For better or worse, much of the dental industry is continuing down the path of consolidation. But where does this leave private practices?
Trevor Lines, DDS, a dentist at Dentists of Chandler (Ariz.), connected with Becker's to discuss the fate of private practice.
Note: This response has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: When examining the future of the dental industry, what do you think is the fate of private practice?
Dr. Trevor Lines: I don't know how many holdouts there are going to be. Because I've run my own private practice before, I know how hard it is and how much stress it is. The job of being a dentist is very stressful as it is. It's a hard job. And when you add on top of that keeping up with compliance issues, making sure you're recruiting and maintaining a team and keeping up with technology, that's going to be a huge problem for private practices.
The way that I see it going is that people will just opt out because they're going to go, "It's too hard. It's too much. I don't want to do it." I see the market consolidating until all the inefficiency has been removed from the system. To me, what that means is that consolidation continues until there's some kind of steady state of two to three or four big players owning 50 to 60 percent of the market.
In that kind of environment, I just don't see a space for private practice ownership. There might be some that do it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say they're crazy. It's just not going to be fun.