This month, dental professionals spoke with Becker’s about financial challenges, organized dentistry, DSO strategy and workforce trends.
Here is what six dental professionals told us in October:
Corey Anderson, DDS. Owner of Affordable Dentures & Implants (Bridgeport, W.V.): Dentists are facing greater difficulties outside of our control than we like to state publicly. As a longstanding ADA and AGD member, organized dentistry has not effectively advocated for dentists or solutions to dental economic conditions of today. As such, organized dentistry has not lived up to the challenges faced at present by dentistry. Historically, advice was to join organized dentistry, but this might no longer be helpful. Time will tell.
Why some DSOs have gone ‘upside down’: Exec
Dylan Bates, CEO of SALT Dental Partners (Phoenix): Organic growth is mission critical in being an integrated operating company. Gone are the days where you can just aggregate revenue and EBITDA and make it for the long haul. That train is at the end of the line. It’s unfortunate that there have been quite a few groups that have lost their way, become over-leveled, and have real challenges. We take a very close eye on that because many of those doctors that joined a DSO that ultimately becomes upside down — it’s their practice, it’s their brand, and if they’ve trusted that DSO and the leadership with their practice and with a lot of rollover equity, and that equity is now impaired or diminished or gone to zero. I hate to see stories like that. There’s too much of that in dentistry, and we know how that happens. We’ve seen it numerous times.
DSOs are now shopping among themselves — what’s driving the trend
Mark Greenstein. Chief Growth Officer at Heartland Dental (Effingham, Ill.): So many of these [groups] grew in this 2018 through COVID period, so they’re less than 10 years old, and they grew just because interest rates were low. They didn’t put the energy into thinking about how to actually create value. I think they realized a few years ago when they couldn’t sell, now what are we going to do? So, they started to do the things that Heartland always does, and they’ve created more valuable assets. The quality of what’s out there now is better. Pricing expectations are more in line with the value that’s actually been created. They’ve actually started to create value in several dimensions. There are more doctors that have been there for a longer period of time, so it’s not just churning through doctors. That, to us, is a real signal of stability, how embedded they are with their communities and the overall quality.
What it will take for oral surgery practices to stay independent
Lee Kojanis, DDS. Co-owner of Premier Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Group (New Jersey): We need policymakers to completely reshape the medical and dental insurance landscape. Each year, patients pay more for insurance and doctors receive less in reimbursement. Denials are at all-time highs, which leads to delays and higher out-of-pocket costs for patients. Contracted rates rarely go up, and it’s extremely difficult to negotiate. Right now, the only ones benefiting are the insurance companies.
The workforce trends that will dominate 2027
Eric Linden, DMD (Woodcliff Lake, N.J.): The shortage of auxiliary dental healthcare workers in the United States, such as hygienists and assistants (both certified and non certified), will continue to get worse. There is no end in sight. High inflation and lower reimbursement rates for the dentists and specialists are creating a dental health workforce death spiral.
State dental boards will be facing mounting political pressure to allow even more liberal guidelines to “incentivize” interest in entering the dental field. There will also be pressure on salaries for the owners of private practices, DSOs, dental Institutions, federal clinics and schools to keep the dental workers at their current positions and for new hires. There will be pressure on the federal government (if they care about dental health) to intervene. If there are not any interventions, then the quality of dental care will suffer even further and create an unimaginable crisis. In the end, the patient will be worse off.
What’s behind dentistry’s broken economics? 7 dentists weigh in
Robert Trager, DDS. Dentist at John F. Kennedy International Airport (New York City): The biggest policy that is out of control for most dentists is to not be in control or to not be able to defend against data breaches of patients’ records and personal information. An uninformed employee or a simple mistake such as opening the wrong link or attachment that seems harmless can lead to a data breach. Congress has to find a way to avoid these mistakes from happening in healthcare and corporate relations. Too many scammers are getting away with these scenarios and people are having to pay a ransom. All dentists should have a policy in place with their computer operations so that these data breaches won’t occur. The ADA or state and local dental society should have courses informing their members about data breaches.
