DSOs will be tested on several fronts this year while facing staffing shortages, inflation, increased competition and more.
Three DSO executives recently spoke with Becker's to discuss the biggest challenges facing DSOs this year:
Mark Censoprano. Co-CEO of Max Surgical Specialty Management (Hackensack, N.J.): I think [the biggest challenge] first and foremost will be talent acquisition and retention. There are a lot of options that the strong and talented surgeons have, so if you're not a winning proposition, it's a battle for talent. There aren't that many oral surgeons who are graduating from programs each year, and there are a lot of folks who would love to have them be a part of their team. So, you just have to be an organization that folks truly understand that that's a great choice for their career to join.
If you think about rising cost structure and the inflationary environment we're living in right now, if you are running your own business, if you're not thinking about how you're going to offset rising costs, it's going to eat away at your performance as an organization, and that's challenging. If you think about what's happening right now, whether you want to say that the inflationary environment is starting to subside, if you look at what costs are generally doing for occupancy, for utilities or labor rates or supplies, go down the list. All these costs are rising at unprecedented levels we haven't seen in a very long time as a country. If you don't have scale, if you don't have the support structure in place to be able to look at every one of these expense categories and figure out, if all of our supply costs are going up, how can we leverage our size and scale as an organization to offset that? At Max, we want people to partner with us who want to bet on us for the future and who are willing to help us to control those costs. Every one of our vendor partners, we go out to them — doesn't matter what the line is in the [profit and loss statement] — and we say, "Hey, we would love for you to truly be a partner of ours and figure out how to control these costs," and the folks who buy into what Max is doing and where we're heading will come forward and say, "We want to hook our wagon up to you," and we've had some amazing partners who have stepped forward and have done that for us. That's really helped us to manage our performance as an organization while costs are rising elsewhere.
Jeff Cellucci. Chief Strategy Officer at MB2 Dental (Dallas): The biggest challenge for DSOs in 2025 will likely be balancing scalability with personalized care and partner satisfaction. As the field grows more competitive, maintaining a dentist-first approach while meeting the demand for operational efficiency will be crucial. Those who can add value to their practices by prioritizing trust and alignment with dentists’ values will ultimately succeed.
Alisa Ulrey. COO at U.S. Oral Surgery Management (Irving, Texas): [The challenges will] stem from these economic pressures we've all been seeing through a number of years, through inflation [and] labor shortages. While it has improved in the last year, we still have opportunities to attract high quality employees who can continue to focus on really great patient care. Some of those challenges are industry-wide, and some of those are more acute and specific. We've been really focusing on improving workforce retention. We have a very specialized workforce that comes in. Our surgical techs work side-by-side with our surgeons and are really critical to quality patient care, and [we're] really investing in their training. Our front office staff, our practice support center staff, we're always looking at ways to improve the work environment and create a culture where people feel valued and appreciated and enjoy coming to work every day.
We're looking at competitive analysis from a compensation standpoint, to make sure we are competitive in the markets in which we support our partner practices. I think the other thing is we have to embrace technology, and that is challenging sometimes because technology is different than perhaps we have led or managed in the past, so leveraging innovative solutions and understanding how we evaluate which ones are going to be the best suited to help streamline operations and continue to build efficiencies while remembering that quality patient care is truly the foundation of what we do.
Organic growth continues to be really important. So, how do you grow your same practice revenue year over year? You do that through preserving your surgeon ethos, continuing to ensure that they stay connected with what we're working on, [and making] sure these models resonate with surgeons so that they feel like they're getting that support of taking away some of those administrative burdens and focusing on patient care. We make it easier for them and almost seamless for those things to happen, but they're still side-by-side with us in our partnership. Recruitment is really competitive in this space. Surgeon recruitment will remain a major focus given increased competitiveness of the market. DSOs are going to continue to need to differentiate themselves by these opportunities, both from culture retention and ensuring that we create the best environment for people to come to work every day.