To all of our wonderful patients and their families-welcome back!

I hope you and everyone around you are well. Thank you to many of you who had such nice things to say about our videos and communications to keep you updated on what we were doing, and how things were going in the office.

Thank you for all of your patience and understanding during the past 10 weeks.

The NYS governor’s office cleared all dental offices in the state for reopening under the Phase 2 state mandated reopening guidelines. Dr. Sara Sullivan, myself, and our entire Comizio Orthodontics team are pleased to be getting back to helping give all of our patients’ healthy and attractive smiles.  As we reopen, I would like to assure all of our patients and their families that Comizio Orthodontics is committed, as we always have been, to providing a safe and clean environment for everyone.  We have always been appreciative that in many of the thousands of reviews which we have received over the years from patients, our office is recognized for being clean.

Please do not call our office to request to be seen right away. We have not forgotten about you, and our administrative team has done an excellent job working remotely on the cloud to reassemble our schedule three times, and to accommodate patients. We have seen many patients for “emergencies”-broken wires and loose brackets- during the pause, as well as distributed many Invisalign aligners, with remote virtual monitoring.  If you are not already accounted for on the schedule, you will be soon. Please be patient and understanding of the task at hand which, frankly, is already well on its way to being managed well. We have not forgotten you!

We understand and respect anyone who has general reservations about “re-entering” the public domain, and we will accommodate you as best as we can. However, I can assure you that our office will continue to be an unlikely environment for anyone to be uncertain if measures are in place to prevent them from catching anything. I would like to outline, below, measures we have taken in our office to ensure a safe visit, and what our protocol will be for seeing patients on a regular basis.

RECEPTION AREA

Things may look a little different when you enter the office. Our reception area seating has been reconfigured with fewer chairs to provide adequate separation between patients. For now, we have suspended our coffee bar, water cooler and magazine and brochure availability in the reception area. We know how many adults looked forward to grabbing a coffee to go at the early morning appointments-sorry! Obvious, but somewhat fashionable “sneeze barriers” are now positioned as an interface between our administrative team at the reception desk, and the reception area. These are also now in place in our consult and home care instruction rooms and none of them hinder our communication with patients. Our self check in touch screen is also suspended for now, and our administrative team will “check” patients in. We have, starting in the reception area and throughout every path of patient travel in the office, many hand sanitizer stations. Every chair in the reception area will be disinfected after each use, and entry door handles every hour.

RULES FOR ALL PATIENTS AND INDIVIDUALS ENTERING THE OFFICE

To facilitate proper and cautious utilization of the reception area, we are requesting that only patients being treated enter the office. Exceptions will be for parents who are required to accompany patients to New Patient Visits and for younger patients who are not comfortable entering the office alone.  For some other visits, one of our team may request that a parent accompany children into the office. Our scheduled has been re template to slow traffic flow of patients through the office.  This has also been made possible by our new virtual remote monitoring of our Invisalign and younger Future Stars Complimentary Orthodontic Guidance Program patients. We will text patients if we feel we need to slow the flow of traffic through our reception area.

1. Anyone entering the office must have a facemask in place. No exceptions.

2. Upon entering the reception area from the front door, everyone must first use hand sanitizer, and then be seated. Every chair in the reception area will have been disinfected since its last use.

3. For patients currently in treatment, a member of our clinical team will come to the reception area to retrieve you. The clinical team member will look a bit different than you normally expected. They will be wearing a protective gown, face mask and face shield. They will take a 1 second no touch infrared forehead thermometer scan of each patient, and ask a few brief health questions. The patient will then be asked to stand for a moment, the reception chair will be disinfected, and then the patient will be accompanied to the treatment area. For our new patient suites and consult rooms, all door handles and chairs will be disinfected after each use.

FUTURE APPOINTMENTS

Whenever possible, future appointment will be made by texting or phoning parents me their car during the appointment or, for adult patients, from our chair side treatment area computers. Although it will be perfectly fine to have a computer generated appointment card, we will make an effort to avoid using them if possible, so have your smart phone calendars ready!

TREATMENT AREA

As it has always been, all of our treatment chairs in our clinical area are separated by six foot paneled and glass partitions. Again, this is not new, as we originally designed our office for privacy and safety in our treatment areas. For our clinical team members, in addition to our new fashionable personal protective equipment gowns and gear, we have taken measures to intensify our sterilization, formulated plans to mediate patient flow and placement and coordinate every patient’s treatment procedure for best strategies of safety and movement throughout the office.

If I may say, objectively, but assuredly, our office is probably one of the safest places you can visit right now. We have worked hard to make it that way, and we look forward to seeing you.

Thank you again for your patience and understanding and, as always, keep smiling!

Sincerely

Dr. Joseph Comizio

Dr. Sara Sullivan

The Comizio Orthodontics Team -  Erika, Alise, Martina, Cynthia, Alba, Jen and Carolyn