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Welcome everyone to the Becker's Healthcare podcast series.
I'm Mariah Mohammed, writer and moderator with Becker's
Healthcare. And I'm thrilled to have with me
today Alexander Eidenbinder,
dentist at Caterpillar Dental. Alex, welcome to Becker's
Healthcare podcast. We're very excited to have you
join us today. To get us started, would
you mind please introducing yourself and telling us
a bit about your background?
Yes. My name is Alex Einbinder.
Happy to be on the podcast today,
and I'm a dentist. I own offices here
in New York,
and I'm a primarily implant dentist at this
point. I also do surgery
and manage offices.
I have 2 right now and looking to
expand
in the New York area as well as
other areas, starting my own DSL, essentially.
And one part of my philosophy is, you
know, increasing accessibility to care, you know, affordable
care
at everyday prices, essentially.
Wonderful. That absolutely sounds excellent. I'm actually in
the New York area too. I'm in Brooklyn
right now.
So I think this is a perfect next
question for me to ask you.
New York is kind of, you know, the
spot for a lot of news that's happening.
What are some of the biggest issues you're
following in dental, whether it is in New
York City,
or just in in in the nation?
Yeah. So as I said, access to care,
I think, is one of the biggest issues.
You know, there's real health disparities. And it's
not in, like, the big cities as much,
but you see it in rural areas.
There's just a lot of barriers. There's not
enough dentists out there,
but there's a lot of patients who probably
need dentistry the most.
So that's a big issue and it's not
something with a simple solution.
But if there's ways that we as providers
could keep our costs down,
we could pass that on to the patient
and really get patients into the dentist more.
I think
a lot of that starts with education, but
there's a lot of
growth in dentistry right now and technology and
everything, but I think we're starting to lose
sight of what about basic bread and butter
dentistry for the masses, for the people who
need it most who may have an insurance
that a lot of dentists have to drop
and the dentists have to drop the insurance
because
you know, the truth is that
the insurance companies are paying outdated
fee schedules.
So that's also another major problem in dentistry
that I'm following because it's, you know to
me, I think, in
dentistry that I'm following because it's, you know
to me, I think that's that's a big
disparity is that the dentists aren't getting paid
enough by the insurance company, so they're dropping
the insurances, and the patients who have the
insurance aren't getting the
aren't getting the care they need. So something
needs to be done there.
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Access to care is definitely
something that needs to be a focus point
for all of us, I would say. I
love how you say bread and butter dentistry.
I think that's a really great phrase that
kinda highlights,
you know, what you're following and what I
think all of us kinda needs to go
back to. Is there anything that is making
you excited or nervous, whether it's in the
news or anything that you're doing personally?
So, yeah, personally as well as in the
news, I think I'm most excited about, you
know, just
advancing digitally.
A, I think artificial intelligence, as we all
know at this point, we're all hearing about
that. That's a big buzzword now. That's going
to revolutionize dentistry. It is already. It's happening
right now. And all the companies are starting
to use artificial intelligence or all the relevant
companies.
And if you don't adapt with artificial intelligence
and digital dentistry and digital scanning and 3
d printing, you know, I think you're gonna
if you're gonna lose you're not gonna you're
gonna lose the race essentially,
in the next 10, 20 years.
And
for me, I think the 3 d printing
and digital technology that we have now is
just so much more advanced than taking impressions.
So that's something I'm really following. I see
every single day, you know, new advances coming
on and dentistry is really catching up, in
terms of technology. I think in the past,
15 years, dentistry was always kind of behind
medicine, but I think it's really catching up
now.
And something even more in the future that
I've been excited about is bio printing, which
I don't hear as much about because it's
so new, but this is actually using
live tissue
and printing it in a 3 d method,
just like 3 d printing, but they're finding
scaffolds of live tissue to put back into
for a bone graft or for periodontal surgery
or even for pulp. They're learning how to
print, you know, new teeth actually.
And I think that's a little bit further
out there, you know, but
that's something I'm definitely following because I think
that's, you know, changing from, you know, patching
up a filling to actually creating new tooth
structure
or an implant that's not titanium,
that's actually biocompatible
with the human body that can go into
that socket,
that's a big deal. That's definitely going to
be revolutionary.
I think on the flip side, as you
say, what makes me nervous is that everything's
going digital.
So I think there's a big issue with
data security, and we've seen that.
We've seen big companies get hacked, and there's
people out there who wanna hack companies, and
this is sensitive information. So that's something if
everything goes digital, you know, and it's all
on the computer, it needs to be safeguarded,
and that's, I think, something where that gets
overlooked a lot. That's something that needs to
grow, actually.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really, really good
insight. And, you know, data security is something
that Becker's repeatedly reports on every single day.
And I feel like every week, there is
another new break about how, you know, hackers
have hacked into some huge system.
I think it was worrying a lot of
at least the big health care systems,
as it should.
Alexander, before I let you go, the last
thing I really want to ask you is,
what would the most effective health care leaders
need in order to be successful in the
next 2 to 3 years, do you think?
Yeah. So I think
just to piggyback on what I've been saying,
you need to be forward thinking. So
today, you know, we have technology, but it's
gonna change, and things are constantly changing.
AI is improving. So you need to adapt
to the change.
You need to constantly be changing because people
who stay stagnant,
those businesses
get eaten up by other businesses, let's just
face it, because you need to
be current, but also forward looking. I think
the companies that are 5 years ahead of
the curve or 3 years ahead of the
curve are going to do better than the
ones that are just
embracing one technology,
but not constantly staying curious and learning about
what the future holds,
because let's face it, technology is advancing pretty
quick these days, especially
now in 2024,
faster than we've ever seen. So embracing technology,
but also I think building the offices that
you have, If you're a leader and you
have a lot of dental offices or medical
offices,
you need to keep good staff. You need
to retain
your key players
because without the top staff,
the dental office or medical office, it's just
a shell.
So it's all about the team. You need
to be, you know, supportive of your team.
The team wants to grow. You know? The
team just doesn't wanna just stay in a
stagnant,
you know, position and just do the same
thing every day. They wanna feel like they
could grow with the company
and that there's movement for them upwards. So
that's something definitely that I think leaders need
to work on is, you know, keeping staff
because a lot of these bigger dental companies
I see them and it's just like constant
turnover
even at the office level too, which is
difficult I think for the patients to keep
seeing new faces and having to onboard new
staff. If you could keep your key staff,
that's that's really important,
and that would help you grow your office.
And it's not easy,
but it takes, you know, like, you
know, leading and and showing your face and
being there and, you know, caring and throwing,
you know, a a quarterly event or whatever
it takes, but you gotta keep yourself.
But having a a vision of your future,
you know, you have to know where you
wanna go and kind of work backwards and
engineer it to get
there. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I completely, completely agree.
And thank you so much for those final
thoughts, Alexander. It's definitely been an informative discussion.
So, again, I wanna thank you so much
for coming on Becker's HealthCare.
I look forward to connecting with you again
soon. Sounds good. Thanks for having me. It
was a pleasure.
Thank you.