Welcome To Dental Beacon

If you’re a new dentist considering opening your own practice, you can earn higher revenue operating two or more dental clinics than only a single office. However, it’s important to consider several financial and non-financial factors involved in taking this big step to ensure your chances of success. The best place to start is to research the population of the area where you want to expand as well as its potential for growth.

Depending on your dental specialty, you may also want to research the demographics of the area where you would like to expand your dental practice. For example, a family dentist would want to open a new location in a community with a lot of young children and families. An oral surgeon who specializes in dental implants and other higher-end dental work – like this dentist in Chandler, AZ – would want to investigate the median income of the community to make sure that most of its residents could afford the dental services.

Create a Business Plan to Outperform the Competition

Even if you have already established one dental practice and benefit from name recognition, that won’t necessarily follow you to a new location. You will likely need to treat your expansion like a new business and create a detailed marketing plan, especially as it pertains to the competition. It will be challenging for you to compete with an existing dental practice in the community unless you have researched how to price and market your dental services most effectively.

Consider Whether You Want to Divide Your Time or Hire New Staff for Other Practices

The whole purpose of expanding to multiple locations is to earn more money. That could be difficult if you decide to open each location for limited hours to give you the opportunity to be at both. However, you will need to hire or transfer trustworthy staff to your other locations if you plan to keep each one open a full range of hours.

Plan to Reduce Overhead to Maximize Profits

In 2015, the American Dental Association conducted a survey of dental practitioners to determine their typical overhead. At that time, the average was approximately 74 to 78 percent for one practice and 80 percent for two or more practices. That means you can expect a slight increase in overhead when you expand to multiple practices. However, expansion also means the opportunity to significantly increase your income if you’re careful to keep expenses as low as possible.

Benefits of Multiple Dental Practices for Patients

People are more mobile today than ever. They may visit the dentist in the community they work yet live 45 minutes from there. When your patients move, having more than one dental practice means they can continue to receive treatment from a name and staff that they already trust. That alone can provide an excellent marketing tactic for your dental practice.

Consider Meeting with a Tax Professional

Whether you ultimately decide to pursue expanding your dental practice to multiple locations or not, it’s a good idea to meet with a professional who can explain the advantages and disadvantages of various tax structures. With careful planning, he or she can help you retain as much of your profits as possible.

All businesses need a steady influx of new customers, including dental practices. As a dentist, you need to take a unique approach to marketing because the practice of dentistry requires building a level of credibility and trust with people you don’t yet know.

After all, most people aren’t too keen on picking just anyone to clean their teeth or perform oral surgery. Below are three dental advertising techniques to focus on in the new year that can help your patient list grow.

Dental Postcard Mailing

If you think direct mail advertising is a thing of the past, consider these statistics from Dentistry Today. A 2016 research study indicated that only 22 percent of email recipients opened messages from a doctor or dentist. In contrast, 60 percent of people who receive a postcard from a local dentist follow through by visiting the website or calling for more information.

You can obtain a list of addresses near your dental practice from the United States Postal Service. When you send out the postcards, be sure to include a strong call to action or incentive to increase your return on investment.  There are a number of companies that offer done-for-you dental postcard marketing campaigns, and they frequently will give you the best bang for your buck so you can spend your time doing dentistry.

Pay Per Click Advertising Campaigns

You won’t get visitors to your website, calls, or new patients if your site doesn’t rank for the most popular terms people use when searching for a new dentist. Working with a marketing company that understands and specializes in the field of dentistry is your first step in attracting the type of traffic you need.

Your marketing specialist will conduct keyword research to identify the best words and phrases and then start your search engine marketing (SEM) and pay per click (PPC) campaigns. The higher you are willing to bid, the higher your dental website will return on the search engine results page (SERP) when potential patients search for a dentist in your local area.

Create a Strong Social Media Presence

People expect the businesses they interact with to be online, even their local dentist office. If your practice does not yet have a Facebook page, make it a priority to create one. This is the perfect opportunity to show of the skills of your dentists and the personality of your dental practice. Just keep in mind that a Facebook page is more about connecting with your patients and less about advertising. Some things to consider posting include highlighting a different staff person each month and providing a step-by-step guide for specific dental procedures.

Facebook gives you plenty of opportunities to advertise your practice without annoying current and future patients. For example, you can pay to boost posts so more people see them. You can also create advertising campaigns on Facebook to display ads to people in your target demographic.

While you should not expect instant results with these three marketing practices, you will see your hard work and patience rewarded soon enough. Lastly, it’s important to measure the effectiveness as you go along and to adjust as necessary for even better results.

There is currently a lot of discussion in the business world about making individual companies into Learning Organizations.  The idea is that a company will continually transform itself by focusing on and investing in the learning of its members and employees.

Along those lines, here are a few random thoughts on making both the individual dental practice and also the entire field of dentistry into a learning organization:

• A learning organization is analogous to a colonial organism – it has specialized parts with specialized functions.
• Each part has responsibilities for “intelligence gathering”, which it reports back to the whole for strategic or survival purposes.
• A learning organization continually questions and challenges its own ethos.
• A learning organization in the business world is one that places high value on its view of the outside world – i.e. its “strategic vision”.
• Information that either confirms or conflicts with the strategic vision is constantly acquired; assessed for truth, validity, and applicability; and used to modify the present strategic vision if indicated.
• A learning organization understands that change is constant, inevitable, and often desirable.
• Backed with a shared organizational vision of the outside world, a learning organization knows when and where to pick its fights.
• A learning organization has a shared vision of its internal and external marketplaces.
• A learning organization must be governed by people who are trained leaders, who are continuously educating themselves in personal and organizational growth matters. Each and every position, at each and every level, is important.  At a learning organization no person may just “fill a vacancy”.
• A learning organization recognizes that it “doesn’t know what it doesn’t know”, and seeks and welcomes the vision of outside resources to help it expand its understanding and its influence.

“The standard of care is the level at which the average , prudent provider in a given community would practice. If treatment for which a recognized specialty exists is in question, then the standard of care is defined by the level at which an average, prudent specialist would practice, even if the treating doctor is a generalist.”

Or is this really the definition? It is the legal definition, but 99% of the dentistry performed in this country is never reviewed in a court of law. Ninety-nine percent of the dentistry performed in this country is accepted by dental consumers but is never bench-marked, is never judged, never graded on its technical merits. As a colleague once quipped, “Our patients judge us only by the experience.” Is there a more valid means of discussing Standard of Care?

AIDA wishes to highlight, in all of its educational materials, a consumer driven model of dental organizational theory. Dentistry as an institution has two consumers—patients (external) and dentists (internal). Consideration of any issue of import to dentistry must recognize the positions, perceptions, and needs of each of these markets to achieve organizational effectiveness.

The “true essence” of the Standard of Care as seen from outside of our profession is that it is whatever the public will accept.

Doesn’t that burst a lot of bubbles? How many of you are still working on that concept of, “If you build it, they will come.”? (Big business has dropped this premise, by the way, many years ago.) How many of you are taking the courses, investing in the technology, changing management experts, redecorating, and all of those other customer-experience things? They all work, don’t they, to a certain extent? But have you seen a fundamental, earth shattering change in your practice because of these changes? Have you seen fundamental change in your industry? Has there been a mass effect in raising the public’s IQ with the advent of intraoral cameras? Do you have patients calling up asking for crowns because they noticed a fracture line across a marginal ridge, although asymptomatic? We as a profession have done a lousy job of educating our patients. In marketing parlance, we have not created value. We have over-concentrated on adding value to services which themselves are not understood. Picture the executive using his new dental plan, “just to check it out”, and realizing that, “Well, the staff didn’t offer me a cup of coffee, but the cleaning was free, and it sure didn’t take very long. I got back to the office fast!” Patients have not been educated to value our services as they should.

The cynical among you are now asking, “OK, so what is the answer?” And, like most awesome endeavors, the answer is not easy or well defined. But we can learn together how to address the dilemmas posed by educating patients to demand Optimal Dentistry. Let’s examine patients’ belief systems about dentistry. Let’s see how the true essence of dentistry is defined, in the minds of patients.

The True Essence Of Dentistry

The true essence of our profession is defined by public opinion, which in turn is formed by:

1. Today’s Media
2. Today’s Third Parties
3. Today’s Employers
4. Society’s Collective Memory/History of Dentistry
5. Today’s Government
6. Today’s Organized Dentistry
7. Today’s Dentists

The essence of dentistry may only be directed by understanding and addressing each of these seven factors. Organized dentistry may or may not understand this, but has been remarkably reactive, rather than proactive, in all of the biggest issues to come before dentistry. Consider the AIDS crisis, the amalgam question, hand piece and waterline safety, OSHA, decline of the traditional doctor/patient relationship, the malpractice crisis, etc. To think that you define your own essence is a basic but common organizational flaw. Dentistry exhibits this flaw. Customer (patient) perceptions define the true essence of dentistry.

Do your part to increase the standard of care in dentistry, like this Beaufort dentist does. But also understand that your part should not be confined to the chair-side aspects. If you demand a practice of excellence in dentistry, your wish cannot and will not be achieved without organizational excellence in dentistry. If you expect it, and vote so with your hearts and your wallets, then it will be so, sometime. If you vote with your time and your talent, it will be so in your lifetime.

The following premise is one that comes up often when discussing managed care in dentistry:

The practice of dentistry and dental pathology are fundamentally different from their counterparts in medicine.

This is how the argument typically goes:
Dentistry is a fundamentally preventive profession. We have already achieved the success in positively affecting the epidemiology of our most common diagnoses. Dental disease, by its nature, is seldom catastrophic, is generally preventable and easily palliated, and is orders of magnitude less expensive than medical care. Dentistry is already outpatient-based, and thus is an example of the cost-containment that medicine is trying to achieve. The ratio of generalists to specialists in dentistry is already what the medical profession is evolving to achieve. Therefore, dentistry does not need managed care, nor is it attractive to managed care companies, because the major cost containment is already done.

Another View

There is one basic counter-argument to this premise. No one ever said that the managed care organizations are altruistically evolving health care for the good of the masses. They are doing what any reasonable corporation does: making profit. Profit for the corporation, profit for the stockholders, and (in case you haven’t read a financial magazine in the last five years) incredible annual bonuses, often in the tens of millions of dollars, to their top management and officers. This profit is the reason for existence of any major corporation. It’s what they are supposed to do. They do not have fundamental fiduciary responsibility to the patient. The patient is a part of the “product”, grist for the mill.

Dentistry is a thirty seven billion dollar a year industry that third parties used to accept risk on. Dentistry is, in its essence, a cottage industry of competitive individuals with no idea of corporate mindset, no big picture, and no sense of modern organizational theory. It has never marketed its basic product. The public has a love/hate relationship with the profession that is almost genetic. More than fifty percent of its “prospects” don’t avail themselves to dentistry’s product. More than twenty five percent of active dentists don’t belong to its national organization. History has shown that, like medicine, you can find a dentist in any community who will sign any contract, no matter how bad or under what potential liability, and accepting of any amount of potential ethical dilemmas toward patient care. Imagine this narrative presented at a managed care organization board meeting:

“Let’s look carefully at this situation. Here is an industry in which the competitive nature of the providers can be turned against themselves. Plant some seeds, give a few doctors in each community special deals to get our panel started, give significant savings on annual dental premiums to industries which are strapped, like education, airlines, municipal workers, and hospitals. Start discussions about panels closing. Create a need to belong. As we already know from our medical experience, we can truly create a self-fulfilling prophecy in such an industry. The numbers are great. Wouldn’t our stockholders love to get 20-25% of 37 billion flowing through our hands? We can easily swing the public by marketing. We know how to do that well; our return on investment will be high. The dentists will never respond. Maybe someone will give dentistry some bad press that we can take advantage of. Here is an industry, ladies and gentlemen, here is an industry that is ripe for the picking.”

Our foremost premise in dealing with today’s health care climate must be to focus on what we are doing, not the third party payers. That starts with offering exceptional dental care, just like this Raleigh dentist does.  But at the same time we also need to understand the real world like the big boys do. We need to understand consumerism, mass psychology, marketing, and modern organizational theory. Effective change can be accomplished in dentistry, to the benefit of dentists and patients, without mentioning the words “managed care”. Let’s learn about and focus on today’s patient, from a sociological and behavioral basis. Let’s see how good dentists and Optimal Care™ can effect the marketplace. Once we understand, then we can build a new world for dentistry in which we are still included and wanted—by the patients!

If you’re looking to save money on dental expenses for yourself, your family, or a group you represent, a dental savings plan is the way to go. You can save between 10 and 60 percent off your bill at the dentist just by being a member and paying a small monthly premium. More than 100,000 dentists are part of a nationwide network of providers that allow patients to save money by presenting their dental savings plan card. That means there is an excellent chance that your dentist is part of the network.

How Does It Work?

You need to select a dental plan provider and have your membership application processed before you can begin using your dental discount card. When considering plan administrators, be sure to compare the following:

• Credentials of the dentist
• Location of the practice
• Your personal budget
• Whether the dentist performs specialty services you or a family member may need in the future

Many dental savings plan providers allow you to complete an application online. You can print out your membership card and begin using it to save money right away. You simply present your card to a member of the dental office staff to receive an immediate discount. There is no paperwork to complete and no waiting for reimbursement from the plan administrator.

Dental Costs Can Be Significant and Unexpected

When you owe a bill for dental implants or the work you had done cost more than expected, it can be difficult to come up with your portion of out-of-pocket expenses. Like many people, you probably don’t think beyond your bi-annual trip to the dentist that is normally covered by dental insurance providers at 100 percent. That leaves you in a difficult spot when you must deal with sudden trauma to the mouth or extensive treatment of an oral health condition. A dental savings plan helps you manage these costs while providing valuable peace of mind at the same time.

Benefits of a Typical Dental Savings Plan

Dental savings plans offer several benefits in addition to their simplicity and affordability. You can expect to enjoy the following benefits once you apply for membership and pay your first monthly premium:

• A solid return on investment that can pay out as much as 10 times what you pay for annual premiums
• Ability to choose from over 30 regional and national plans with participating dentists from multiple networks
• No treatment restrictions based on your past or present oral health
• Discounts go beyond preventive care to include savings on the services of dental specialists
• Excellent customer service before and after you enroll in a plan
• No benefit maximums or deductibles to meet

If you have additional questions about dental savings plans, start by asking your dentist. He or she will get you pointed in the right direction.

A recent innovation to be brought forward by the entrepreneurs in orthodontics is the orthodontic management company “concept”. This entity will buy practices, manage them, advertise them, hire staff and orthodontists as needed to operate them, and take a percentage of the profits for their efforts. This model is already well established in the medical community. In fact, as well as almost ubiquitous in the pharmacy profession, it is active among optometrists, veterinarians, and other professional groups as well. The concept of turning over all of the business of a practice, so that one can concentrate on the patient care aspect is somehow very appealing to many oral health care providers. The only problem is that it won’t work in the long term.

At some point in the future the cost of the care proposed will come to loggerheads with the quality of care desired and quality will lose the battle. Every day dental practices dentists make decisions about procedures, materials, auxiliaries, etc., as to whether the expenditure of funds will be justified by the rendering of a higher quality of service. This is what makes a practice unique, what makes it personal. These decisions are often made with the patient sitting in the chair, as the dentist weighs the best options for the situation at hand.

These decisions should not be made with the economics as the prime consideration. If office overhead goes up 2% but quality of care goes up as a result, to most dentists that is a worthwhile expense. That is a decision that must be made by the individual practitioner. The problem lies in the fact that the assessment of practice worth -not value, but worth- as in the quality of care, the daily environment, the satisfaction level of the patients, etc., can only be made by the practitioner. No outside entity is in a position to quantify these intangibles. Dollars and percentages are much more easily assessed from afar. As a result, these two perspectives will have to eventually battle for control of patient care, and if an individual practitioner has forfeited -or sold- his or her autonomy that battle will be a short one.

An equal concern over this corporate approach to practice is it’s effect upon the next generation of orthodontists. If large numbers of practices are owned by management companies doesn’t that limit the choices of graduating orthodontists? Will the new employees have even less control over how they practice than the established doctor who sold out? Won’t the “bottom line” decisions referred to earlier be even more likely decided by accountants? Will the patients be better off under such a system?

Another worry is the business stability of some of these entities. It is very unlikely that all of those companies presently being formed are going to survive. Suppose an orthodontist signs on -sells his or her practice- to ABC Company which is subsequently bought out by the DEF Company. Does the orthodontist have any guarantee that the rules are going to remain the same? Suppose in an even worse case scenario, the DEF Company is subject to a stock takeover by a larger conglomerate. Can the doctor seek an annulment?

It is evident that many of these entrepreneurs, both DDS and MBA, are altruistic in their motivation. More likely, the potential profits for those “in on the ground floor” are the driving force of this movement, and all of the rhetoric about quality and relief from drudgery is designed to divert attention from the real motivation–money. Certainly not an evil, but also not in this case a positive factor in better patient care.  Yes, a dentist has to take steps to succeed as a business, ensure practice search engine visibility (that’s where new patients come from these days), advertise locally, and do all the other things that make good business sense.  But when the business of dentistry outweighs the main purpose – providing superior care for the patient – then something needs to change.

Yes, the day to day details of running a dental practice are sometimes a pain. They are sometimes a reward too. To learn from one’s mistakes, and get better at anything, offers a sense of accomplishment. Remember too, that being in charge of the details of a practice is what allows the orthodontist to decide when one works, on whom one works, what one does for a patient, what one does it with, who helps one do it, how much one charges for the service, how long they give the patient to pay for the service, how long they need to provide the service, and all of the many more details that stamp it as theirs. Are we ready to turn these details over to “big brother”? How can we believe that we will only let “big brother” decide those details that we don’t want to decide? How can we believe that our management friends will be content with only those details that we don’t wish to bother with? How can we believe that we can send them 15% to 20% of our office income each month and still have the same net income? That’s naive.

To sacrifice one’s autonomy, to turn a professional practice into one in which the decisions are made by business–not professional-people, to eliminate one’s practice from the buyable pool of practices by entrants into the profession, and to create an entity that is a potential take over target for the insurance industry is selling the future of the profession. If any one who has run a successful practice for 20 years must get that added few dollars when they sell their practice, it is a factor of greed, not of need.

Here are some action steps that could change the face of commitment in Organized Dentistry at the grassroots level:

1.  See the Opportunities Afforded by Participation

Participation does not have to be completely altruistic.  Specialist have known that for years.  They have used their participation in Organized Dentistry to market to general dentists.  What can you get from your participation besides a warm sense of accomplishment?  How about the promotional value that you can build within (or external to) your practice centered on your stand promoting quality, not profit, in dentistry.  How about the financial value of building your indelible reputation for stand-up righteousness when you go to sell your practice?  The opportunities are only limited by your imagination and foresight.

2.  Understand That What is Good for Dentistry is Good for You

If dentistry does better as a profession, you will do better.  You are a proxy voter in the future of the “Big Business of Dentistry”, a $47 billion dollar a year industry (by comparison Coca Cola is $44 billion).  Get out there and “Kick Butt” in the dental marketplace, you will kick butt in your office as well.  Invest yourself in your own future.

3.  Understand That What is Good for Patients is Good for You

Yes, of course you know what is best for your patients.  You have all the right training and technology behind you.  Problem is, you can touch only 1,000 to 5,000 people at a time, according to the size of your practice.  Organized dentistry has the potential to touch 300 million+ patients.  The more people can be taught to appreciate and demand good dental health, the more you will be able to concentrate on your profession and less on “closings” and “presentations” and even bottom line.  If your participation in Organized Dentistry at any level can increase “External Patient Education”, then you will benefit in the wallet.  Patients are not just pathological casualties from whom money can be extracted.  They are our partners and stakeholders in dentistry, and they will do their “jobs” better with better education and information, at the benefit of all.

4.  Make Your Dental Organization Stand for Something More Than Dinner and CE

These days CE is a lousy reason to go to a monthly meeting.  The best CE is no longer available locally.  This is one of the main reasons for the lower attendance noted in most dental societies and study clubs.  Dentists don’t want to waste time going to meaningless meetings, unless they are stagnant dentists.  By reinventing your dental society or study club into an organization that stands for the advocacy of dentists, dentistry, and patients, real dentists will have a real reason to participate.  Stand for Optimal Care, and do something about it.

5.  Make Your Organization Visible

Visible in the dental community, visible in the lay community.  It will be good for each individual dentist, and it will be good for the patients.  Improving access, having an indigent patient day, volunteerism, supporting “green” issues, will all increase the value of the “shares” of the stakeholders in dentistry.  Be even more visible; create a marketing consortium of Optimal Care dentists.  Market that your group has pledged never to compromise quality to profit.  And police your group.  Be loud, be proud.

6. Make Mentorship a Priority

Zig Ziglar preaches that you can get anything you want if you help enough other people get what they want.  Young dentists are dying for direction, and very few entities are offering it to them.  When was the last time you took a resident or the new dentist next door to a meeting on your buck?  Have you opened your door?  Your Mouth?  Your heart?  Young dentists are being taught that managed care or employee status is to be their future.  Create an alternative.  A direct benefit to you will be the nurturing of an associate, a potential partner, a potential buyer for your practice.  Be an alternative to managed care.