Dental organizations and DSOs should always be looking to boost efficiency and enhance their processes, and having a strong plan is an important launching point.
Being able to take in feedback from individuals throughout the organization and being able to adjust from the original plan is also crucial, according to Mark Censoprano, co-CEO at Hackensack, N.J.-based MAX Surgical Specialty Management.
MAX launched in September 2023 and has added 14 practice locations and 17 surgeons to its network and has nearly doubled its headcount to more than 300 since the start of 2024, hitting 25 total practices in November 2024.
Mr. Censoprano recently connected with Becker’s to share how the company navigates improving its processes as a younger organization.
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Question: How do you go about improving those systems and those processes? How do you find those areas that need improvements?
Mark Censoprano: It is definitely a combination of many things, including input from the surgeons themselves, the team members at the individual practices and from leadership. Each year we have an operating plan developed in terms of all of the things that we think that we need to build to build a successful and scalable organization that can grow as our number of partnerships grows. But then we’re always open. We’re very conscious of the fact that we need to be open minded and have open ears to be listening to pivot and be nimble when we need to. Here’s an example of that pivoting. I was in a conversation with one of our surgeons, who said, ‘I got a two-star rating for my practice, and I mentioned that to my treatment coordinator. My treatment coordinator mentioned that to our regional operations manager. They mentioned that to the director of operations, who then knew to bring it to our head of marketing, and then our head of marketing brought it to their team member who manages that. He asked if that was the most efficient way to address a two-star review.’
It was a great question. And my answer was probably not. It’s a great point. What do we need? What do we need to change in order to accelerate our ability to address that, that two-star review? Any time our surgeons ever have any feedback for us, we want to hear it. If you read our vision statement, it talks about shared ideas and collaboration, we’re only going to be as good as the willingness of all of our doctors, team members, support team members, to be willing to share their thoughts and their opinions. We have a plan. It’s not that we’re waiting for anybody to give us feedback. But when we hear things like that, we go out there’s something that we’re not addressing we didn’t realize.
