One of the biggest challenges facing DSOs is overcoming the negative reputation that comes with being a large entity, according to Ash ElDifrawi, chief commercial and brand officer at The Aspen Group.
Mr. ElDifrawi recently spoke with Becker's to discuss obstacles facing DSOs in 2024.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What are some of the biggest challenges facing MSOs and DSOs right now?
Ash ElDifrawi: I think the biggest challenge is how quickly consumers expectations are changing. Healthcare, historically, has always been a laggard on how fast it moves as consumer expectations change. Whether it's Amazon getting in the business, private equity investing in the businesses, what you're starting to see is consumerism coming hot and heavy into this area. So consumers have very different expectations. [I think] that's a challenge for most DSOs because how do you keep up with that when you're managing thousands of different locations that have different owners or providers when you can't hold them accountable to a single consistent experience? That's a big challenge because consumers expect that ... How do other DSOs continue to move up the curve on that promise for consumers? The other thing that's really challenging for DSOs is, how do you convince the providers that they can have it all? What I mean by that is, we are built around providers and consumers. We see providers as our consumers as well. For us, the promise to our providers is you can provide better quality care, do really well financially and have the quality of life you want, and we invest a lot to make that happen, but I think for a lot of DSOs the question is, how do you do that? It always feels like there's a trade off to make.
The other one is I think there's a ton of misinformation about that concept of corporate dentistry that we have to overcome because we still need to bring dentists into the fold and convince them this is the right way to go. This is a story that I think the industry struggles with because, in my view, the concept of corporate dentistry is seen as a bad thing, but if you think about different analogs of things that have become corporate, it generally makes things better if [companies] are investing in the customer experience versus the bottom line. Uber lost billions of dollars trying to make it better for consumers. So did DoorDash, but they took something that was pretty crappy and inconsistent, delivery and so on, and turned it into something, but they didn't do that by being greedy. They did that by spending billions of dollars on the customer experience. So what corporate tends to do, if you do it right, is actually make it better for consumers, and then, hence, make it better for providers, not the opposite. So I think DSOs have to continue to be able to convince and demonstrate to providers that this is a better way of doing this, not a worse way of doing this.