How to enroll a patient in Ortho Monitoring

Ortho Monitoring follows an aligner patient between visits through photo rounds registered to the planned tooth positions, so the clinic sees whether each tooth is tracking the plan.

Audience: Orthodontists, general dentists running clear-aligner cases, and practice managers.

You'll come away knowing: how to share an aligner case with the patient as a monitoring subject, how the patient captures their photo rounds, and how to verify the first round came back framed correctly.

Time required: Around five minutes the first time. About thirty seconds per patient after that.

Before you start

You need:

An aligner or orthodontic case in Cympha with a finished treatment plan. The case must have a saved .gvw — Ortho Monitoring uses the planned tooth positions as the registration target for the patient's photos.
The patient's email address.
The patient's treatment-start date and how many days each step runs. The patient is asked for these the first time they use the camera flow, so it helps to give them the numbers up front.

If you don't have a case ready yet, you can create one from any existing scan or import an OrthoPlus / Studio plan first. Ortho Monitoring sits on top of an existing case; it does not replace planning.

Step 1 — Open the case in Cympha

Sign into app.cympha.com and open the case from your case list. The case detail page is where the patient-share action lives.

In the case header (near the status and category badges) you'll see a Share to Patient button — only on Orthodontics, AlignerBot, and ClearAligner.AI cases. It sits next to the regular Share button (which is for colleague shares, not patient shares).

Step 2 — Click Share to Patient

Click the Share to Patient button. A dialog titled "Share with patient" opens with two fields:

Patient email — the patient's email address.
Which .gvw to share — pick the confirmed treatment-plan file the patient will see. Only .gvw files are listed.

Click Send invitation.

An invitation email from Cympha goes out to the patient. New patients get an invitation linking to the patient sign-up page; returning patients get a notification linking to the patient sign-in page. If the patient already has a Cympha patient account (for example because you shared a different case with them previously), the invitation reuses that account.

What the patient sees — a deliberately narrow page listing only the case you just shared. They cannot see other patients, other cases of yours, your case folder, or any editing tools.

Step 3 — Agree the photo schedule with the patient

Ortho Monitoring keys each photo round to a treatment step. On the patient's first capture, Cympha asks them "When did treatment start?" and for Days per step, then proposes the current step number, which the patient can confirm or adjust. Give the patient those two values when you hand over their aligners, and agree how often you want a round of photos — many clinicians line it up with the patient's tray-change rhythm.

Step 4 — Wait for the first round of photos

Once the patient sets up their account, they open the shared plan and start the camera flow.

The five orientations — Front, Left, Right, Upper, Lower — appear as tiles. The patient picks an orientation, the 3D plan rotates to the matching view, and the camera opens with the planned jaws drawn semi-transparently behind the live feed — the patient lines up their real mouth to the planned mouth before snapping.

The whole round takes the patient about a minute on a phone.

Step 5 — Verify the photos in Studio

Open the case's Studio workspace links from the case detail page and pick the Ortho Monitoring workspace.

You'll see the 3D plan on one side and the patient's photo on the other. Play through the steps in the case bar — the matching photo follows the current step automatically. Cycle through the orientations to see Front / Left / Right / Upper / Lower for each step. If the patient hasn't captured a given step, the panel says "No photo for phase {n} yet" rather than silently substituting an older photo — what you see is always from the step it claims to be.

What to look for in the first round:

Framing. The patient's mouth should occupy roughly the same proportion of the frame as the 3D model. If the photo is wildly off-axis (head tilted, mouth too far away), the patient probably ignored the alignment overlay; consider a quick note to them about lining up to the rendered jaws.
Lighting. Phone-camera flash on close-up dentition is harsh; soft natural light or a bathroom mirror with overhead light works better.
Lip retraction. If lips are obscuring the buccal corridors, the doctor's check for attachment seating and bracket position becomes harder. A cheek retractor is helpful but not required — most patients do fine using their thumbs.

If the first round is rough, coach the patient before the next one — most patients improve dramatically on the second round once they understand what the overlay is for.

What happens next

Photos accumulate per step. Each round the patient saves lands on the case, keyed to the treatment step it was taken at, and the Ortho Monitoring playback lets you scrub the plan and the photos side by side.
Missed rounds are visible, not hidden. A skipped step simply shows "No photo for phase {n} yet" in playback, so gaps in compliance are easy to spot.
When treatment completes, the photo history stays on the case for the record.

Where the photos are stored

Every photo lives inside the patient's case in your Cympha account — the same private storage that holds the case's design files.

The patient role provisioned on first sign-in has no access to other patients, no access to colleague cases, and no access to your case folder beyond the specific plan you shared with them.

Troubleshooting

The patient says they got the invitation but can't sign in. Verify the email matches what you typed in Step 2 exactly. If they typed a different email when creating their account in the past, the invitation will be sitting against the address you entered, not the one they use day-to-day. Re-send the invitation to their actual address, or have them sign in with the original email.

The patient's photos look wildly different from the plan. This is usually one of three things: (1) wrong treatment step — confirm the treatment-start date and days-per-step the patient entered on first use; (2) tracking deviation — the case is not progressing as planned, which is the whole reason you're monitoring; (3) photo framing problem — see Step 5 above.

The case isn't showing up in the patient workspace on the patient's side. Verify the case has a saved .gvw and that Share to Patient completed without error. The share is tied to a specific finished plan; if the plan was never saved, the patient workspace has nothing to load.

I want to monitor cases that aren't aligner. Ortho Monitoring registers the patient's photos against planned tooth positions, so it's built for orthodontic plans — and the Share to Patient entry point only appears on Orthodontics, AlignerBot, and ClearAligner.AI cases. It does not support implant or restorative cases as monitoring subjects.

Related how-to: see the Cookbook on Ortho Monitoring 3D playback for a deeper look at the doctor-side review experience.