Hey there, dental professionals and industry enthusiasts.
Picture this, it's October and you're in the
middle of one of the most transformative experiences
of your career. You're at the Becker's Fall
Future of Dentistry Roundtable in the vibrant city
of Chicago, fresh off an incredible 3 days
at the Hyatt Regency.
Imagine yourself inspired and invigorated after attending captivating
keynote sessions by none other than the legendary
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Lila Elite, and the extraordinary
professional basketball player, Caitlin Clark. See yourself engaged
in lively discussions, exchanging ideas, and collecting a
stack of business cards from fellow dental experts
and potential partners.
You've networked with over 350 attendees and learned
from more than 80 speakers who are at
the forefront of dental innovation.
You sat in on educational sessions exploring topics
that elevate dental care as a critical element
of whole person health. You've witnessed firsthand how
digital technology is revolutionizing
patient outcomes
and how both large DSOs and independent practices
are flourishing. Get ready to transform your career
and don't miss out on this incredible opportunity.
The Becker's Fall Future of Dentistry Roundtable is
from October 30th to November 1, 2024.
Get registered by going to beckersdental.com
and clicking on the events page.
Hello. This is Arianna Portallatin with the Becker's
Dental and DSO Review podcast. I'm thrilled to
be joined today by doctor Matt Carlson of
Comfort Dental.
Doctor Carlson, thank you so much for being
here today. Just to start off with, can
you introduce yourself and tell us a little
bit about your background?
Of course. Yeah. My name is Matt Carlson,
and,
I went to Temple Dental School. I graduated
in 2004,
so I just hit 20 years
being a practicing dentist. I currently practice in
Denver,
on South Denver location,
with Comfort Dental. I've always been with Comfort
Dental for my 20 years of clinical dentistry.
I also have
a different role in Comfort Dental in regards
to,
recruitment of dentists,
trying to acquire new talent,
help with marketing,
and
also
just try to help our practices
across the 10 states where we're located
and manage,
patient flow and,
be as successful as they can.
Great. Thank you for that.
And what are some of the biggest issues
that you're following in the dental industry this
year?
Due to my role in
acquiring new talent for Comfort Dental,
I have the opportunity to talk to a
lot of
dentists, whether they are still in dinner school,
they're recent grads, or kinda more seasoned docs.
We have the opportunity to speak with them,
and
we really try to focus on how we
can help them become more successful.
And as most people know,
dental school,
is
a tremendous expense financially for many of these
docs.
And
we try to help educate
young docs on
pitfalls that they can fall into,
as far as making the right decisions
upon completing their
dental school and what they can do to
be most successful.
And we do this by
explaining
kind of the dental landscape
and what it looks like for many of
these
of these new grads and how we feel
like Comfort Dental
and help them achieve
clinical and financial success
at a much faster pace
than
most of the other opportunities
out there.
And once we have them in the organization,
we talk a lot about
kind of their recent trends in dentistry right
now, whether it's,
you know, technological
proficiency or how we can focus things on
the patients and how they can run a
successful
practice. We pride ourselves to comfort dental by
having a much lower
average overhead
than
the national average of
of most general practice dental offices.
K? And we really focus on
helping these young docs become leaders
and how they can
run successful practices,
how they can adapt
to certain situations.
Because
our docs get a lot of reps and
they're able to see a lot of patients,
We really want them to adapt to these
clinical settings
quickly and but there's a lot that goes
into that. Right? We've gotta be compliant. We've
gotta,
understand
some of the programs out there,
how we can do everything
properly.
So there's a there's a whole lot of
things, but mainly our focus
is on younger docs and how we can
help them become successful
as well as our existing docs and how
we can help them maintain their success.
Okay. Great.
And I'm also curious. What are you most
excited about when it comes to dentistry right
now, and is there anything that makes you
nervous?
Well, what am I most excited about? Well,
I still practice clinically.
So I I still feel like I'm in
the trenches. I can still talk to these
docs about emerging trends and things like that.
You know, we try to,
stay up with technology.
There are a lot of technological advances that
are going on right now, a lot that
we're
implementing into our practice.
Comfort Dental, we do not consider ourselves the
DSO
because the docs own the practices
100%
in the offices. Comfort Dental does not own
practices. We just help to
run them efficiently. And so
we introduce
technological
advances,
to our docs while still helping to maintain
access to care,
for many, many patients. We're a new patient
driven organization.
And so,
there's a lot of innovative ways that we've
been able to drive
new patients to our practices.
I think what makes me most excited though
is just to see the success of some
of our younger docs and how they didn't
think it was possible to achieve success and
see so many patients and do so many
procedures in such a short time out of
out of dental school, and it it is.
Yeah. That's great.
Is there any specific technology that you've, added
recently at your organization that you could speak
to?
Yeah, sure. So, most of our practices have
introduced CBCTs into their offices.
You know, at some point that will become
standard of care for
many different procedures if it isn't already.
We also have introduced,
Overjet Interrupt, many of our practices, which is
kind of the AI
version of helping you, just to identify,
any pathologies on x rays and things like
that.
You know, when I started
dentistry as many of your listeners did, everything
was PDF to do,
you know, any type of fixed
result now because we're scanning any of our
crowns or
implants or bridges
and we're
always staying ahead of it. I think one
thing that we're trying to look ahead and
introduce is how we can communicate and interact
with patients
on a digital level and not just the
old traditional phone calls. We're trying to interact
with patients and engage them in ways that
will
keep them,
in the in the office and keep them
engaged
and regularly attending
their dental visits.
Okay.
And what will the most effective healthcare leaders
need to be successful in the next 2,
3 years?
I think there's a tremendous amount of competition
in the dental field right now.
When I graduated from dental school back in
2004,
there were approximately
3,200
to 3,300 graduates nationwide.
And here in 2024,
I think it's close to 7,000.
So there's a tremendous amount of competition for
many of these organizations. And so we need
to maintain
our practices and make them attractive
to some of these younger docs because
these younger docs they are concerned about many
of the trends of over saturation
of making sure that the office they choose
is up to date with technology
and that they're able to see,
enough patients
because,
you know, they do need to service this
debt. Right? When you graduate from dental school
and and you've got $500,000
in student loans and then you have no
idea
how you're gonna pay it off or even
the process to pay it off,
you need to plan ahead. And
you need to be in a situation where
you're able to successfully service that debt. So
we as dental healthcare leaders
aren't aware of that, then it's gonna stagnate
growth and,
dental graduates will choose to to work somewhere
else.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's definitely interesting.
And, you know, saying that you have been
in the industry for about 20 years, what
do you think has been your biggest takeaway
from your your time in in dentistry?
My biggest takeaway.
Well,
I I still enjoy dentistry immensely.
Mhmm. I think that
it's,
it's such a
undervalued
asset in in many regards that you can
include increase the quality of life
of patients with not,
you know, not a full mouth rehab, but
there's simple things that you can do to
help patients live a better quality of life,
whether it's a geriatric patient or whether it's
a young adult. There's there's simple things that
can be done to help them. And access
to care is important. With Comfort Dental,
our doctors can choose to accept any type
of dental insurances that they do, but we
end up seeing a lot of kinda low
income blue collar patients where many other offices
almost
not shut the doors, but they don't see
many of those types of patients. And so
we have the ability to see patients from
all socioeconomic
groups, and it's very rewarding to be able
to see the changes that have come in
the dental health care industry where those patients
now have much more access to care, and
they're able to receive adequate treatment, and the
doctors are able to be reimbursed properly for
that type of care.
Yeah. Great.
Well, thank you so much for joining us,
today, doctor Carlson. It's been a pleasure working
with you, and speaking with you today, and
I look forward to connecting with you again
in the future.
Thank you for having me on. I really
appreciate it. Yeah. Definitely. Have a good
day.