Orthodontic Products (12/19) reports, “The American Association of Orthodontists (AAO) Board recently met in St Louis and approved policy language on medically necessary orthodontic treatment.” Orthodontic Products reports that the AAO “will support bifurcated policy structure characterized as traditional orthodontic cases and medically necessary orthodontic cases, to include the use of diagnostic codes (SNODENT or ICD10) in lieu of diagnostic indices.” Additionally, the AAO “will call for universally accepted diagnostic records (intra-oral and extra-oral photos—panoramic image and lateral ceph) for claims submission” and “will support the use of auto-qualifiers to determine medical necessity rather than more subjective indices; and will advocate for higher reimbursement for medically necessary cases.”
At today's DICOM WG22 (DICOM in Dentistry) meeting held at the Radiology Society of North America at McCormick, the ADA SCDI told us that the ADA has funds to hire a consultant for the technical DICOM aspects of the visible light project dealing with images and templates.
A Structured display is a view of various images at once. The intent of this standard is to allow for various entities to share a set of images, and be able to all seem laid out the same way. An application could be, for example, the ABO board exams: the student could submit the images in a specific DICOM template, which he or she could generate with any DICOM compatible application that would support such functionality, which, hopefully at some point, most orthodontic software package would support.