The ADA added an AI section to its Q2 2026 economic report, and the headline number is doing the rounds already: 43.3% of dentists use AI for at least one task in their practice.

Fine. Adoption is real, faster than most people expected, and that's a legitimate finding.

The number I can't stop look...

The ADA Health Policy Institute published its Q2 2026 economic report in July, and buried on slide 30 is a sentence I've been chewing on for two weeks. After laying out that dentists are busier and that consumer dental spending grew only 1% over twelve months, the authors offer three possible explan...

The short answer: leadership in a dental practice is mostly clarity plus consistency. Your team needs to know what winning looks like this week, who owns what, and that the standard applies to you too. Practices with strong cultures aren't the ones with the best mission statement on the wall — they'...

Direct answer: collect 98% or more of adjusted production, keep AR over 90 days below 15% of total AR, and submit clean claims within 24 hours of the appointment. The money you lose in collections is pure margin — there's no lab bill, no chair time, no supply cost attached to it. Planet DDS calculat...

Here's the short answer: a healthy hygiene department generates at least 25% of a practice's adjusted production, keeps 90% of recare patients scheduled, and treats periodontal disease at a rate that roughly matches its actual prevalence in the population. CDC data puts periodontitis at 47.2% of adu...

Short version: the fastest revenue in dentistry is already in your database. Recall is keeping active patients on schedule — target 90% of hygiene patients leaving with their next appointment booked the same day. Reactivation is going back after patients who've fallen off, typically 30% to 50% of a ...

The direct answer: effective dental scheduling means building the day around production blocks instead of filling holes chronologically. You set daily production goals by provider, reserve prime-time slots for high-value procedures, protect hygiene capacity, cut your combined no-show and cancellatio...

The direct answer: treatment acceptance improves when you fix diagnosis consistency first, presentation second, and financing third — in that order. National case acceptance medians run 55% to 65%, but the more revealing number is case completion, which averages just 47% industry-wide. Ethical pract...

Here's the short answer: there are ten numbers that tell you almost everything about whether your practice is healthy, and most owners are tracking maybe three of them. Production. Collections. Overhead. Case acceptance. New patients. Hygiene reappointment. Cancellation rate. Production per operator...

Three numbers decide whether a dental office build actually pencils out: your debt service coverage relative to the new monthly payment, your realistic new-patient flow, and what your new operatories will actually produce compared to the benchmark for a healthy practice. Get any one of these wrong a...

Every dollar a dental practice spends that isn't doctor compensation falls into one of six overhead categories. Most practice owners know their overhead is "too high" — but they don't know which category is the problem, or how their specific mix compares to practices like theirs.

That's the gap the...

Most dental practices have an AR problem they don't fully see.

Not because they're not looking — but because the numbers on the AR aging report are accepted as fixed, when they're actually a signal. High AR days, a bloated 90+ bucket, a climbing denial rate: these aren't just administrative annoyan...