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Seeing the Whole Patient: How Rebis Health Uses CBCT Interpretation to Put Airway at the Center of Care
A Colorado practice built entirely around airway health found a partner in BeamReaders that makes expert interpretation part of every patient visit, and changes what they see.
Lisa Coburn, DDS · Director of Airway Health, Rebis Health, Colorado
Rebis Health started as a different kind of sleep clinic. The founders want to understand why patients aren't sleeping well and investigate what could actually be done about it.
That question led them to recruit Dr. Lisa Coburn, a general dentist with 22 years of experience who had spent the previous four years building her own expertise in airway dentistry and was in the process of founding a dedicated airway practice.
In June 2025, Lisa joined Rebis Health part-time as Director of Airway Health. By October, the undertaking proved so meaningful that she sold her general practice to join Rebis Health full-time. Because Rebis Health's caseload is built entirely around airway and sleep evaluation, clinical indication for CBCT spans nearly every patient she sees. Each scan is sent to a BeamReaders oral and maxillofacial radiologist for interpretation.
At Rebis Health, initial treatment planning appointments run 90 minutes, long enough to comprehensively evaluate what's going on. When the BeamReaders radiology report is ready, Lisa often has it open on one screen alongside the patient's CBCT scan. She walks through both with the patient, reading findings aloud, pointing to images, connecting what the radiologist identified to what the patient has been living with.
The effect is immediate and tangible. Patients who have spent years being told they're fine or only given the option of a CPAP and sent home, see color-coded images of their own airway, with the passages and measurements rendered clearly.
For many, it's the first time the dots have been connected, and the picture becomes complete. The conversations and treatment plans resonate in a new and profound way. Lisa describes moments of quiet in the room, patients leaning forward, registering what they're seeing for the first time and finally understanding the why.
"I get to say: this is a real radiologist who reviewed your scan. And I'll read some of the findings out loud. It legitimizes what I'm telling them."
Many of Rebis Health's patients come in chronically tired, frustrated, sometimes on medications that haven't helped. They've had braces and seen other providers, yet nothing has connected the dots. Lisa and her team's expertise, in conjunction with an oral and maxillofacial radiologist's read on the CBCT image, starts connecting them.
Lisa describes a patient whose airway measurement was so reduced that their imaging software struggled to generate a reading:
"When I see some of these reports, I have to pause. Because I can see their whole past. I can see them as a baby not sleeping well, as a wiggly kid in class who couldn't focus, as a tired adult who never knew why."
Lisa feels that when planning a structural intervention that affects jaw position, a two-dimensional image isn't sufficient, as she can't see what's changing in the third dimension.
"We can make the teeth aligned and pretty, but both jaws might be shoved back into the throat."
Without a three-dimensional image, the anatomical boundaries of the airway like the skull base, spine, jaws, and adjacent soft tissues, never fully come into focus, and neither does the treatment plan built on top of it.
Lisa knows this not only professionally, but on a very personal level. Surrounded by elite athletes, she skis double-black runs and mountain bikes throughout the Rockies. Yet she still found herself struggling to go uphill without getting off and pushing. She just assumed she inherently lacked the endurance her friends had.
However, when she got back her own BeamReaders report, it showed her own airway was extremely narrow. Three sets of braces over her lifetime had straightened her teeth, but no one looked at what was happening behind them in the airway. With this new insight, she is actively exploring treatment options and is excited to see how it impacts her stamina.
"Turns out, I have a tiny airway and I can't breathe. I just didn't know."
Rebis Health's diagnostic approach took a significant step forward when Dr. Kevin Boyd joined the team in 2025. Dr. Boyd, a distinguished pediatric dentist and educator, is no stranger to BeamReaders. He recommended integrating BeamReaders OMRs, who have advanced training to identify anatomical risk factors for obstructive sleep apnea, alongside the practice's own clinical review.
Applying our OMR's knowledge about the anatomical boundaries of the airway to Rebis Health's cases meant the reports arriving in Lisa's hands were already calibrated to the clinical questions she was asking and an invaluable tool to help her communicate what she was seeing to her patients. As a result, BeamReaders reports have become a standard part of every new patient file, not just an occasional add-on.
"I wouldn't feel safe taking a CBCT without BeamReaders looking at it with me."
Lisa has found that reviewing the BeamReaders reports for each patient isn't just helping educate her patients, it has become its own clinical education that she credits with accelerating her own expertise faster than courses alone could.
At this time, airway dentistry has no licensing board, specialty designation, or standard curriculum. Practitioners are needing to piece together expertise through CE courses, mentors, and repetition. Lisa spent a year feeling uncertain before she felt like it clicked. She wants other clinicians to know that uncertainty is normal, and that it shouldn't be a reason to wait.
"We weren't taught this in dental school. Orthodontists weren't taught it. Nobody was. It's not your fault. You just have to start somewhere."
She also points to what dentists uniquely have access to: the CBCT scan. Every patient who gets one has their airway on record. Whether or not the scan was taken with airway in mind, a trained radiologist can see what's there.
That data, she argues, is already in the room. The question is whether someone is looking at it.
Rebis Health is a Colorado-based interdisciplinary clinic focused on the root causes of sleep and airway disorders. The practice brings together sleep physicians, functional medicine providers, and airway-trained dentists under one roof, with CBCT imaging as a standard part of every patient evaluation. Dr. Lisa Coburn leads their dental and airway program.
