Healthcare operators and analysts covering the business side of dentistry. Benchmarks from ADA HPI, BLS, and Dental Economics. Dental Intelligence. No Noise.
Insurance
A practice submitting a million dollars of insurance claims a year at the national average denial rate is handing about $28,500 annually to paperwork it will never collect. That money does not show up as a loss anywhere an owner looks: it hides inside write-off lines, inside a billing
Knowledge Base
A single-location general practice collecting $1.6 million can be worth $1.69 million or $2.57 million heading into Q4 2026, and the $875,000 spread has almost nothing to do with which broker you hire or how many letters of intent you stack up. It has to do
Practice Management
The clearest dividing line between a practice that collects $500,000 and one that collects over $1,000,000 isn't the marketing budget, the number of chairs, or whether there's an associate. It's that the smaller practice reappoints about 60% of its hygiene patients
Industry Trends
Two general practices collect $900,000 a year. One sells for $720,000. The other sells for $1,188,000. Nothing separates them but a margin line neither owner looked at closely until the year they decided to quit. Here is the claim, and plenty of brokers will argue with
Dental Economics
In the average general practice, an hour of doctor chair time collects somewhere near $679 and keeps roughly $258 of it. The hour right after that one, the one nobody filled, still costs about $326 in rent, payroll and equipment notes, and collects nothing at all. That gap is the
Insurance
Hold your fees flat for one more year while your costs move the way they've moved lately, and a $1.2M practice quietly hands back roughly $36,000 in profit without a single patient noticing. ADA Health Policy Institute data shows practice revenues up 1.4% against expenses
Financial Strategy
A 4% Fee Increase Is the Floor, Not the Answer If your fee schedule has sat still for two years, you have handed roughly seven percent of your pricing power to your suppliers, your lab, and your hygienist's raise. The Producer Price Index for dental care services rose
Financial Strategy
Sell 300 memberships at $33 a month and you've just signed a $118,800 fee schedule with yourself, and unlike a PPO contract, nobody is going to audit it for you. That's the part owners miss when they bolt a membership plan onto the practice: you
Practice Management
A single-doctor general practice running a 12% hygiene no-show rate and a 4% restorative no-show rate is handing back roughly $67,776 of production a year, and most of that owner has no idea which half of the loss actually matters. They will spend the next quarter buying text reminders
Knowledge Base
Collections are rising with patient spending, but only your collection rate shows whether your revenue cycle works. The benchmarks to measure against, and the math on recovering the gap.
Insurance
Two Plans, One Schedule, $54,012 There are two PPOs on your schedule right now. One writes off 38 cents on the dollar and the other writes off 15, and the one you think is bleeding you is earning you $360 more per chair hour than the one you'
Insurance
A practice collecting $1 million a year with a 35% average write-off is handing roughly $350,000 in billed fees to insurers before it pays a single hygienist, according to Veritas Dental Resources citing the ADA's 2023 Survey of Dental Fees, which puts PPO write-offs at 30% to