Business operations, insurance navigation and leadership are among the skills dentists say they wish they learned in dental school.
Six dentists recently spoke with Becker's about the education they think was missing from their time in dental school.
Editor's note: Responses were lightly edited for clarity and length.
Bernard Avendanio, DDS. Turtle Creek Dental Associates (Dallas): Upon reflection of the last 27 years, there are a multitude of things that would have been very beneficial to learn before graduation. What comes to mind immediately is insurance. This can range from how it works, the pros and cons and if you decide to participate, how to manage and navigate the process as it relates to the revenue cycle of the practice.
Eugene Bass, DMD. Bass Dental (New City, N.Y.): I wish that I would have learned more business principles to evaluate practice opportunities that presented themselves upon my graduation. We were provided little to no guidance in how to assess the merits and shortcomings of individual practice opportunities. A more structured program in dental school regarding how to run a practice and some basic business principles would have been invaluable.
Misako Hirota, DMD. Private practice (National City, Calif.): Business acumen. It would have been helpful to have some education in how to run a successful practice as in what type of analytics we should be looking at on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis, how to handle HR issues [and] how to analyze insurance plans.
Benjamin Joy, DDS. Joy Dental Pines (Pembroke Pines, Fla.): There are two things I wish I knew before leaving the NYU College of Dentistry in 2016: sales and placing implants.
Sales, or "treatment acceptance," is essentially learning conversational techniques to listen to people, help them overcome legitimate objections and help them want the things they need. I don't recall formal training on this subject in school and yet I find it is of vital importance in practice. I like Paul Homoly's book, Making It Easy For Patients To Say Yes, on the subject.
While I did learn how to restore implants, I firmly believe that placing implants belongs in a dental school curriculum. Implant placement is the gold standard to which all other tooth replacement is compared. Why is it not a required procedure for the largest category of dentists — the general dentists? Other specialty treatment such as root canal therapy was required of me as a generalist.
Mark Malterud, DDS. The Minnesota Center for Minimally Invasive Dentistry (St. Paul): There really isn't one particular thing that I would like to have learned in dental school. What would have been nice [is] for us to be given the knowledge that what we learned in dental school was really only the tip of the iceberg and we needed to broaden our knowledge base each and every day for the rest of our careers. We need to be consummate learners. If I practiced at all with just what I learned in dental school, I would feel that I was malpracticing at this point in my career. I currently do so little that even remotely represents what I learned back then. However, it was a great starting point.
That being said, the area that was woefully under-taught was how to run a practice, but at that point in our training very few of us were even interested in how to run a business. Once we got out, we then learned that we needed those skills and had to seek them out from mentors or learn by the school of hard knocks. These skills are based on leadership, and I really don't think dental education in most institutions teaches true leadership skills.
Larry Stewart, DDS. Texas Oral Surgery Group (Plano): As one of the "old guys" now (I graduated Baylor Dental School in 1978), I wished that we had been given more instruction on management of the patient holistically. In that era, there was significant emphasis on technique and procedures. We were trained to do beautiful restorative and operative techniques but got little training in managing the "entire patient." Certainly as I have aged and my patient population has aged, we see so many patients with significant health and lifestyle limitations. Dentistry has a wonderful role to play in the aging patient population. Advances in implant dentistry have given us techniques to be able to give patients excellent functional and esthetic results that mimic their natural dentition. The coincidental benefits to patients' overall general medical health can not be overemphasized. These older patients, while they can be time consuming on the schedule, represent an underserved and extremely grateful portion of our practices. I'm glad to see dental schools adding geriatric and holistic care to their curriculum.