Uncovering the future of CandidPro with Chief Dental Officer Dr. Brian Gray

This year, our Chief Dental Officer, Dr. Brian Gray has helped our teams bring a host of new product features to our CandidPro doctors. These exciting developments have helped our providers treat more clear aligner cases confidently and help more patients achieve straighter, healthier smiles. 

As we enter the final stretch of the year, we’ve tapped Dr. Gray to hone in on some of the highlights from 2023 and offer a sneak peek into what to expect in the coming year. 

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We’ve released several new features to our CandidPro doctors this year. Are there any that are particularly exciting to you?

I think I’m most impressed with the sheer volume of features we’ve been able to develop and roll out in such a short amount of time. Bite ramps, elastics, support for mixed dentition cases, attachments, and IPR are some of the heavy hitters—features our doctors expect us to have. It’s been a huge team effort to get all of those up and running in a scalable way, and the general feedback from our providers has been great. It’s awesome to see how these features have helped them gain confidence in our platform.

But that’s really just half of what we’ve accomplished. We also made some really smart updates to our software this year that have helped our providers and our internal teams save a lot of time. When you’re dealing with clear aligner cases at scale, like we are, efficient workflows are essential. I give a lot of credit to our teams for how they’ve been able to hone in on maximizing efficiencies for treatment plan submissions, retainer ordering, case tracking, and more. 

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How are these features expanding the number of cases our providers can treat with CandidPro clear aligners?

So, this is a complicated question for me. On one hand, our providers are used to treating certain cases with attachments to conduct certain complex movements or using IPR to create additional space for movement. We added them to CandidPro because that’s the industry standard. But, from my experience, these are tools designed for legacy aligner technology, which means we can often achieve similar results without them.

What makes CandidPro so exciting is that we can offer our providers treatment plans that require minimal IPR, minimal attachments, and even minimal office visits while achieving similar—or even superior—results. A lot of that is due to how we’ve been able to address the four things that keep a tooth from moving: not enough force, not enough space, not enough science, and not enough compliance. And though there are some cases that we know we’ll need certain tools like elastics for, by and large, our aligners are able to achieve great finishes on their own.

The primary goal in adding all of these new features is to give our providers the flexibility to conduct treatment the way they want. If they want to go all-in on attachments because that’s how they’re used to planning treatment, we can accommodate that. And if they want a more minimally invasive approach, we can do that too—all with support from our team of US-licensed orthodontists. 

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What role does our orthodontist network play in helping providers utilize our new features and platform in general?

Having a team of US-licensed orthodontists available to our providers is huge. Treatment plan support is usually a paid service that can cut into case profitability. With CandidPro, our providers get orthodontist oversight at no additional cost. I think that makes a lot of folks feel confident that they’re going to drive a great result for their patients. 

When it comes to our new features, our orthodontists are a great resource for helping providers understand how to implement them effectively. It’s great for providers with less experience because we’re not just throwing them into a cockpit and expecting them to fly a plane—we’re giving them a co-pilot to show them how to get to their destination.

Our orthodontists also serve as a simple way to validate whether a patient is best served by aligners only. In some cases, aligners may be appropriate for the required movements but may also require several years of treatment. For complex cases, surgical interventions may be necessary to correct skeletal issues. In my experience, other aligner systems don’t really have that additional validation step—and it can lead to sub-par results and endless refinements that reduce profitability and discourage patients.

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Based on what you’ve seen, how are our providers responding to our new features? What about the industry as a whole?

The results I’ve been seeing so far have been fantastic, and I think our providers are excited to have even more flexibility. Among my own patients, it’s been nothing but smiles. They’re happy with their results, and I’m happy to see our new features working the way they were designed to. It’s extremely gratifying to see all of this work generate real results.

Beyond our providers, I think our new features have also garnered us a lot of attention from the industry as a whole. We have a few major partnerships that I’m very excited about. Those will certainly be a major focus next year. I also wrote an article for ADA News a few months back. Having a feature in ADA is huge for us and validates how far we’ve come. 

And then, I just found out that we’ve been selected as a Dentistry Today Editors’ Choice Award winner. Out of thousands of products, only 30 were chosen for this award. The fact that we're getting noticed by some of the biggest trade journals and periodicals is amazing. They’re looking at our data and coming back saying, “Wow, you guys are really changing the conversation here.” That just feels like a huge accomplishment to me.

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Looking ahead, are there any features on the roadmap that you’re excited about announcing in 2024?

Well, we certainly have a lot planned for the coming year. As I mentioned earlier, our partnerships will be a game-changer for us, I think. It’ll expose us to a ton of new providers and give us the opportunity to show them that, yes, we are a viable alternative to what they’re using today. 

Outside of partnerships, we’ve been developing some really cool new features that will be ready next year. Our R&D teams say I need to keep the details under wraps until then, but I can say that we’ve got some really interesting applications using our CandidMonitoring™ AI that go beyond what I could have imagined. 

Finally, I think 2024 will be a major unlock for us in terms of adoption. We’ve built up a lot of excitement and momentum since I joined. We’ve already been growing like gangbusters, but I think we’re reaching a point where we’re becoming harder to dismiss. The dental professionals who are already in our network are doing great things with our products and driving serious growth. It’s only a matter of time before every practice that offers aligners signs on with CandidPro.