The Dental Business Manager
The Dental Business Manager
September 2026
Most of an orthodontic patient's treatment doesn't happen in your surgery. It happens at home — brushing properly, wearing elastics, looking after an appliance, half-remembering something you told them six weeks ago at their last appointment.
That's the gap Sussex Orthodontics were trying to close when they introduced BraceHero: a way for patients (and often their parents) to get practice-approved answers and support in between visits, without it depending on someone being free to answer the phone.
Patients see you every few weeks. In between, BraceHero gives them somewhere to check their next appointment, request a change, get guidance if their brace breaks, and be reminded of the oral health advice you gave them — including a brushing timer, so the advice doesn't just live in a leaflet nobody rereads.
None of that replaces your clinical team's advice. It just means that advice is still accessible on a Tuesday evening when the patient's parent has a question and the practice is closed.
There's a consent angle too, and it's worth taking seriously. You tell patients a lot at the start of treatment — their responsibilities, what to do if something goes wrong, why compliance matters. Nobody remembers all of it three months later. Having that information sit somewhere patients can actually go back to is a genuine, if unglamorous, way of reinforcing what was covered as part of consent.
This was the real question before launch — plenty of practice apps get downloaded once and never opened again.
Sussex Orthodontics has had 394 first-time downloads across Apple and Android, and more than 1,300 recorded patient interactions in the first few months. The single most-used feature has been checking the next appointment — 530 times in about two and a half months — alongside 447 uses of the appointment screen more broadly, plus change requests and other queries.
Usage held up rather than tailed off: interactions went from 599 in July to 620 in August. That's the more meaningful number, honestly — not the download count, but that people kept coming back.
BraceHero wasn't bought to cut reception costs — the case for it is patient support and communication first. But it's a fair question, so here's the honest maths, kept deliberately conservative.
Patients are currently using the appointment-check feature over 200 times a month. If only half of those would otherwise have been a routine phone call — say three minutes each — that's around 5.3 hours of reception time a month. At £15 an hour, that's roughly £79.50 of capacity freed up, against a monthly cost of £60.
So on a cautious assumption, one feature alone is covering the cost of the app. That calculation doesn't include appointment changes, brace problems, elastics queries, or the oral health and consent reinforcement — all of which add value without any figure attached to them.
Patients get support between appointments instead of only during them. Oral health advice gets reinforced at home, where the actual brushing happens. Consent and understanding get backed up over the course of treatment, not just at the start. And reception fields fewer routine calls for information patients can now get themselves.
It's not a dramatic transformation. It's a practical tool that's demonstrably being used, and that broadly pays for itself while it's at it.
£150 setup, £60/month. Available on Apple and Android — happy to arrange a short demonstration.
Book a conversation and we can talk through how BraceHero could work for your patients and your team.