Regarding Dr. Levin’s March JADA column, "The Correlation Between Dental Practice Management and Clinical Excellence," a historical perspective is helpful. When I began practice in the 1950s, the state of what we now consider to be practice management was the same as it had been in my father’s and grandfather’s generations: widely ignored. It was considered a bit dirty, and generally irrelevant.
Conventional wisdom was that you could open your practice wherever you wanted and, if you treated your patients with expertise and concern, you’d be successful. My generation may have been the first to discover that that wasn’t always true.
Much has changed since the 1950s. Solo practice was the rule, with groups occurring only in families and some specialists. Some of these specialist groups employed practice management methods, but almost no one else saw the need. As more and more practitioners came out of dental schools, owing to government grants to the schools, competition for patients developed.
Some practitioners sought to increase their incomes through increasing their efficiency, reducing their costs and engaging in marketing. As the government and insurance companies became frequent payers, reduced reimbursements gave further incentive to practice management as a means of maximizing practice income. In addition to its other virtues, group practice became more desirable to reduce overhead.
Given the present environment, few practices can survive, let alone thrive, without efficient business practices. But, considering our dental practices as businesses reduces our claim to be a profession. As a profession, we always put the patient’s welfare, not our practice nor our person, first.
Society and the government grant us professional status on that basis. If we become perceived as a business, we will lose our status as a profession in the eyes of the public and the laws that give us protected and honored status as a profession. Let’s take advantage of the knowledge that business practices can offer, but keep the public trust by providing excellent treatment, and using practice management as a tool, rather than as our guiding principle.
