Can any practicing orthos verify these back of the envelope numbers I was running

[paamp]

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Was just playing with some hypothetical scenarios and wanted to see if I did my math right:

20 starts/month
24 mo. avg treatment
6 week visits
Total visits per pt while in active tx: approx. 18 (104 weeks / 6 weeks)
20x24 = 480 max active pt
480x18 = 8640 total pt visits over 2 years at peak practice volume
8640 visits/24 months = 360 total visits/month

Assuming 2 weeks unpaid vacation:
~22 appt/day@4 days/week
~30 appt/day@3 days/week

Assuming $5k/case:
240 starts/year x 5000 x 0.92 collection x 0.35 net after overhead = 386,400

Is this right? 30 pt a day for 3 days a week for $386,400 a year seems pretty chill ngl! I guess one thing I'm not accounting for is retention visits

 

[veryhappylabrador]

Sounds feasible to me, listen to Dr. Glenn Dubroc's lectures from AAO to hear something about this type of practice model: lean practice, low overhead, lower stress seeing 25-30 patients a day.

 

[gryffindor]

Sure, but in many desirable areas, pedo has done the same math and hired the ortho to keep that $5K or $6K of production from walking out the door. Stand alone orthos then get the cases that aren’t a cool breezy 24 months to tweak some mildly rotated incisors and are instead a 36+ month upside down impacted canines or worse.

 

[charlestweed]

20 starts/month is a healthy number for a single location practice. If you see twice as many patients a day (around 50-60 patients…which is not too bad), you only need to work 6-7 days/ month to take care of your 480 active patients. A $385k/yr income is just ok if you owe $1-2 million (student + practice + home + car + a bunch of other loans) in debt, have kids to support, and live in an expensive area in NY, New Jersey or CA. For the other free days that you have in the month, you can travel to work at multiple offices as an associate (or open more of your own offices) to double that income amount. Because of the long schooling, you will be at least 29-30 years old when you earn your ortho certificate; therefore, you won’t have a lot of time to work, to pay off debt, to save for kid’s college education, and to save for your own retirement. With so much debt, this is not the time to think about having easy work schedule…..need to work hard when you’re still young. You are not getting any younger.

To gain (and then to maintain) this healthy number of starts each month, you have to continue to maintain good relationship with the referring GPs, continue to reach out to the new GPs in the area, take good care of your patients (ie loose brackets, poky wires etc need to be taken care of right away), and deliver excellent clinical results. All of these require a lot work. The good thing is ortho is easy…so you should have plenty of time to do so. I stopped going around to meet the GPs a long time ago…..as I get older, I have less motivation to do so. Consequently, my offices have fewer patients. Five years ago, I closed one of my 4 offices. I am old. It’s time for the younger generation of orthos to take over this wonderful profession. It is still the best dental specialty IMO.

60+% overhead is very high. It should be kept under 50%. Mine is around 35% because I still use paper charts and the same 20+ yo film based pan/ceph unit, which hardly requires any repair/maintenance. I still use the cheap alginate ($5/bag) and quickset stone….no fancy scanner….no 3D printer. I don’t use any dental/ortho software and have to pay monthly fee for it. If things that I’ve used have worked well for years, there’s no reason for me to upgrade. To save money, I hire part time assistants, who only come to work on the days (8 days/month) that we have patients.

 

[2TH MVR]

The key is getting the starts.