Expanding marketing beyond an organization may be the key to solving the dental industry’s workforce challenges.
Bob Rubino, CEO of Sharon, Mass.-based Qualitas Dental Partners, recently spoke with Becker’s to discuss his DSO’s strategies for expanding in the Northeast and recruiting providers to key areas.
Editor’s note: This response was lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: How does Qualitas Dental Partners plan to continue expanding in the Northeast?
Bob Rubino: We look at all of our partnering practices with the opportunity to expand because there’s no lack of patient demand. The only thing that’s inhibiting us is capacity, either in provider and staff or in physical plant. So, as we look around, we’re trying to figure out how we expand each of our locations to benefit the area. It’s tricky because to find providers, you really need to have good connectivity with universities. You need to understand where dentists have been out for a period of time and are looking for a better home. You really have to work the recruiting angle very hard and build these alliances. That’s what we’ve been working on, and it’s bearing a lot of fruit.
We’ve also spent a lot of time marketing New England in order to attract dental talent out of major cities. For instance, we have three large dental universities right in Boston. Many of those [graduates] want to stay in Boston. Their whole socio-economic fabric is all in Boston. It’s only later in life that they want to come out into the suburbs. Well, the suburbs have a lot of people and they have a lot of need, but they don’t have a lot of access to that care. Part of our mission is to try to attract people into these wonderful places. We have a video that talks about New England. We have pictures of snow and skiing, we have pictures of beaches and boating, we have pictures of food — all of those things to lure people and say New England is a really wonderful, cosmopolitan place to live.
If you go to any of the Chambers of Commerce and say, “Give me your best marketing materials to talk about the area,” they’re not great. We have had to go out with our own money and our own time and resources to build some quality materials to convince people that coming to New England is something special. So far, we’ve added many providers that way. We’ve transplanted many people who didn’t necessarily give New England its due, but it’s every day we have to do it. We’re adding a valuable service to the area because we don’t want to see practices go dark. We don’t want to see providers leave the area or retire without replacing them. Eventually, there’s a whole crop of dentists who are going to retire. They must be replaced, or the problem of access-to-care is going to get worse. We are organized to help alleviate this problem.
