Treatment reminders your patients actually see.
OrthoPing puts elastics, retainer and hygiene reminders on your patients' lock screens, in your practice's name, on a schedule you set once. Replies come back to one inbox at the front desk.
From the team behind Orthodontext, the SMS reminder service. No per-message fees, no contract, patients added in under a minute at the chair.
Reminders work. The evidence isn't new.
Two randomized trials in the Angle Orthodontist, both with adolescents in fixed appliances.
- 3.7×
- more Class II correction over three months in patients who got message reminders about their elastics, compared with patients who didn't. Leone et al., Angle Orthodontist, 2018 (n = 42)
- 97%
- of teens receiving daily hygiene reminders said the messages helped them understand why brushing matters. Bleeding index fell by almost half. Angle Orthodontist, 2019 (n = 79)
Between appointments is where treatment slows down.
Elastics come out at lunch and stay out. The retainer lives in the case. Brushing around brackets gets skipped. None of it shows until the next visit, and by then the bite hasn't moved, the visit is a repeat, and the parent is the one doing the nagging.
A reminder on the phone at 8 pm, from the office rather than mom, is the cheapest intervention in orthodontics. It just has to arrive every day, for every patient, without anyone at the front desk remembering to send it.
Set it up at the chair. It runs for the rest of treatment.
Three steps, none of which need your practice management software.
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1Add the patient
Type a name and email, or let the patient sign themselves up on a tablet at the chair. They get a six-character code and a QR to scan; the app is theirs in about a minute. Parents can enroll on a child's behalf.
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2Pick the reminders
Choose from the built-in library or your own wording, then set the hour and the days. Reminders fire in the patient's time zone, rotate their wording so they don't go stale, and expire on their own at the end of treatment.
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3Read the replies
Patients can answer any reminder. Replies land in one inbox, the owner gets an email with a one-click response link, and anything that sounds like a care problem is flagged for the clinical team.
What's included
Everything a practice needs to run reminders for every patient in treatment. One flat price, no add-ons except patient photos.
- A reminder library, ready on day one
- Eleven categories, from elastics and retainers to diet and motivation, with three dozen wordings written for teenagers. Edit any of it, or add your own. Every practice gets its own copy.
- Rotating wordings
- A reminder that says the same thing every night gets swiped away. Each message draws from a set of wordings so the 40th elastics reminder still reads like it was written today.
- Schedules that respect the clock
- Set the hour and the days in your practice time; patients get it in theirs. Daylight saving never double-sends. A forgotten reminder switches itself off after eighteen months.
- Push first, email when needed
- Reminders show on the lock screen with your practice's name and stack together. If a patient turns notifications off, the same reminder goes to their email instead, and you can see who is on which.
- One inbox for replies
- Open, care priority, handled. Canned responses for the common ones. Every reply also emails the owner with a signed link that answers it in one tap, without signing in.
- One-off messages
- Appointment nudges, birthdays, a post-adjustment check-in. Care messages get through even to patients who have paused their regular reminders.
- Your whole team
- Owner, admins and staff with sensible permissions. Invite by email; nobody shares a login. Every privileged action is written to an audit log.
- Patient photos, as an add-on
- Let a patient send a picture of the loose bracket instead of describing it. Photos are stripped of location data, shown only to your team, and capped per day.
What your patients get
A small app with one job. No feed, no ads, no account to create: they type the code from the chair and they're in.
- Reminders on the lock screen, with the office's name, that can be read at a glance.
- A chat with the office. Replies go to your inbox, and staff answers never show their text on the lock screen.
- A list of what's scheduled, so a parent can see what the office asked for.
- Pause reminders for a trip, or delete the account and its history in two taps.
We built the text-message version first.
Orthodontext has sent SMS reminders for practices for years. OrthoPing is what we built once we knew what the texts couldn't do.
Nothing per message. A practice with 400 patients in treatment sends thousands of reminders a month. Push notifications cost nothing to deliver, so the price is flat and you never think about volume.
Nothing filtered. Carriers increasingly hold or drop automated texts, and registering a sending number is its own project. A notification from an app the patient installed just arrives.
Replies go somewhere. A text reply lands on whichever phone sent it. A reply in OrthoPing lands in your inbox, next to the reminder it answered, with the patient's name on it.
The honest trade-off. Patients install an app. We made that a one-minute job at the chair, and if they ever turn notifications off, reminders switch to email on their own. Practices that still want texts can keep using Orthodontext.
Built for patients who are mostly minors.
The whole privacy policy fits on one page, and we'd rather you read it than take our word for it.
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Encrypted at rest
Patient contact details and every reply are encrypted in the database, not just on the wire.
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Nothing sold, nothing trained on
No advertising, no data brokers, no AI training. The office sees its own patients' messages and nobody else does.
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Photos stay with the practice
Location data is stripped on upload, images are shown only to your team through short-lived links, and deleting the account deletes them.
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Under-13s through a parent
Invitations for young children are created by a parent or guardian, and any patient can delete their account from inside the app.
What orthodontists say about our reminders
From practices running Orthodontext, the SMS service OrthoPing grows out of.
“Orthodontext is saving appointments in my practice and helping achieve better outcomes in less time.”
“It takes the nag factor away from us and away from the parents. It is an amazing innovation.”
“Orthodontext is an important tool in our toolbox to encourage patient compliance.”
Questions we get asked
What does it cost?
One flat monthly price per practice, whatever the number of patients or reminders. No setup fee, no contract; cancel from the settings page. Patient photos are a small add-on. We'll quote the current price when you request an invite.
Does it connect to my practice management software?
It doesn't need to. Adding a patient is a name and an email, or the patient does it themselves on a tablet. A practice API for bulk enrollment is on the roadmap; tell us which system you use.
Do patients really install an app?
Yes, and at the chair it takes about a minute: they scan a QR code or type a six-character code, and the app asks once for permission to notify. If a patient never installs it or turns notifications off, every reminder goes to their email instead, so nobody is left out.
Who does the setup?
We do. Every practice is created by us, with your library and time zone in place, and we walk your team through the inbox on a short call. Most practices are sending reminders the same week.
Is it available in Canada?
Yes. OrthoPing launches for the United States and Canada, with time zones for both. Other English-speaking countries are next.
Who is behind OrthoPing?
Digital Nudge, LLC, a Texas company, which also runs Orthodontext. OrthoPing is the same idea rebuilt for phones as they are now: push notifications, a chat with the office, and no per-message fees.
Request an invite
OrthoPing is onboarding practices one at a time so each gets a proper walkthrough. Tell us about yours and we'll set it up.
Prefer email? hello@orthoping.com