TAG opened the center in July 2022 to provide free comprehensive dental care to underserved patients in Illinois. The organization has already provided more than $10 million in donated services since its inception.
Sundeep Rawal, DMD, the senior vice president of implant support services for Aspen Dental, recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss the center’s achievements.
Editor’s note: These responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How did the idea for this oral care center come about?
Dr. Sundeep Rawal: About five years ago, I was sitting in a sushi restaurant down the block with Chief Executive Officer Bob Fontana and our chief medical officer, Dr. Arwinder Judge, and we were sitting here talking about how we could best support doctors. The conversation came up [that] we are who we say we are, which is the best support organization for dentists in the world. There’s really no reason why a doctor should have to leave Aspen to go learn. The epitome of growth and development for dentists is live patient education, so we had this brain child that we really need to have a center for excellence where we can actually teach doctors new skills and allow them to grow and develop with patients.
In 2018, we decided to plant our flag in Chicago, and it’s really important to us to be productive members. The decision was made to build an educational summit here in Chicago. At the time, the legislative rules for dentistry didn’t really allow for training other doctors. We spent two years working to partner with legislators to change the law. So really, the Oral Care Center for Excellence allows us to accomplish the two really important pillars of who we are. One is being able to support doctors through lifelong growth and development and really give them the best possible way to be able to innovate how they deliver care to people.
The second pillar is we really do want to give back to the communities that we’ve been a part of and that have helped us find ourselves. We feel really strongly about this. We have our Healthy Mouth Movement we started over 10 years ago. Over the last decade, we’ve been able to donate over $40 million and serve tens of thousands of people. We have programs like our Day of Service, where we shut down all the offices across the country, take a Saturday and we come in and care for veterans. [We’ve also traveled] around to underserved areas … but if you think about care in those kinds of environments, it’s very static, meaning there’s only so much you can do. You’re only going to be there for a couple of days … It’s very limited because a lot of dental therapy that is needed is complex and comprehensive. It can’t be done in 24 hours. What we’ve been able to accomplish here is not only what I think is the preeminent educational facility in dentistry in the world today, but we’re able to give back in a way that far eclipses anything else that’s possible.
Last year alone, we donated over $10 million in donated dental services in this building delivering comprehensive care to people who need it, the underserved residents of Illinois. The other thing that having a pure physical presence allows us to do is innovate. We can make technological investments. We can adopt new technologies, new ways of manufacturing that you can’t if you’re going to do a mission trip or go to a free clinic for a day. All of this has come together [into] what we see here today at the oral care center. It’s pretty special … The countless people that have been involved in this from day one to make it a reality has been extraordinary, to say the least.
Q: Are there any other DSOs out there doing something similar of this magnitude?
SR: Not to my knowledge. We don’t just deliver care, but we deliver care in the most innovative ways possible. We leverage all of our partnerships, many of them you can see here today, to not just deliver care, but do it in the ways that are the most state-of-the-art in dentistry. Patients here get the best care in ways that are employing the very best that dentistry has — the newest, most innovative techniques [and] state-of-the-art processes, protocols and materials, whether it’s manufacturing technology, whether it’s imaging technology, or whether it’s artificial intelligence — we leverage it all in this center to be able to deliver care.
There are a lot of places that do a lot of great care from a donated services standpoint, but maybe they’ve got like two operatories. There’s just a physical limit to what they do. When I think about what we’re able to do here and the footprint, how we deliver dentistry, the type of dentistry we do, and the passion the doctors bring when they come through here, I don’t know of any other place in the world that is replicating what we’re doing.
Q: Do you see Aspen potentially opening additional centers in other states?
SR: We certainly are open to the idea. As you can imagine, this is not an easy endeavor. There’s a lot of complexity to be able to deliver this vision. There’s a full-time team that’s managing being able to ensure that every patient not just gets the care they need, but gets a positive experience, and when you think about the complexity of doing that, it’s not easy. We’ve learned a lot over the last few years, and I think we are certainly open to being able to make an impact like this in other communities. We just haven’t had the opportunity to do so yet.
Q: Are there any anecdotes you can share about how the center has helped patients?
SR: Too many to count. I have seen grown men cry because of the impact we’ve made when we rebuild their smile. There are patients who come in and thank the team that’s here because they thought a lot of doors had closed because of their oral health, and suddenly those doors are wide open. Their gratitude to the team that’s here and what they’ve been able to do is quite moving.
