Dental365's emphasis on clinical success and doctor support have helped the company continue to be successful despite the pressures facing other DSOs.
The New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based DSO recently hit 140 offices in seven states and is looking forward to continuing its recruitment of like-minded dentists in 2025.
Dental365 Founder and CEO Scott Asnis, DDS, and Joshua Gish, DDS, president of Leading Edge Specialized Dentistry, recently spoke with Becker's about the DSO's accomplishments this year and its goals for next year.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What are your proudest accomplishments of 2024?
Dr. Scott Asnis: Our experiential learning platform and our fellowship program. Our accomplishments are always tied to helping our dentists. These platforms really help our dentists enhance the quality of clinical care we offer. Our experiential learning platform is very unique and proprietary. It's a platform that focuses on the process of learning practical information through experience, not just lectures. For our new graduates, we also now have a custom, tailored fellowship program. It's a program that includes individual mentorship, case presentations [and] patient management strategies, and encourages the individual growth of our dentists and their professional development. It's also a proprietary program that is part of our Dental365 University, and I'm very proud of it. Our mandate since I started the company has always been to be the patients' advocate and to provide them evidence-based care for their dental needs.
Q: What do you attribute Dental365’s growth to this year, and were there any specific strategies or initiatives that drove its success?
SA: I believe that we grow exponentially each year because our core values attract like-minded dentists who feel strongly about achieving great clinical outcomes, and they want to join us for that reason. We focus on the right things. We focus on doctor-staff engagement and the success of the office, as opposed to disseminating business metrics. We're dentists. We help our offices provide concierge care, giving them the most up-to-date technology, such as [artificial intelligence] and our SalivaScore. It gives the dentists every opportunity to achieve really good clinical outcomes. As Dr. Gish and I will constantly tell you, dentistry is hard, and if we can somehow try to make it easier for them, that's really the initiative that has driven us.
Q: What kind of challenges did the company have to overcome this year to ensure success? How did you overcome those challenges?
Dr. Joshua Gish: We consider ourselves to be very unique. I think our management style is unique, our focus is unique, and I think our outcomes as a result of those are unique. However, the challenges we face are definitely not unique. These things are pervasive throughout the dental industry. I've spent a lot of time listening to other dental leaders and colleagues in the field, and we all really experience many of the same challenges — the headwinds of wage pressures [and] staffing scarcities. While it's getting a little bit better, we continue to focus on more engaged recruiting and some best practices for our work environments. The challenges of finding quality dental professionals that share our practice philosophies continue this year. We really try to do our best job of screening candidates and finding the right people to come and join us, and fortunately, our reputation is preceding us. We're really seeing the fruits of our labor by doubling down on the quality of dentistry that we provide because it's attracting really high-quality practices that have high-quality associates, and also bringing in other people. There's actually word getting out into the universities and into the higher education institutions. [Graduates] see people who have graduated and left their programs years before them, and they're seeing now and saying, "Oh, they joined Dental365. This could be a great home for me as well," so that's getting out and really helping us a lot.
The other thing we're doing is investing in our learning management platform. We're doing a lot more robust auditing and mentorship. We're providing a real dental home where clinicians can come in to practice the way they want to, and see a growth in their future. So, we're improving patient care and we're also engaging our doctors, so our doctors are aligned. They're aligned with our clinical goals, they're aligned with our culture, and they're able to come in and some of the seasoned doctors are actually able to then mentor and share some of their expertise with these new doctors. That's been working really well for us to help overcome a lot of the challenges that everybody else is facing as well.
Q: What are your primary goals for the organization in 2025?
JG: Our primary goal is meaningful growth. We've seen, unfortunately, a lot of other DSOs that have just focused on growth without the quality aspect. For us, it's really meaningful growth. We're looking to continue our scaling into new regions. We're trying to increase density in the existing geographies that we're in by partnering with exceptional dental providers. That's our key, [to] just elevate dentistry in the regions that we're in and meaningfully grow into new locations.
We have been, and continue to be, very sensitive to building our infrastructure so that it's [aligned] with our growth. We don't want to fall under the weight of our scaling. We've seen a significant increase in partnership interest from some of the best general and specialty dental practices in our regions, and even beyond. That's where we're getting our first look at some new locations for us into new states. [It] comes from internal referrals and people who have heard about us, which is really exciting for us. Being 10 years old at this point, to now see that type of growth and interest from people who have heard about us and like what we're doing, it means the world to us. We're excited to see our growth into the Northeast. Our reputation is preceding us, and that's been a real exciting event for us, and we're looking forward to more of that next year. We're optimizing our existing practices. We're building on our momentum. We had an incredible 2024 and the growth is only going to continue into 2025.
Q: What makes the Northeast region such a hotspot for DSOs?
SA: It's great to be where a lot of our doctors are part of the finest dental schools in the Northeast, with Tufts University and Harvard and [Boston University] and [New York University] and the University of Connecticut and Rutgers' dental school. We're very happy and lucky to be part of those universities and have professors who work there. So we're very comfortable in the seven states we're in.
Q: Dental365's expansion strategy has previously been described as "aggressive, but selective." Will that stay the same next year, or does the company plan to approach expansion differently?
JG: I think we'll continue to say that we're going to be selective. That's critical to what we do. Like I mentioned before, just Frankensteining a business model together is not working for a lot of other companies. So, we're practicing with partners that share our core values. We don't sit in a boardroom looking at a map, pinning locations that we think would be great for dentistry or for Dental365. We're always looking for opportunities and kind of filtering through our inbound referrals and then figuring out from there what makes sense, and that's really how we're going to continue to grow. So, we're aggressive because we want to grow ... we're going to continue to be aggressive, but we're going to continue to be selective. We're still, like I said, filtering our inbound referrals. There are a lot of opportunities, and we've really spent a lot of energy and time fine-tuning this evaluation process and the acquisition process and onboarding our teams to see the true mission statement that we have. We're approaching everything the same, same thoughtfulness [and] taking our time. We feel some of the tides are changing, and we think we position ourselves to be really great and able to support not only individual offices, but even larger platforms, as we continue to grow.
Q: Dental365 has long advocated for the use of salivary diagnostics in dental practices. How do you see this technology advancing in 2025?
SA: We are on the cutting edge of technology with salivary diagnosis and the field is rapidly changing ... We feel that saliva diagnosis and saliva testing will be the new blood testing soon in the future, and it really has been great for our patients to be able to see what kind of inflammation is occurring in their mouth. The point-of-care testing that we do is frictionless. It's easy for our patients. They don't have to wait, it doesn't get sent to the lab, and it has been an unbelievable success. It is so great to have our dentists really take part in being the future of dentistry. It's point-of-care testing that we do for salivary markers that help drive proper diagnosis of periodontal disease and patients' acceptance of critical preventive maintenance because we are the advocates of our patients. We help our dentists be their advocates, and this is one way that we can do that.
JG: It's important to understand that the technologies that we embrace and make available to our providers help our dentists to be better clinicians. Our comment of dentistry done right means staying on the cutting edge of technology. So, not only are we helping our patients, but we're actually helping the doctors who are partnering with us to be better dentists and to do better dentistry, which we've said from the beginning is really hard to do. So, the more tools you have in your tool belt, the better you're able to provide a diagnosis and help patients understand how to improve their dental health, [and] the better we're going to do for the community. That's the focus of all this.