Any orthodontic appliance, designed to your prescription

A good prescription describes the appliance the way you would describe it to a technician you trust: what it is for, which teeth it engages and how, which components it carries and where, what it is made of, and what it must not do. It does not need to be long. A retainer prescription that names the clasp type on each abutment, the labial bow's extent and the acrylic coverage is complete. A habit appliance prescription that describes the crib's position and the teeth it is anchored to is complete.

Where the prescription is silent, the design follows the convention for that appliance type and says so in the notes, so that you can change it before approval rather than discover it at delivery. Where the prescription asks for something the scan does not support, such as a clasp on a tooth with no usable undercut, the design raises it as a question rather than building something that will not work.

A sketch is often the clearest prescription for an appliance of your own design. It is read alongside the scans, and the first version is built as a proposal for you to correct.

The appliance is reviewed in the browser on the scanned arches, so that you see it on the patient's teeth rather than on a diagram. Comments can be attached to a tooth, so that a note about a clasp is unambiguous, or to the design as a whole. Each round of comments produces a new numbered version, and the earlier versions are kept, so that a change can be compared and, if necessary, reversed.

Approval is explicit. You approve a version, and that version is the one exported. The boundary matters more for a custom appliance than for a standard one, because there is no named service description to fall back on: the approved geometry is the specification.

The chairside instructions and material specifications are written from that approved version. They state the wire gauges, acrylic or resin and metal the design assumes, what to check at delivery, and which elements can be adjusted at the chairside without changing what the appliance does.

A design can be fabricated well or badly, and a laboratory that receives a file it has not seen before may interpret it. Production oversight is the option of having the fabricated appliance checked against the approved geometry before it reaches you: the laboratory's output is compared with the design for the position of components, the fit to the model and the materials used, and any discrepancy is reported before delivery.

Oversight is arranged with the laboratory you nominate and follows its workflow; it does not replace the laboratory's own quality control, and it does not make Alignodontic DPS the manufacturer. It exists so that the appliance in the patient's mouth is the one you approved on the screen.