About Us
In a summer job during college, Reid taught himself to program in COBOL and operated an IBM 360 system when not programming. A year later, he took the first undergraduate computer science course taught at Georgia Tech. Today they have an entire school dedicated to computer science. Upon graduation, he went to work for NCR selling mainframe computers. The largest sale was to Grady Hospital in Atlanta.
Reflections prior to the 2022 AAO in Miami
As I am packing the bins for the AAO Annual Session in Miami, I reflected back to 1982 when I attended my first AAO in Atlanta with my life-long friend Dr. Jim Davis. He had heard that they would be displaying several computer systems that might help him in his private orthodontic practice and wanted my computer background to translate for him. What we saw was 6 or 7 dental software companies demonstrating their dental products at an orthodontic convention. When we asked about scheduling on the computer, payment plans, and printing appointments, they laughed.
One year later at the 1983 convention in Boston, we demonstrated the first software dedicated to orthodontists – Orthotrac. For the entire convention, we had doctors lined up 3 and 4 deep at the monitors to see something designed just for them.
Fast forward to 2011, I joined with some of my former co-workers to start Cloud9software – the first browser-based software for orthodontists. Instead of trying to convince doctors that they needed to buy a computer, we switched to telling them that they only needed software and could use any computer to access the data.
There have been so many advances since that day 40 years ago, both in what software can do to help orthodontists but also in the products and services that the doctors provide, such as bonding vs banding, Suresmile, Invisalign, digital records, digital x-Rays and AI. What has not changed, however, is the insurance industry. In 1982, full braces cost just under $2,000 and the insurance company would pay $1,000. Today, full cases run in the $5,000 range and insurance companies pay…. $1,000.
I am sincerely grateful to the thousands of orthodontists and staff members that I have met in the past 40 years.
It has been a helluva ride for all of us!
Our mission
Our mission is to help the orthodontic community in any way that we can. We have helped offices to evaluate hardware and software options, helped venture capitalists to learn about the orthodontic landscape and why orthodontists are different, and made presentations at multiple orthodontic meetings.