Mohamed Magdy Attallah

19 years in the dental field. 15 of which in Orthodontics and 14 of which using Clear aligners. You can read all about me here if you are interested, but more interesting is….

What is the story of AlignerFlows?

The spark started when all of a sudden the “very well known big brand aligners company that i was happily working with decided all of a sudden to:

1) Introduce a carrot and stick system in their aligners sales! Meaning, me as a dentist had to reach a certain target of points by doing aligner treatments in order to keep my tier and have a discount. Luckily where i practice, discounts go only to end consumers so my patients benifited when i did my targets well for the big company, but also i was confronted with an ethical issue, beacuse as you can imagine, a smaller, simpeler treatment costed less and thus benifited the big company less and so i got less points 🙂 The complexer the treatment the more points you get. This created a certain ethical pressure, because in this way all of a sudden i felt like the sales person for the company instead of just keeping my position as a medical professional. Of corse i communicated my displease about this system and my concerns about the ethics behind it, did the big company care? Well, guess what: NO.

2) In the start of the AI hype, the big company started letting AI making treatment plan setups instead of the professional orthodontic technicians, whether they were experimenting with the “smaller clients” “the ones who make less target points” or not, i do not know, but all of a sudden treatment plan suggestions were very unrealistic and did not seem to be created by a professional orthodontic technician, so is also what i have heared of several of my colleagues. 

At that moment i realized very well that “The big company” did not really care that much about me as a practitioner, as well as they did not also care that much about my patients, they really, truely and devotedly cared about the target. Believe it or not, I do not blame them, that is a corporation, and that’s how the business world works, but for me that was not enough, because i just wanted to keep my ethical professional practitioner position and i just refuse to be under pressure of a company just because they are “the big brand one with the best well known name and the biggest production centers” although i for sure give them credit for the amout of research and development being done. So i decided to start in-house aligners manufacturing. Afterall, scanners were there, softwares were there and printers were there, so why not, right? Wrong! Easily thought but with blood and tears done after taking several years in searching for the clear honest information, the good materials, the affordable softwares, the non-brand attached platforms or courses, etc., Well guess what? It worked out, i managed to find what is needed to manufacture my own small brand of aligners. Still i have nowhere where i can workflow my system because i am not using any of the market available brands, and none of which will offer you their platform to work on. 

Then there was another adventure…

I got in close collaboration with another “big company aligners brand” which came up with a brilliant idea: “Let’s cancel the role of the practitioner, whether a dentist or an orthodontist in the clear aligners treatment and just produce and sell aligners directly to the end consumer!” B to C instead of B to B. So they though, so they did, they still needed partner practitioners (among which i was) to perform the parts of the treatment that had to be done by a practitioner, so they did not manage to completely cancel the presence of a professional. Did i like the concept? No. Why? because again it contradicted with my ethics, but for sure i understood just a little bit more. Anyway, that “big company” was taken over by another “big company” that supposedly is just trying not to completely cancel the professional practitioner. That we will have to wait and see if it is true. But out of all these experiences i figured out the following:

I would like to develop an aligners ecosystem platform that offers A to Z experience and integrations to everyone involved in the orthdontic clear aligners industry, each to their role, without locking abyone to any certain brand or platform, and empower the smaller practices, practitioners and laboratories to be able to manufacture their own aligners, find the required information, find the wholesalers and colleagues around them that can help, all this not being stuck in any kind of way to any certain software, or brand, hoping to break the cycle of censoring of any information and give the practitioners the power to have this treatment also under their own control and not getting manipulated or ethically pressured by anyone. Furthermore, i wanted to figure out a way to collect all this in one place, have an easy, user friendly platform with available workflows for users to choose from, each to their comfort but also completely adjustable and personalizable to each their workflow and part of interest in the clear aligners industry.

So the development of AlignerFlows began, 

and about the story… well that has just started