Macroeconomic challenges combined with low payer reimbursements have led to a new level of financial strain that the dental industry may not have ever experienced before.
Two dental leaders recently joined Becker’s Future of Dentistry Roundtable to discuss how dental practice economics have shifted this year:
Note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Vilas Sastry, DMD. CEO of Teledentistry.com: For those who don’t know, I actually had my own DSO in Las Vegas, and I started it at the perfect time — 2006 — and we went [up] and then straight off a cliff. It’s an interesting thing to see what’s happening now because there are a lot of parallels between what I experienced during the recession to what we’re seeing now during this sort of tumultuous time. The demand side evaporated during the recession. People just weren’t coming in. They were coming in specifically for pain-related stuff … All the elective stuff went out the window. You flip it to now, and you have a workforce issue, which is there is demand but you can’t supply it.
Aleeza Hashmi Shafi. Co-founder and CEO of Bitewing AI: I think we’re certainly in the middle of a paradigm shift in which [during] Covid, there was a demand issue. I think what we’re seeing now, in addition to cost pressure and margin pressure, is that it really is a unit economics problem. We’re seeing that the dental business model for the first time in a long time is almost flipped upside down, where costs are increasing far more than our structural payer reimbursement. As a result of that, we are finding ourselves in a place where sustaining dental operations is much harder than ever before.
