Dental Products Insights: MyPerioHealth App from OraPharma
OraPharma director of medical affairs Richard H. Nagelberg, DDS explains the new MyPerioHealth app and why OraPharma created this free resource for staging and grading the severity of periodontal disease. [3 Minutes]
Video Transcript:
The American Academy of Periodontology, the AAP, came out in 2018 with what are called staging and grading guidelines, and this is to characterize or describe the patient's case of periodontitis.
The other point I want to make is staging and grading is only for patients with periodontitis, not for patients who are healthy, or have gingivitis. So that means the diagnosis of periodontitis has to come first before the patient is staged and graded.
Now, the guidelines are very complex because periodontal disease is a very complex disease. Because of the complexity and the challenges, we know that very few offices around the US are doing this. If the staging grading is not being done, then the patients are not benefiting as they should. So the app, you just drop in the data and you push a button and up comes the stage and grade in about two minutes. It is completely automated and streamlined.
Some offices may choose to give the patient the results page so they have it to carry with them. So your stage 3 grade C or whatever it is. But essentially, the next step is to come back in for treatment. If they have periodontitis, they're going to need some level of treatment.
The way, ideally, it's used is as the patient is in the hygiene chair with a cell phone or tablet device with the app on it. The patient is going to input all the information, and that means that for the first time ever, the patient is participating in the discovery of their disease. Historically, we lay the chair back we poke them, we x-ray them and then we sit the chair back up and say, "you have gum disease, and this is what we're going to do."
They were passive participants. Now they're active participants, which gives them a much greater understanding and ownership of the disease. So it streamlines the process, automates the process, makes it much simpler and faster, and is incredibly accurate to arrive at the stage and the grade. What we hope to accomplish with this is to increase patient understanding of the disease and case acceptance. It's all about the patient.
