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Chicago Dental Society - September 2018.
The stereotyping says young dentists are risk-averse, don’t want to scrimp and save to venture into the dog-eat-dog world of small business ownership, and would rather work for a lucrative salary so they can plunk down monthly payments for a shiny new “beamer.” However, there’s a 29-year-old named Scott Drucker who splits his time between nurturing a start-up business in a healthcare incubator hub in the Merchandise Mart and traveling the country supporting that business, and also spends a day practicing dentistry at an office more than 40 miles from his home

Supply Clinic is an online service interfacing between dentists and those firms that sell dental supplies. This article mentions a range of emerging technologies dental practices will be using from the front end, upstream for patient recruitment and management, to back-end services such as teledentistry and Dental Service Organizations (DSOs).

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

So many company founders wind up circling back to Joseph Heller's brainchild, Catch-22.That's all starting a company is, really. Our protagonist Yossarian's fight, and his buddy Orr's, was one of survival during WWII. Most companies have loftier goals, certainly, than merely staying alive (if that's a goal at all in the long term). But the journey is riddled with Catch-22s, which tend to require more than disregarding safety to move past.

A Quick Take on Dentacoin

With all the craze surrounding the boom and bust (and boom?) of cryptocurrencies, it should come as no surprise that the dental industry has gotten in on the action. Starting in early 2017, a slow rollout of Dentacoin has taken place. Billed as a blockchain-based solution for the dental industry, Dentacoin promises to build a decentralized future for dentistry.

Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission issued a complaint against the three largest dental distributors in the country: Henry Schein (HSIC), Patterson (PDCO), and Benco (the “Big 3”). The complaint alleges that the three dental distributors systematically boycotted buying groups. If true, the Big 3 have been forcing smaller dental practices to pay higher prices for supplies, despite the practices’ ability to band together to negotiate. In contrast, the large distributors have been negotiating with corporate dental customers, potentially giving an unfair advantage to Dental Service Organizations.  

According to the FTC document: