My Practice My Business: The Clinical Business of Dentistry

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Increase clarity, confidence, and connection before the patient leaves your office, and the need to crowdsource disappears.

You won’t completely eliminate this behavior, but you can dramatically reduce it by controlling when, how, and why patients feel the need to “shop” your treatment plan.

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I want you to ask: 

Who’s making these decisions in my office to “hang up” on effective training opportunities? 

What power do they hold? 

And what opportunities are we missing? 

One of the most surprising things we encounter is when dental offices hang up on our team before hearing a single sentence about the training. Think about that for a moment. Here is a training program specifically designed to help dentists and their teams understand laws that directly impact their profitability, patient communications, and insurance interactions, and some offices choose to end the conversation before learning what is being offered. This was a free training opportunity sponsored by the UDA, and taught by those writing and passing dental insurance reform legislation, meaning Tracy and I at MPMB.

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Organized dentistry has a choice:

            -Either listen to your remaining members and tackle insurance reform, or

            -Continue with platitudes over principles

Every ADA administration, every ADA leader, every state dental association has said the same thing over and over again, “you signed a contract, there’s nothing that organized dentistry can do for you.” This statement has been a false narrative for as long as I’ve been in practice, and it’s why Tracy and I finally said, “enough is enough.” It’s why the two of us have lobbied, written dental insurance reform bills, and got them passed into law. It’s why Utah leads the nation with dental insurance reform. Yet, the ADA has remained silent on what Utah has done, or more specifically, what Tracy and I have done for dentistry here in Utah, and in other states.

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I had so many titles for this podcast. But, I think you'll get the point...

• “The Dentist Who Feels Guilty Charging Patients… And Why It’s Destroying Their Practice”
• “Why ‘Being Nice’ Is Costing You Hundreds of Thousands in Your Dental Practice”
• “The Hidden Reason Some Dentists Struggle Financially (It’s Not Insurance)”

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The dental profession is facing a quiet but growing crisis, one that many practicing dentists feel every day but few leaders are addressing effectively.

At the heart of the issue is a disconnect between current economic realities and the leadership guiding the profession.

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Today we talk about the code changes we requested for the CDT Code Book, and what we requested to be removed in the CDT Code Book. What followed was not what we thought would happen.

The individual who placed the anesthetic verbiage at the head of each category admitted he should have never placed it there, and why the ADA coding department shelved it to next year.

Are they worried about the fallout?

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This episode isn’t just the end of our 10-week campaign, it’s the beginning of a conversation that the American Dental Association needs to start having.

Because if the ADA truly exists to unite the dental profession and advocate for providers and patients, then it’s time to prove it.

Utah has led the nation in dental insurance reform. We’ve passed laws that protect patients, empower providers, and hold insurance companies accountable. And yet, silence. Not a word of recognition. Not a mention. Not a single update from the ADA.”

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The Link Between Fair Pay and Team Prosperity

When insurance companies dictate fees and force write-offs, the first people to feel it aren’t the executives in corporate headquarters, it’s the dental teams.

When practices lose thousands every month due to unfair reimbursements, that’s money that can’t go toward staff raises, bonuses, continuing education, technology, or cotton rolls.

But when we passed laws that protect fair pay, from ending forced write-offs to banning bundling, that money stays where it belongs. Practices can finally reinvest in their people.

We’ve seen offices increase wages, offer benefits, and even shorten workweeks because they’re no longer working twice as hard just to break even. That’s a win for everyone.

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When we started this 10-week series, our goal was simple, to help dentists bill for what they do and get paid fairly for what they do.

And the reason that’s so important goes beyond money. It’s about honesty. It’s about transparency. It’s about patient trust.

Every law we’ve discussed, from bundling protections to timely filing, was built around one central belief: that patients deserve to know what their care costs, and providers deserve to be paid fairly for delivering it.

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Before this law, we started noticing something troubling — insurance companies were trying to shorten the timely filing period to just three months.

Three months might sound fine on paper, but anyone who’s ever worked the front desk knows that’s barely enough time to process complex claims, wait on coordination of benefits, or deal with slow insurance responses. As a dentist and owner, you need to better understand what your front office team members deal with each day.

Sometimes patients take a few weeks to give updated insurance information, or you’re waiting on primary insurance to pay before submitting to secondary. In many cases, that process can easily stretch past three months.

So that shorter window wasn’t just inconvenient — it was setting offices up to lose legitimate reimbursements.

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