Destination Dental, led by Lynn Pierri, DDS, recently received approval to build a dentistry-focused ASC in Hauppauge, N.Y., the first of its kind, after a five-year process. The facility will have a maxillofacial ASC, a multispecialty dental center, a digital design center, a teaching center with live surgeries, a medical spa and a dental laboratory.
Dr. Pierri connected with Becker's about the five-year process to earn approval for the facility and the impact the ASC will have on the community.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: What excites you most about a dentistry-focused ASC?
Dr. Lynn Pierri: Seeing it come to fruition will be the most exciting thing. It is a concept that has been developed over the years. I've been in practice for 37 years and I tried to take concepts from everything that I've experienced. I developed a medical spa with tons of great equipment. I love teaching and I love taking courses, so I wanted to have a teaching facility where you could reach the latest of everything and have live surgeries and teach people in the community. It seems that to have the best care you have to have an in-house lab, and we've evolved digitally to do that, so we brought the best equipment that we could get our hands on. When COVID hit dentistry, nobody wanted dentistry in the hospital, it was not considered a priority at that time and the reimbursement levels were low. The main hospitals kind of put dentistry on the back burner, so this ASC provides the community with the ability to provide dental care without compromising.
Q: What impact do you see this facility having on the community?
LP: Basically, it has everything. You could come here and get and basically get all your oral needs taken care of from all the different specialties in dentistry — endodontics, periodontics, prosthodontics, oral surgery. You're able to give comprehensive care so you're able to streamline treatment planning. It reminds me of the Mayo Clinic in the sense that you can see one specialist and as you're walking down the hall, the other specialist that you're going to see already has the treatment plan and everything is so streamlined and so comprehensive that nothing is falling through the cracks. You’re not just pulling out a tooth or doing a single root canal. You're looking at the person as a whole and you feel like you're giving the best care. As far as I understand, it is a one-of-a-kind facility because nobody has all those moving parts under one roof.
Q: Over the past five years, what have been some of the biggest challenges that you've had to overcome to get the facility up?
LP: There have been a lot of challenges. It started with delays with different architects and construction. Then COVID hit. Then the prices started to increase. The interest rates increased. The supply chain issues happened. The entire county got hacked and everything came to a complete standstill for six months. It's basically been one thing after another — plus all the other obstacles that normal practices have, including staff issues, reimbursement issues and the difficult economy. So it's been challenging, but we're on the finish line now.
Q: How does it feel to finally get approval and be right on the doorstep of the finish line after all these years and all these challenges?
LP: It's hard to express in words. When my husband and I drove up to Albany and we sat in the room to go through the approval process for an ASC and when they put our name up and everyone said "I" for approval, my husband and I had tears in our eyes. It was such an emotional experience to finally see it become a reality. Of course that's just the approval and we have to build it, but it was so moving and it felt so great.