Four Levers Driving Organic Same-Store Growth

MARKETING  ·  PATIENT ACCESS  ·  CASE ACCEPTANCE  ·  REVENUE CYCLE

Most dental groups grow 2 to 3 percent a year while costs climb 5 to 6. That gap is where value quietly disappears, and most operators try to close it by spending more. We spent four hours in Denver on the other path.

139 operators in the room. A workbook with 16 questions in it and no answers, because the answers only existed live. No vendor pitches. No future-of-AI speculation. Just the people doing the work telling you what is working in 2026.

Here is what we covered.

Marketing. Sherianne James, EVP & CMO of Heartland Dental, and Jenn McClain, CMO of Affordable Care. Patients are already sending AI agents to call contact centers, armed with their insurance and their preferred times, shopping on their behalf. If your team cannot hand over pricing and availability on demand, the agent does not book.

Patient access. Lorri Detrick, President & COO of Riccobene Associates, and Jeremy Stroud, VP of Customer Service, Patient Services & IT Delivery at Heartland Dental. Heartland's practice-level answer rate was 60 to 70 percent before contact center support. Their outbound team recaptured 60,000 new patients last year that would otherwise have been lost.

Case acceptance. Dr. Cindy Roark, SVP & Chief Clinical Officer at Sage Dental, Dr. Trey Mueller, Chief Clinical Officer at Dental Care Alliance, and Dr. Tim Quirt, SVP of Clinical Operations at Heartland Dental. Sage spent two years trying to convince doctors and got nowhere. Then they retrained the assistants instead. Production per patient went up about 29 percent, measured in their worst practices, not their best.

Revenue cycle. Peter van Riper, CEO of Tally. Credit balances run about 5 percent of revenue, and roughly 85 percent of them are not real refunds. Tally is raising one Texas DSO's EBITDA by more than 50 percent this year just by cleaning them up.

We closed every conversation with the same question. What is the one move a group in this room could make tomorrow that returns $100,000 of EBITDA inside a year?

Their answers are in the workbook. The full conversations are in the episodes, releasing one a week for four weeks.

Add your email below and we'll send each one as it drops.

A.J. Peak and Amol Nirgudkar 

Co-Hosts, Healthcare 100

Watch the Episodes Here:

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