal life policies, as they are more expensive, loaded with fees, and the person selling them is making a large commission.  

If You Build an Emergency Fund, You Will Be More Secure. 

The next thing I recommend is to build an emergency fund that is not invested in the stock market but rather kept in a savings or money market account, or invested in government treasury bills that are short-term. This way, if there is an emergency, the money’s available and there are no surprises. A good rule of thumb is to have emergency savings that equal three to six months of your income. If you have a disability policy that won’t kick in for 90 days and are disabled, you will be glad you have this 

Take Advantage of an Employer Retirement Plan. 

If you have access to an employer retirement plan, maybe even in your own practice, make regular contributions. If you are employed by a dental practice that contributes a matching percentage, contribute enough to get the match. Dental practice owners can set up an employer retirement plan. A recent PankeyGram article by Dr. Mark Kleive provides great advice for doing that.  

Pay Off Credit Card Debt. 

It makes sense to pay off higher-interest credit cards first. Keep in mind that If the interest is the same, it makes sense to pay off the personal debt first because the business card interest is tax deductible, essentially lowering the rate of interest. 

What if paying down debt means you don’t have the ability to save for retirement? Ideally, you will maximize saving/investing in tax-advantaged accounts like IRAs and 529 college savings accounts. But if you are paying down debt, the 20% annual interest you are saving is like getting a 20% investment return with no risk.  

For some people, paying off debt or investing in retirement is a choice they must make. Some can’t sleep at night worrying about one more than the other. Because different people have different priorities and personal situations, I recommend that you get a second opinion to help you decide. 

What About Dental School Loans? 

Dentists can pay off student loans by sticking to a regular monthly payment plan, refinancing to pay them off faster, or consolidating with a personal loan. 

Dental Sleep Medicine in Restorative Practice Part 4: Treatment Monitoring 

By Todd Sander DMD 

One week after a dental sleep medicine patient is given their appliance I have them return for a follow-up appointment with my clinical assistant. During this appointment, we want to determine if the patient is having any issues. It takes a little time for patients to become accustomed to wearing their appliance and most patients have questions, so this appointment is a time to reassure them and reinforce instructions for advancement if the patient has a titratable appliance. After one week, many start to experience the benefits of 50 to 60% advancement. 

We bring them back again at four to six weeks, at which time, we review their medical history and see if there have been changes. We also evaluate their compliance. We have a sleep log for patients to fill out every morning after they wake. We ask them to make notes about the quality of their sleep. We also have a report form for the patient’s bed partner if the patient has one to make note of the patient’s sleep quality. Believe it or not, spouses/bed partners are accurate 80% of the time when compared with sleep monitors. My clinical assistant reviews the sleep logs and medical history, performs a preliminary appliance check, and lets me know the highlights. Then I come in and perform a thorough examination and lead a discussion to determine how well the patient is adapting to the appliance. 

If the patient is doing well with compliance and feels the therapeutic value of the appliance is adequate, I might decide to skip the eight to ten-week appointment and go straight to confirmation of resolution of symptoms with some sort of monitor. If the patient is not doing well or cannot advance comfortably, then we work out a plan. It is important to note that there are many effective appliances that are non-titratable and fabricated in a fixed position. With these appliances, I work out the titration to the treatment position in My TAP following a similar protocol before prescribing a treatment position in a final appliance. 

Note that we often see issues that cross over into the area of facial pain and temporomandibular joint problems. Many patients doing sleep appliance therapy have these problems, so if you want to do sleep dental medicine, be prepared to also manage your patients through facial pain and TMD issues as you titrate their appliances. 

Usually, in eight to ten weeks, we have successfully taught our patients to self-titrate the appliance to a comfortable treatment position, and we can move to monitor its effectiveness. We are always available to answer questions.  

People wearing Fitbits and iWatches can use snore lab apps. By self-monitoring, they have a good sense of when their appliance is in a good treatment position. In our practice, we always confirm this with either a high-resolution pulse oximetry monitor or a peripheral arterial tone monitor. These two types of monitors provide data we give the referring physician. I always send a letter and report back to the patient’s sleep physician and general dentist (if the patient is not also a general dentistry patient), and I ask the patient’s permission to include their primary doctor in the loop.  

After this, I see my sleep dental medicine patients for a six-month visit, then once a year for an annual visit. Often there are issues to be addressed. Sometimes the appliances need to be titrated a little bit more. Sometimes patients have been seating them improperly. Sometimes we see bite changes to address and document. 

Are You Prepared for Your Next Hiring Challenge?

Most dentists hire during a crisis because a vacancy created for various reasons drives a need to fill a position immediately. This high-stress, time-sensitive situation often undermines the dentist’s ability to hire more strategically and therefore move their practice up to the next level. In other words, dentists tend to re-create the status quo out of desperation, rather than strategically evolve their practice over time based on how they hire and develop team members.  

Understanding what you need and want to create ahead of time (skills and values that are non-negotiable in a person) is key. Hopefully, this article will prompt you to think about this truth as well as prepare for the next hiring challenge. 

Seek These 8 Personality Attributes 

According to Avrom King (and my own experience), there are eight personality attributes that must be predominant within a care team for it to prosper over time: 

1. Optimism: Despite all the craziness in today’s world, team members routinely demonstrate a hopeful and positive attitude toward adversity and others.
2. Involvement: Team members actively pursue problem identification and resolution. They are caring and committed to seeing the practice function at an optimal level.
3. High Self-Regard (not to be confused with high self-esteem): Team members feel competent, capable, and worthy of success. They believe that their lives make a positive difference in this world, and they demonstrate it every day.
4. Missionality: Team members are committed to living clarified personal values. This commitment goes far beyond themselves. They see their life as an integral part of a greater whole and congruent with the mission of the practice.
5. Energetic Curiosity: Team members are stimulated by their curiosity about people, things, and challenges. Consequently, their positive energy is contagious, and their problem-solving ability is high.
6. Resilience: Team members are flexible and able to adapt in a healthy and functional way to routine day-to-day stressors. Consequently, they don’t avoid conflict. Instead, they approach conflict maturely and with the intention of positive resolution.
7. Self-Control: Team members know who they are, where they are, and where they want to go. They also know what they are doing – or are in the process of finding out. In other words, they are effective self-leaders with the ability to delay gratification.
8. Relationship-Oriented: Team members prosper via long-term open, honest, and hidden-agenda-free relationships. Consequently, they’re able to seek out and effectively propagate opportunities for commitment in others through those relationships.

Conduct Behavioral Interviews and Assess Emotional Intelligence 

The bottom line is that our hiring process must be behaviorally sophisticated to predictably assemble a highly symbiotic team of emotionally intelligent individuals. Conduct behavioral interviews and make use of emotional intelligence and personality assessment tests. Behavioral hiring interviews ask candidates questions about how they handled specific situations in the past and the candidates are urged to provide somewhat detailed answers about their role, actions, and results. You may ask how they feel about the experiences and what they learned from them. Knowing what they know now, what would they do differently? Don’t shy away from asking them about their life goals and what appeals to them about working in a dental office. Are they enthusiastic about teamwork and making a difference in the lives of patients? 

My regular examination and treatment protocols for dental sleep medicine patients are based on what I learned from mentors, but I’ve molded them for my style of practice.  

Screening—Years ago, I offered 15-minute consultations for anyone who wanted to learn about dental sleep medicine and alternatives to CPAP. I found that patients were already well-versed, so I don’t do that anymore. When my team members answer the phone, they often answer insurance-related questions, and my team members have learned to answer those questions astutely. While on the phone, they weed out those just curious about how a dentist might help them and focus on those likely to be committed to my process and accept treatment. I have team members who are knowledgeable about oral appliances and quickly answer questions about them over the phone. 

Pre-Examination Records—Referred patients scheduled for a comprehensive dental sleep medicine exam are sent paperwork to complete before their examination. My clinical assistants gather the paperwork, including a detailed medical history, the referral from a sleep physician, the letter of medical necessity, and their polysomnogram, if they have had it, and the hypnogram. We gather as much data from the physician as possible. I review this in advance of seeing the patient. 

Pre-Examination Records Created by My Clinical Assistant—When patients arrive for their initial two-hour appointment, my clinical assistant takes digital impressions (sometimes we take traditional PVS impressions) and x-rays. She also collects vitals and interviews the patient just as a medical assistant would in a medical office. 

Examination—During a thorough examination, I voice-record the information needed for the medical documentation. By the end of the exam, I know what the patient’s treatment options are going to be and the anticipated charge for treatment. Sometimes the patient is not a candidate for a sleep appliance and I refer the patient to their physician. We still get paid for the comprehensive exam. Our patients are prepared for this. Even if we can’t help them, they appreciate the time we spend. When each patient leaves the comprehensive exam, we have all the information we need, including a protrusive bite registration if the patient is to receive an appliance. 

Medical Reimbursement—In my practice, payment is due upfront for the examination. If they know this is coming in, they’re accepting of this. We have chosen to do our best to help patients seek medical reimbursement and submit the required medical documentation for their insurance. We operate on a fee-for-service model, and this requires intentional conversations with patients so they will value our care, skill, and judgment whether insurance reimburses them or not. 

Second Appointment to Start Appliance Therapy—My clinical assistant helps by initially trying in the appliance we have had lab-fabricated. She educates the patient about warming the appliance in warm water if it is a thermoplastic material and fabricates a morning repositioner. Then I come in and do a fit check, spend more time adjusting the appliance if needed, answer questions, confirm that the appliance has been fabricated correctly, and review instructions for wearing the appliance and using the morning repositioner. For titratable appliances, I usually start an appliance at 50 to 60% protrusive if it’s a mandibular advancement appliance. I ask the patient not to advance the appliance for one week. If the appliance is titratable, we educate the patient on how to advance 1-2mm every two to three days until symptoms alleviate.  

Part 4 of this series will discuss how I monitor my sleep dental medicine patients. 

When my daughter Kaitlyn (currently in through E2 at Pankey) finished dental school in 2020, I strongly recommended that she learn analog first, then once mastered, make the transition to digital. This lasted about four months. I learned rapidly that this generation sees things in the digital realm far better than we do. She reminded me that “she grew up with a screen in her hand.” 

We began to focus on her learning the concepts of occlusion, esthetics, biology, tooth-by-tooth structural integrity, and visualizing and planning in the virtual (digital world). We quickly learned that, although she could easily visualize things on the computer, the patient is ultimately analog. We began to utilize an analog articulator for her to learn the hand skills of what we would do on the patient. 

A great example of this is equilibration. A “trial equilibration” on a virtual articulator is a 5-minute process that lets us determine if equilibration is an appropriate treatment option. The problem is that, unlike analog, you do not learn the brush strokes that will be required to perform this skill in the mouth. I have performed hundreds if not thousands of equilibrations. I know the brush strokes. For me, once I see on the virtual articulator that I can do the equilibration without too much tooth structure removal, I am ready to go to the mouth. For Kaitlyn, who has very limited equilibration experience, once visualized on the virtual articulator, then it’s time to go back to analog. She mounts the printed models on an analog articulator to perform a traditional trial equilibration. In this way, she learns the brushstrokes of this incredibly important procedure. 

I think it is extremely important that dentists, who are learning to equilibrate intraorally, work on mounted analog models to develop their equilibration skills. 

Returning to the consideration of the financial cost of bringing new technology into your practice—input devices (scanners and CBCTs), output devices (printers and mills), and software to manipulate the data all cost money. Doctors that are going down this road usually like technology and consider the dramatic increases in efficiency to ultimately increase the productivity and profitability of the practice. This is certainly something I have seen. The bottom line is dental stone will go away. We all must make the decision when it is appropriate to make the jump. 

Dr. Lee Ann Brady has invited me to audit all the Pankey Essentials courses over the next year. I am super excited about this. She has asked me to recommend ways to appropriately implement examples of digital technologies and workflows into these core classes. While younger dentists are drawn to digital information, it is important for us to remind them that our patients are ANALOG. We are training dentists to perform complex procedures on patients, not on computers. This requires great study and a commitment to understand timeless concepts, while simultaneously developing the hand skills to accomplish these procedures accurately and use digital workflows to make things more efficient. 

In 2024, The Pankey Institute is also implementing a digital hands-on course for those doctors who would like to make the transition over to virtual articulation and digital workflows—something that I am excited to be part of. Dentistry is in a great transition. I look forward to making sure the concepts that we have all built our practices around do not get lost in the digital world. 

One of the things that I take the opportunity to do every year in January is evaluate my fees. I am disciplined about this because the cost of doing business goes up every year.  

Whether it is a low inflationary time when the cost of doing business has gone up 1-1.5%, or it is more like the recent period when the cost of doing business has gone up 7-10%, our profitability is going to decrease if we don’t adjust our fees. When profitability decreases, usually the dentist’s compensation decreases.  

The Fee-by-Fee Way 

We can go through our fee schedule, fee by fee, and raise them individually. Dentists who do this are concerned that they will lose patients if they raise certain fees, for example, their fees for regular recall exams and dental cleanings. Dentists who take the fee-by-fee approach tend to believe patients are less price sensitive to the cost of restorative dentistry and appliances. Some dentists cover the increasing costs of Hygiene by increasing the fees for their restorative procedures. 

The Global Way 

Alternatively, we can do a global fee increase that raises every fee by the same percentage. This is my preferred way. To select the rate, I will look at my 2023 end-of-year profit and loss statement (from my accountant) and compare it to my 2022 end-of-year profit and loss statement. Did I make a profit in 2023? Was it higher or lower than in 2022? I don’t want to make less profit year to year.  

I will also look hard at my practice’s operating expenses in 2023 compared to 2022. I expect 2023 will be significantly higher because we have gone through high inflation in 2023 that none of us could have reliably predicted at the end of 2022.  

For example, if overhead was 65% in 2022 and jumped to 68% in 2023, I must increase my fees by at least 3%, plus a percentage I anticipate will cover overhead increases in 2024. If my profitability decreased in 2023, I also would want to compensate for that loss in the future. (Our “healthy business” goal each year is to maintain and hopefully increase profitability.) 

To arrive at the final percentage that I will raise my fees across the board, I will factor in the raises I want to give my team and myself in 2024, and the other expenses I know (or anticipate) will go up.  

The Global Way Is Easier 

If we do piecemeal fee increases, it becomes a complicated set of mathematics to determine if we will recapture last year’s decrease in profitability, cover next year’s increase in overhead, and hopefully increase our profitability over the next year. If you want to be cautious, you can blend the two approaches. Do a global increase and then go back and look at the price-sensitive fees you are concerned about and lower just those. This is the Modified Global approach. 

Evaluate Your Fees Early in 2024 

Annual evaluation of our fee is a must-do, and I don’t think there has ever been a better time to raise fees in all the years I have practiced. We live in a time when everything costs more. Patients understand that our overhead costs have increased. They know we are running a business and want us to stay in business to be there for them. 

I encourage you to use a system of thinking to figure out which fees you will raise and how much you will raise them. I advocate for the global approach or the modified global approach. Ask your accountant to give you profit and loss statements for 2022 and 2023. If you need help with your evaluation, ask your accountant or practice management consultant to assist you.