Not necessarily. Places like Small Smiles are heavy Pulp and SSC treatment planners, sometimes, depends who the doc is really. Depending on the state, a PSSC on a primary can produce about $200 for the practice. So let's assume they see 20 patients, and half are new patients because places like these usually don't retain patients like a private practice and thus have a much higher percentage of new patients, so that's 10 new patients. We can also maybe assume that 20-30% of those new patients have been to other places that treatment plan kids relatively aggressively and have most of their molars either PSSCed already, which leaves about 7-8 kids with work to do. Kids on medicaid tend to have more decay than other kids, so if say, 6 of those kids have decay on their molars and the practice thus treatment plans, lets say 6 PSSCs and 2 fillings each, on average, which along with exam, radiographs and cleaning is like $1400 of production.
Let's say only 3 of the 6 kids get treated cause the other 3 have parents who say no or decide for some other reason to wait. That is then:
$4200 of treatment from these three kids
Then factor in 10 recall, radiographs, and cleanings ($1000), 4 New patient exams, radiographs, and cleanings ($500 cause they didn't have decay or had all molars already PSSCed) and 3 New patient exams and radiographs but no treatment or cleaning ($200)
Grand total: $5,900 production for the day. Not bad.
Production for the month working 20 days: $118,000
Production for the year (2 weeks of vacation): $1,361,538.46
17% of production: $231,461 a year
These are all just estimate #s of course, but you can see how even off 17-20 patients a day, a place like this can do more than well enough to survive and thrive.