For the entire history of the profession, dentists have been enculturated and trained to be surgical repair people. Their educations encompassed pathology and anatomy, which enabled them to diagnose disease, dysfunction, and aesthetic issues. Another part of their training was learning how to “fix” the destruction caused by disease and improve aesthetic issues. These skills were — and continue to be — the building blocks that fuel the dental economic engine. In this context, a dentist’s identity was a highly skilled, hands-on technician, restoring the teeth and gums to health and beauty. This required constant learning and improvement in advanced clinical techniques, computer technology, and customer service, along with continually growing knowledge of business infrastructure and business processes.
Dentists’ Changing Roles
Over the last two decades, however, business requirements for dentists have steadily grown more onerous and complex. Progressively increasing management and HR demands, expanding requirements for analytics, more specialization for managing reimbursement and purchasing, steadily snowballing demand for better customer service and convenience, and expanding marketing methodologies have all been thrown into the mix.
The increase in management and ownership demands has prompted more dentists to turn to DSOs to alleviate the burden of these tasks. This movement from private practice to DSO is happening at a steady pace, and in turn, dentists are reevaluating just who they are. An existential shift is happening: dentists are going from small-business owners to integrated members of dental companies.
Even in the DSO scenario, dentists retain the title of technician: repairing and restoring teeth and gums. But as artificial intelligence and robotics gain popularity, diagnosis and treatment planning are done by computers, and dentistry is delivered by dental therapists and eventually robots, who will dentists be? What skillsets will they need? What personality and psychological profiles will best fit this new model of dentistry? What will determine a dentist’s compensation? An existential conundrum lies ahead for dentists, dental schools, and their professional organizations.
Pathways to Success for Dentist-Entrepreneurs
In my view, to succeed in this new environment, dentists will need to become technology specialists: authorities in computing. Authorities in artificial intelligence. Authorities in robotics. Professionals in managing complex integrated mechanical functions. This will occur within DSOs with senior non-dental executives managing the business functions.
In addition, as dentistry is more united with medicine and becomes vertically and horizontally integrated, prevention will be a pressing outcome. Dentists today basically pay only lip-service to prevention, considering that their economic engine is driven by repair, not prevention. But as the payment system leans toward outcomes and values, a shift from repair to prevention will come with it.
Solo practitioners are not a fit for this future. With AI, Big Data, cloud computing, applications that identify appropriate diagnosis and treatment plans, identification of evidence-based best practices, and the push to become integrated into primary care, the days of the solo practitioner are numbered.
— Marc
Read more about the future of dentistry here.
