Best Of Fives For Dentistry Pdf

[Alana Fekety]

AmericanFamily Dentistry proudly celebrates over 11 years of tradition and clinical excellence as the premier dentist in Kendall Park, NJ. Our commitment lies in providing comfortable, personalized, and affordable dentistry for all residents of Kendall Park and surrounding areas. We make it our mission to stay at the forefront of ever-changing technology to deliver the very best in modern dental care. Step into our dental haven and experience a home-like atmosphere with gentle, personalized care for every patient.

At American Family Dentistry, our focus is on creating an amazing overall experience for each and every patient. From the moment you walk through our doors, you'll be greeted by a dedicated, knowledgeable, and deeply compassionate team of professionals. Our expertise spans across general & family dentistry, along with top-notch cosmetic services like teeth whitening, porcelain veneers, dental crowns, implants, and much more. Your dental health is our priority, and we're here to ensure your smile shines bright for years to come!

Our passion is helping families and patients of all ages enjoy a lifetime of great oral health. This starts with building trusted & caring relationships with every patient upon your fist visit to American Family Dentistry.

We offer a wide variety of cosmetic smile enhancements to whiten teeth or fix blemishes, misalignment & gaps. This starts with simple cosmetic bonding procedures, all the way through advanced smile makeovers.

Permanent teeth replacement solutions for a single tooth, multiple teeth and full mouth rejuvenation. We offer great pricing on implants that includes the placement of the implant, crown and abutment. Learn more about our dental implants here.

Dr. Kalaria at American Family Dentistry has a deep understanding of the unique oral health challenges faced by patients of all ages, from young children to grandparents. Her expertise extends beyond basic dental procedures, allowing us to provide comprehensive care tailored to each family member's specific needs. This continuity of care fosters trust and comfort, creating a positive dental experience for everyone in the family.

Here at American Family Dentistry, we strive to create a warm and inviting environment, making dental visits enjoyable and stress-free. We build strong relationships with our patients, which aids in open communication and encourages good dental habits within the family. With a focus on preventive care and early intervention, we help families maintain optimal oral health, promoting healthy smiles that last a lifetime. Choosing American Family Dentistry ensures that your entire family receives top-notch dental care.

We truly appreciate of all of our patients that have spoken kind words and left positive reviews about our practice. This helps us be recognized as a best Somerset dentist on Expertise and also receive Top Dentists Awards from New Jersey's Top Docs. Helping our patients achieve great oral health and creating dream smiles is what gives us the most pleasure!

Dr. Kalaria is a graduate of New York University College of Dentistry (NYU) and has been practicing dentistry since 2009. She has a wide range of experience in providing the best family dentistry, cosmetic dentistry, implant and restorative dentistry.

"Been going here for many years - Dr Kalaria and her staff are wonderful, pleasant and thorough with their care. Definitely get all my questions answered, and know that I can trust them for any dental work I get done."

"Dr. Kuma Kalaria is a wonderful and the most thorough, compassionate and caring dentist I have ever seen. My family has been going to her office for many years. She is Professional and does not try to push any extra procedures or services. Her office is clean and comfortable and her staff is very friendly. It's always a pleasure to go in for dental work."

As part of my application to dental school, I was required to submit a signed paper showing that I had completed 100 hours of shadowing in dental offices as a way of demonstrating my commitment to the field and providing some real-world context for what I was attempting to sign up for.

I completed some of those hours with a younger dentist who was about eight years out of school in the major metropolitan area of Salt Lake City, some with various specialists along the Wasatch Front, and just a handful with an older dentist in the quiet and cold Cache Valley of northern Utah. While my time in the busy offices of the specialists and the younger doctor made me more excited to be a dentist compared to the relative inaction of my time up north, it is the sage words of that rural doctor, wizened by nearly 40 years of practice, that left the biggest impact on me as I started my dental journey.

Well . . . now I know, and all dentists know, exactly what the sagacious doctor was talking about. He was forecasting the precipitous rise of private equity into the dental landscape, a phenomenon with which our friends practicing medicine are already familiar. He was talking about the rise of the DSO.

Before we get into the nuts and bolts of the DSO world, let me be clear about my intentions for this column. This is not intended to be a comprehensive or complete analysis of the complex world of DSOs or the myriad variables any given dentist would consider when it comes to doing business with them. I am confident that most of you practicing dentists know much more about this than I do, and I defer to your knowledge and experience. Further, I welcome your participation in educating me and our peers based on those learnings and lived observations.

The DSO gets an equity share in an established cash flow-positive business and obtains varying levels of control over how the business is run going forward (every DSO and DSO contract is different). The equity position of the DSO is a majority share in most cases. Some states mandate that a licensed dentist be the majority owner, which occasionally requires the original owner to retain a 51% holding, but most DSOs work around this by having a licensed dentist as a shareholder and thus, speciously claiming that a dentist is the majority owner.

You can see why this is so appealing to the private equity world. You get ownership in and control over a historically inelastic industry without having to train, build, or borrow to get there. It is a plug-and-play investment that has both tangible property (real estate and equipment) and goodwill (the established patient base).

There are somewhere between 100-200 DSOs backed by private equity right now. The largest controls more than 1,000 practices with the smallest owning only a few. You have probably seen or been treated at some of the big ones: Aspen Dental, Heartland Dental, Pacific Dental Services, Western Dental, Smile Brands, MB2 Dental, Affordable Care, or Dental Care Alliance.

First, they are looking to simplify their professional life. They want to keep doing the procedures they enjoy with patients they have come to know over many years, but they want to do them without the ever-increasing burdens of EMRs, HIPPA compliance, employment law, sterilization testing, recertifying radiographic equipment, website management, etc.

Second, they want to get as much for their practice sale as possible, as this often represents a meaningful portion of their retirement nest egg. Increasing profitability and finding a well-qualified buyer starts taking up more and more bandwidth in their minds.

The first way is that the DSO purports to increase profitability by reducing overhead, implementing more efficient processes, and increasing marketing. This can all raise the metrics used to evaluate a practice at the time of the sale and put more money in the retiring dentist's pocket.

Many dentists in their late 30s to early 50s have several areas of their financial lives that would benefit from a large infusion of cash. They may have debt they are anxious to resolve in the form of student loans, practice debt, equipment loans, or building loans. They have kids who are about to go to college, and they have undersaved for their college funding goals. Many are looking to upgrade from their starter homes or make considerable renovations to their existing home. Others have woken up to how their delayed retirement planning has put them in a mathematical bind, and they now understand how a large lump sum investment into the market would aid in shoring up their retirement projections.

Both of these motivators were evident when I informally polled my old OHSU classmates at our dental school reunion in the summer of 2023. In a room full of 40+ dentists mostly in their mid-30s to mid-40s I heard a lot of:

Even though the clinical practice of dentistry is considered a SSTOB, the administrative services provided by a DSO (owned by the dentist) are not. A DSO is a QTOB, or at least it can be argued to be such.

This gets very complicated very quickly, so if you are considering this, work closely with your tax professional. My point is that the QBI deduction (set to go away by the end of 2025) has been a motivating factor for some to give birth to their own DSO.

Young dentists can be drawn to working with DSOs for reasons that are both practical and generational. According to the ADEA, 18% of graduating dentists intend to work for a DSO as their first job as a new dentist.

Enter the DSO offering a steady paycheck, benefits, and sometimes even the option to buy into the larger DSO conglomerate with its promise of 15%-25% returns in the years ahead. That can be a very appealing point of entry or a long-term career plan for a new provider who has already taken on seven figures of debt at 7% just for the opportunity to work and to have an overpriced roof over their head.

There is also a generational component at play for young providers. Most of the Gen Z dentists I talk to are not looking to work full-time until they are 70 (yes, the average retirement age for dentists has crept up from 65 in 2001 to 69 in 2018). They have seen their peers take six-figure jobs working from home, flexible work schedules, and great benefits. They have seen the toll that burnout has taken on the Gen X and Millennial dentists ahead of them, and they have a stated desire to achieve a more thoughtful work-life balance.

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