The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry

Rob Brenneise, Chief Growth Officer & Bruce Tuck, Director of DSO Sales & Strategic Marketing of Glidewell, are joined by Dr. Oussama Founas, Founder of Dentologie. The trio shares their thoughts on:

Dentologie’s adoption of technology
Implementing solutions like Fastmill.io
The importance of clinical education
Advice for incorporating digital dentistry
Much more

To learn more about Glidewell’s Fastmill.io or any of their digital dentistry solutions you can visit https://glidewelldental.com/

You can also email dsosupportteam@glidewell.com

To discover more about Dentologie visit https://dentologie.com/

or visit Dentologie’s Instagram’s page – https://www.instagram.com/dentologie/

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Full DSO Dentologie and Glidewell Podcast Transcript:

Bill Neumann: And I’d like to welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate you watching us or listening in. And if you were just listening and you haven’t watched yet, I want you to jump over to YouTube because you missed a really cool video. It features Glidewell’s Fast Mill IO. So you’re going to make sure that you jump over there and watch that before you get going. And then you can jump back over if you want and just listen to it. But it’s better to watch it anyway, because You’re going to get a chance to see these wonderful gentlemen that we have on the podcast here. So we have Rob Bernese. He is the Chief Growth Officer of Glidewell. Bruce Tuck, who is the Director of DSO Sales and Strategic Marketing at Glidewell. And we have Dr. Usama Founas. He is the founder of Dentologie. So thank you, Dr. Funas, Rob and Bruce, for being on here today. Good to see you all. Good to see you. Well, let’s start off with you, Rob, a little bit about your background, if you wouldn’t mind, and then maybe a little in your role at Glidewell.

Rob Brenneise: Oh, absolutely. I got to do the math. Numbers are getting too big. Thirty six years, I think we’re at, I’m at in dentistry. Only career field I’ve ever been in. Fort which was pure dumb luck back in 1988, but it all worked out. Thank goodness and Yes from bulk of my career in the beginning was with Denmat back in those days did some couple stints with private equity and Then the last seven eight years was fortunate enough to end up here at Glidewell Which has been an amazing seven eight years and that’s 36 years and 36 seconds and

Bill Neumann: Yeah. Thanks, Rob. And I know, Bruce, you have a connection to Denmat as well.

Bruce Tuck: Yeah. So the first part of Rob’s bio or a chunk of it is the same as mine. He took a job by accident. I took a job by accident or to time me over for a few months at Denmat. We started within months of each other. We parted ways after our first decade together and then recently came back, came over to Glidewell just about a year and a half ago. So, and it has been an amazing surprise, a great run and made the DSO space. I spent 30 years in the DSO space. So coming over here just made things amazing. It’s incredible the reputation that Glidewell has built and the products and services that they provide.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Bruce. Dr. Founas, a little bit about your background, and I really would like you to kind of, so we’ve done a couple of articles on group dentistry now about Dentologie, but maybe you can kind of get us up to speed. You have a very unique model, so I want to make sure that people understand that, but a little bit about your background.

Dr. Oussama Founas: Sure. Originally from Detroit, basically went to dental school, now 2010. And now coming forward, I’m currently one of the co-founders, but also the chief operating officer. A little unique in the sense that I think many dental owners go the route of just saying that they’re the owner, but my partner and I have become quite specialized in what we do. So yeah, 2013 is when we started Dentologie, a very unique idea of, hey, why is it better to get a cup of coffee than it is to go to the dental office? So we really focused in on brand identity and the patient experience. Um, so since 2013 till now, you will see Dentologie is still the same name. It is uniquely, uh, branded as that, um, fast forward. It’s like, it’s funny how Rob did it as well. Like you have to skip all these moments of looking at your career. Um, but fast forward, you’re now, we’re now at location 12 or 13. Um, and the goal right now is to have, uh, the premier dental experience. particularly for patients, and I would say and employees, so we’re really big on our culture. And we’re on track right now to finishing our 14th location by the end of the year.

Bill Neumann: And all of your locations until recently were in the Chicagoland area, right? You just opened up in Seattle.

Dr. Oussama Founas: Yes. So first 10 locations, all Chicago. Seattle came forward about June of this year. As of this past Wednesday, we’ve opened two locations in Seattle on pace to opening our fourth by the end of September. Seattle was unique in the sense that it actually satisfied our patient demo. Very untapped market. There is not much brand recognition there from a dental perspective. We hit the ground running, but it’s only been a month and one or two so far. So I’d like to say things are actually going great, but a little too soon to report out.

Bill Neumann: And all the practices are de novos, right? And they’re all branded Dentologie across all the locations.

Dr. Oussama Founas: Correct.

Bill Neumann: Really, I mean, if you go to their website, which we’ll drop a link in the show notes, Dentologie.com, I mean, you’ll see everything is, I mean, looks like you said, like that great experience that you would get at a Starbucks or a high-end coffee place, right? It’s very, very nice, clean. And you’re like, why would we not see something like this? So gosh, in a dental Very modern and yeah, they’re very, very, very cool. It also looks like, again, it’s simple to book online too. So just the website itself is super clean. So anyway, thanks for that. I mean, I do think it’s unique. A lot of the DSOs you see out there doing things through acquisition, nothing wrong with that. You’ve definitely just chosen a different path and looks like it’s working well for you. So congratulations.

Dr. Oussama Founas: I appreciate it. Still going on path, but I think right now we’re trying to focus on the patient experience and getting that employee experience right. Because at the end of the day, if you don’t get that employee experience right, the patient experience can’t get there.

Bill Neumann: Well, so that really leads into something I think that’s important is, you know, you talk about the experience, you know, this is really patient and employee related. Let’s talk about a little bit about partnering with Glidewell. So Glidewell is well known in the industry. I think every dentist probably knows who Glidewell is. You may not know everything that Glidewell provides. And that’s really what we’re going to talk about today is the technology advancements and really focus in on the in-office technology advancements that Glidewell is providing. So maybe let’s talk a little bit about the partnership, if you don’t mind, Dr. Founas, that you have with Glidewell, a little bit about that relationship.

Dr. Oussama Founas: Yeah, so what’s interesting is, so I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Robert as of a couple years ago. I think it was three years ago, actually. And prior to working with Glidewell, we actually through years looked through different ways and avenues of doing CAD CAM. And the idea there obviously was getting to the point where, hey, how can we actually do in-house milling to not only improve profitability, but obviously improve the patient experience, because you can win on both ends if you do it right. And through the years of research, I think the thing that always did not work for us in our work and our flow was the sheer volume of touch points that most systems had, where, hey, you have to get the material, put it in, glaze it, bake it. You kind of had so many layers where it’s like, you’re going to have errors that pop up. So my thing, and I think this is more so now my COO hack, is how do I minimize touch points? Because that would decrease errors So we went with Gladwell just through a multitude of conversations and whatnot. And what we did was amazing because we partnered with them. One, they’re one of the largest. They’re very service-based, which is evident now that I’ve been partners with them for some time. And I know it sounds cliche and obvious, they’re a lab. So who better than an actual dental lab who makes these materials day in day out to know what the materials should and look like at the end of the day. So there were just a lot of things that to me just sounded like common sense that worked out really well. We also have had really good relations where we’ve had client success managers with us. So we worked with somebody named Ty. He’s amazing. So if anything comes up, just shoot a quick text. So from that standpoint, the service was there. The material was there. The organization was backed. for us it was like he’s saying it this way it’s just very logical and it made a ton of sense.

Bill Neumann: Let’s talk a little bit about, and I want to explain this. So we’ve got, and I’ll let, well, I’m not going to explain this. I’m going to let Rob and Bruce explain this. So you’ve got, you’ve got Glidewell IO, right? Stands for in-office. So there’s Glidewell IO on top and those are all, and then all the solutions that kind of fall under that, right? Including FastMail. So why don’t, Rob, why don’t you start things off a little bit and kind of explain that and how that all works.

Rob Brenneise: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, so Glidewell IO, you could look at it, that’s the enterprise or the umbrella, and below that is the Fast Mill, Fast Design, and I’ll talk about both of those, Fast Scan, and then this last year, Fast Print. So all the digital solutions, and a big part of that, these last six or seven years, is just Glidewell being in the unique position to bring the lab to the office. And, you know, I thought Doc said it perfectly, who better to make an in-office mill than the biggest lab in the country? And with that being the, you know, actually I got to back up real quick to Dr. Fuentes. We met years ago and I got involved actually because there was an issue. That’s how I think I ended up, you know, on the phone with Doc. And we’ll ask him to speak a little bit to the support later, if he doesn’t mind, because it’s easy to be good when everything’s going good for anybody. It’s when and if there is ever an issue. And that’s just really something that I think separates Glidewell in this realm from everybody, because we can’t point the finger to anybody but ourselves. The mill is made here at Glidewell. The products that go in the mill are made here at Glidewell. And by here at Glidewell, I’m pointing to the campus here in Irvine. And the software is created by Glidewell. None of this is off the shelf or pieced together. So it’s really a true ecosystem. And from A to Z is all our responsibility. And there’s never any, well, go talk to the company who makes blocks or the team that trains you. It’s really all on us. And we’re going to do everything we can to make it right. My last thing I would add to that is simply we’re in a unique position because I think if you talk to a lab, every lab will tell you you shouldn’t mill. If you talk to a mill company, they’re going to tell you you should never use a lab. And we’re in a unique position. It’s whatever is best for the practice or the patient. And we hope, you know, we have the opportunity to work with the practice on both or either of those.

Bill Neumann: Bruce, what are you seeing with your DSO customers? I mean, day in and day out, you’re working with DSOs, emerging groups. What does it look like as far as the uptake for in-office lab solutions? Do you see more and more adoption of this?

Bruce Tuck: I do, but obviously, they have a hurdle with it for multiple reasons. They’ve always got to think about the CapEx and things like that. I think there’s a prevailing feeling that when it comes to milling specifically, you need a lab tech on site. And to Dr. Founas’ point, their hurdle is the same thing. They have their doctors come in them saying, I want this unit or that unit. And they’re educated enough to know that, well, that means all this other stuff comes into play. And they just cannot see an ROI on that. It adds steps to their workflow. So there’s a reluctance to go down that road. And usually when there is, there’s a press from one of their partner dentists that is adamant about it. And then they look to us for two reasons. One is the workflow. There’s no ovens or any of those things like Dr. Founas talked about. And obviously cost-wise for DSOs, we’re significantly less than the other units. And then the third part of that is the support that we offer, unlimited free training and support, that sort of stuff. And they can speak more about how far we go with that, but it’s still It’s still across the board, I’d say a reluctance to go down that road. It’s almost a, if I have to, they can’t see. And Dr. Founas is probably excellent to speak about this part of it, but how do you make that more beneficial than sending out to a lab doing it in the office? And so once they get past that hurdle, I think we’ll see more and more of it. But most of the systems out there today still require all those extra steps.

Rob Brenneise: I was going to add one thing to Bruce’s comments. You know, he just hosted his second annual DSO summit, and I think, Bill, you were there the year before. But if I did my math right, Bruce, 77% expressed interest in the chair side part. Correct.

Bruce Tuck: Yeah, and it ended up being higher last year as well.

Bill Neumann: So, Dr. Founas, maybe you could talk a little bit about that transition when you went from, you know, sending it out to the lab and deciding, hey, we want to try and bring this in-house and how maybe the why behind that and how you were able to accomplish that.

Dr. Oussama Founas: So it was interesting was, so I was the guinea pig, just because I wanted to make sure that if it were to be deployed, I would know how and be able to explain the why. It’s one of those things where dentists are just, we’re quirky like that. If it’s a claim from another dentist, it’s just much better received. So it went through the process and it was great in the sense that I think what’s been insanely impressive is the rate to which the software has constantly been updated. So in the four years or three years that we’ve been on Fast Design, there has got to be at least more than a dozen updates that have occurred. And with each update has been an improvement. So it’s been amazing to see the software get faster, the AI, which I think a lot of companies will tout having AI because it is a buzzword that can help with financial reasons, this one was actually practical and pragmatic where you have it and actually makes the design faster and actually marks the margin quicker. So there were things that were just a no-brainer. So from that standpoint, it was great. What Rob was talking about earlier that I have to give him props on is that we did have an issue that came up eventually. And part of the issue that we had was the mills were starting to go down. And because it is lab backed, what’s beautiful about it is that when these mills do go down, Glidewell does stand behind their product. So if you do get it and you don’t have the mill available, you can send it to their lab and they take care of it for you. They’ll go ahead and ship you cases. which obviously defeats the purpose still of trying to do same-day crowns, but that was the end goal, to get same-day crowns. And then Rob, one day, I just kind of called Rob, I’m like, hey, we’re having a problem here. I can’t provide same-day crowns, I can’t mill. What do we do here? And it became really difficult, and he kind of came to the decision, cool, we’ll just give you two. So then, therefore, if one goes down, you have the other. And I knew from there we were set like, Hey, okay, this is the right partner. Cause if anything comes up, we can talk about it. Uh, it’s been significantly more on the good side of things than it is something like that, to be honest. Um, so I think it speaks a lot to the kind of service you’ll get there. Um, but I feel like I, I should probably answer your question more directly as it relates to basically, was it why Glidewell or the leap? I just want to make sure I answer it directly for you.

Bill Neumann: Well, I think it’s both. I think it’s making the transition over, right, from sending it out to a lab to bringing it in-house. And then, yeah, of course, you probably went through some options out there. There are other solutions. And then, yeah, why ultimately was it Glidewell? The biggest reason why… Sorry.

Bruce Tuck: Jump in real quick. Just to kind of reframe the question a little bit is, piggyback on the DSOs out there, like this doesn’t work, this model doesn’t work. Why did you, and how did you come to the conclusion it did work for you? And then one last, one question in between is, with all the upgrades, because that’s one of the hesitations of DSOs, I have to get a new unit, I have to get a new unit. When we did your upgrades, what was the cost on that?

Dr. Oussama Founas: I can answer that. So the costs were zero, by the way, but we can go back. So the DSOs just down. It was actually very smooth from that standpoint. So in terms of why Glidewell, in terms of the actual physical unit, and it was honestly just it worked in our workflow. We had typically about an hour and a half appointments for crowns, add a little more time if you’re doing other procedures in that mix like quadrant dentistry. And what the mill did really well that worked in our system, and I’m sure it would work for others as well, is that it is designed optimally for quadrant dentistry. How do you get to the point where you’re not adding more time but your workflow in terms of your appointment might be, hey, let’s go ahead, prep the tooth for the crown, scan it, get it milled, and while it’s milling, go ahead and do the fills, which has been something in the past that dentists have thought of with other brands, but because the blocks that you get are pre-sintered, so that means you don’t have to bake them, because the blocks are zirconia monolithic, but also more importantly, you have the aesthetic zirconia option. because you only need to have two burrs to polish it and you get this insane high polish when it’s done. And oh, by the way, when I’m done and I deliver my cases, You do get, I mean, I don’t mean to sound cliche, you kind of get that high of like, all right, I need to keep doing this. So I think the hurdle always, I think for at least for the dentist that we work with, is just getting to the point where you’ve delivered your first couple of same day crowns. Because what I will tell you happens now is when our docs who’ve done this multiple times now come to our offices, the first thing they say is, okay, how many crowns can I do today that are same day? even though they’re not incentivized to do same-day crowns, but it becomes this thing of like, how do I save chair time, which obviously translates to the financial in the end. And we did see significant savings from a lab perspective, I will say.

Bill Neumann: This will tie into another point here. So how did you get the buy-in from all your docs to go from sending out to a lab to bringing it in house and using one system?

Dr. Oussama Founas: and using one system. So because we are one brand, I think it’s important to note that because of that, we do foster a culture that is oneness. So it’s not typical that we would have doctors that we would bring on board that are very much like, we’re gonna do things this way or that way. The docs we typically get on board are usually very flexible. They’re very adaptable. They welcome change, to be honest. So whenever something new is brought on board, yes, there’s hesitation, but it’s not immediately a no. It’s usually like, okay, let’s give this a try. Let’s see how we can make this work. So, part of it is first training. So, we obviously worked with Glidewell’s trainers on getting training for our doctors. Secondly, I would say another part of the adoption is their colleagues. So, our most productive docs are the ones who mill the most and that was intentional because once you have new docs that join, what’s the first thing they want to do? They want to be like the most productive doctors. So, if they want to be that way, what are the behaviors that they exude? And then if they notice like, oh, you’re actually milling most of your cases. they put two and two together. So then they kind of run with that. And then one thing we did do later on, and we started doing it in the middle of 2023, is we have brought lab techs on board. And I can go into that later on, like the why behind that. But we have seen significantly even more adoption when that did occur.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. We’ll make sure we touch on that. You mentioned it earlier, Dr. Founas, about support that you get. You had the issues with the mills. Rob and Bruce, tell me a little bit about the support that you would offer. What’s pretty typical if there’s an issue with a customer? How would you handle that?

Rob Brenneise: Yeah, I’ll take that one. First, just to Doc’s point, yeah, if the mill were ever down and the office truly couldn’t use it, We allow them to send the cases to Glidewell. We’ll make those cases at no cost and get them back to them within three days, which is also a huge incentive for us to make sure we get the machines back up and running. But if I could talk about the whole kind of experience, Glidewell comes out, sets up the mill in the office, and then spends a day in the office training the office. Once that technician leaves, we are open Monday through Friday from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., and we have a dedicated team that can take calls, and when you call, you get a person. There’s no recording. And they can dial into your system with you and help you on a case. If it’s the first time you’re doing a certain type of case, or you forgot how to do something, they could literally dial in and walk you through it and keep you moving with your appointment. And then about 90 days later, part of the owning a mill is we pay for airfare and hotel to get two people from the office out to California here at Glidewell for an advanced training now that you’ve used it for three or four months and know enough to be dangerous. And that’s really the the service and support is when we’re not in that office that I think Dr. Founas was referring to is just part of the package. There’s no, you know, no limits, no, no extra costs. Just that’s that’s our job is to support it, because this only works if you’ve got, you know, the office uses the machine. So it’s not, you know, it gets sold and then we disappear.

Bill Neumann: Let’s talk about the important thing, right? The financial side of things. So, like, bottom line, what did that look like for you, or what does it look like for you, Dr. Chouinas, and how long did it really take to become profitable, to start to see, you know, some, hey, we invested in this, now what does our profitability look like? And maybe compare that to, you know, sending it out to a lab.

Dr. Oussama Founas: So I think the way I would, I’m not going to talk about like payback because I think that’s going to vary from office to office, brand to brand. But I think the way we looked at it was at what point do we see the percentage of revenue of that become either the same or significantly less than what it would be for having it outsourced. And we saw that very early on. I think it was because it took time to adopt because it was just me initially. Then I bring on another few doctors after that and eventually getting the entire team within I would say like an eight to 12 months span. And again, it wasn’t because we’re trying to sell it. It was just we want to make sure people were ready before we brought them on board. We saw significant savings. And I would say when I say the variance, we’re talking about two and a half, 3% that going straight to the bottom line, which is huge if you’re running an organization as a scale like that. So there’s significant savings that occurred there. But another conversation that can happen, I don’t think we need to happen now is then how do you make sure you add more value to that? And one thing we do do is we do have charges that start happening for the doctors when they use the mill because we believe it’s such a useful tool that if you just provide it, I hate saying that word, free, they won’t have the value that it should have. So we actually have a minor charge for our dentists to use certain blocks as an example. So it actually pays itself off and then some.

Bill Neumann: Rob, let’s switch gears a little bit. You mentioned it earlier, learning opportunities. You mentioned your facility in Irvine. I had the opportunity to go there for your DSO Summit. I mean, first class. I mean, just great, great, great area to learn. So I’m interested. I want to find out more. You mentioned that initially there’s some training in California, but what does the training look like and what is ongoing training?

Rob Brenneise: Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, it starts in the office first, right? We’ll come out to each individual office and train the entire team for a full day. So the next day, that office can start milling crowns. And then it’s that ongoing support Monday through Friday to, you know, you can call anytime to get the help you need. We have a very robust curriculum for education around the mill. both in an extensive library of years of recorded webinars we’ve done over the years, you know, all categorized depending what you’re looking to learn. We have a, beyond the training where we fly the two people out from the office three or four months later, we also have advanced classes. For example, we have an advanced anterior class, a two-day intimate limited to 20 attendees that we hold every other month. We have an advanced partial coverage and bridge, screw retained is coming for us. And those are available for just those offices that want to go to that next level or in that certain vertical or type of restoration they’re looking to add. And I think one thing I didn’t mention earlier, and Dentologie is great and it’s Doc himself, every month we provide the offices with a mill report which we, internally, it’s like a report card, so we can look at every practice. We can see number of units they’re milling, what materials they’re using, what tooth numbers they’re using the materials on, what types of restorations. We can track, you know, how much time they’re spending designing, marking a margin, just everything, you know, so many tools are available in software to make sure we have the tools and the leaders have the tools to help an office. to improve or get more efficient. Even if that office isn’t raising any questions or concerns, we might be able to see they take longer over here than we think they really should based on our national average.

Bill Neumann: And Bruce, I think you mentioned to me there, it seems like every week there’s some new education, some course that’s going on in Irvine, right? I mean, I know that I had a list of some of the courses that you sent over and it just seemed like every week there was something else going on there. And there also are opportunities, I think, for groups to come in, right? So you could actually bring some custom training as well.

Bruce Tuck: Yeah, so one of the most amazing things at Glidewell, I don’t refer to them as courses or events. They’re an experience. Dr. Founas mentioned the importance of culture and developing that, which is something DSOs wrestle with. And so at Glidewell, invariably, whenever we have a course, there’s going to be at least one or two people that come up and say, are people really this happy here? So the culture experience, and a few years back, I believe it was Rob’s decision, if not somebody else’s, to have all of our events right here at Glidewell. Because they get the experience, not just of the culture, but all the latest in technology, digital and otherwise, lab restorations and things like that. So we do have a lot of courses that we do here, and I think we’re close to doubling next year what we did last year. And then for the DSOs, If we’re partnered with a DSO, all of our courses are free of charge. Something that we did coming out of our summit last year is, as you know, Bill, most DSOs will have their annual doctor meeting where they bring their doctors together and things like that. So at Glidewell, we started to offer DSOs the opportunity to have us host their event at our campus. So that includes covering all costs, speakers, CEs, the events, the food, the drinks. The only thing they have to cover is their flights in the room. And coming out of the summit last year, fitting into our schedule, we’ve got already three DSOs this year that are having their doc four. We just We just had our summit August, or excuse me, July 26th, and one DSO said, can we do one on August 23rd? So we put it together. They’re bringing their doctors out just to give them the opportunity to host it there. Obviously, it saves significant costs, but the reason that they want to do that is to experience that culture that we have, and it definitely rubs off. You can see it by the posts that people make afterwards. So yes, we will host them. We will also go to their, if they have an event, they’re not coming here, we’ll send a speaker out that way. All of our education opportunities can be done virtually or in person as long as our dates are available, speakers are available, and things like that. And we don’t charge for any of those things. So the opportunity is there on a large scale.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. Dr. Founas, what advice would you give other DSOs that are considering making that leap and incorporating digital dentistry into the practices?

Dr. Oussama Founas: What’s interesting to me is these conversations in terms of digital. It’s not, to me, if you want to get philosophical, it’s not a future question. It’s more like you’re already behind if you’re not there. And I think from being behind, it’s one, in front of patients. Because the last thing you want to be is for patients to come to you and you don’t provide specific services that are becoming more and more commonplace. Two, I think it does actually help as a recruiting tool for employees. And you see that you’re staying up to date. They know it translates into other aspects of the business. And I would say that, I mean, From a profitability standpoint, it only makes things far more efficient and better for you. It definitely gets you there. Honestly, I’ve had a really great time working with them personally and professionally. I think that from a service perspective, it’s very places that I’ve worked with where I can actually call like, Robert, hey, I have a question, or I can contact my, I can just get on a text thread and start asking questions about X, Y, or Z. It’s not commonplace to do that. Even though dentistry is very good at being personalized, I think it’s not very common to see that.

Bruce Tuck: brought up a really good point that I think, and Rob, I always let you talk about the crossover on impression versus scans from Glidewell, but I do, we’ll tell you this from the recruiting standpoint, unexpectedly, we did have a DSO order 30 scanners from us, our Glidewell Fast Scan, simply because it helped them with the recruiting. I was surprised, but Dr. Founas is spot on on that. I think, especially the younger dentists, they want the new tech and things like that. But anyway, and then Rob can talk about, Dr. Funes is 100% correct that it’s already come, and Rob can speak to that.

Rob Brenneise: Yeah, that’s exactly where I was going to go, Bruce. to that, because I hear that question to our doctors, you know, do you think digital is the future? And to feed off mentioned, yeah, by our size and scale, March of last year, we started receiving more digital scans than physical impressions. And it just grows month over month. So we see it as a year and a half ago almost is when digital became the norm and analog is now not. We still receive over a hundred and something thousand physical impressions, but it’s growing month over month. And yeah, I think it was March of last year and originally we started the year thinking it would be August of last year. we would find our, our path to crossing. And that’s just how fast growing it’s compounding month over month.

Bruce Tuck: And to frame that, like you didn’t catch it. Rob said, we do 10 to 12,000 cases a day. So we’re pretty good picture of what’s going on in the industry today.

Bill Neumann: Absolutely. So as we start to wrap up the podcast here, I’d like to get final thoughts from Dr. Founas and also maybe a peek into the future of Dentologie. What do you have in the works in the next year?

Dr. Oussama Founas: Yeah, so obviously there are growth plans from a quantity perspective. I think in order for us to become the premier brand and to become the patient experience brand, that does obviously involve being present. So you likely will see us in another two markets about a year to two years from now. Our patient base is pretty urban. So we will be pretty, we’re pretty focused too. So we don’t like to veer off too much. So we’ll probably be another couple of cities at that point. We are very tech heavy. So, So that scanning thing, I think we do about 97, 96% of our cases are scanned. We actually track that just because there’s, we actually have a PBS that gets expired, but that’s neither here nor there. And then we also are growing our tech in terms of the patient experience. So we actually have built like a, an app for our patients and the idea will be their dental world of all things, Dentologie, but also their, so, things like balances, one month visits. And we’re really excited that patients as of a few weeks ago, were able to start booking their treatment visits via the app. So it’s not very commonplace to be able to do that in dentistry, you usually have to pick up the phone or go back and forth by email. But now because of how we’ve done our systems in the offices, our patients can actually sit back, get a push notification, book their visits, and then not have to take their card out. So the idea is to become very frictionless over time.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. And Dr. Founas, if people want to find out more, is it best to go to your website Dentologie.com?

Dr. Oussama Founas: So if you definitely Dentologie.com to learn more about us. If you actually want to know the substance of us and actually see us day to day, Instagram and dentology were very relevant. My partner, Dr. M, he’s like, I call the TikTok face for us. So he’s definitely educated patients on there. So definitely the angle to go and find more about us.

Bill Neumann: Okay, we can drop the links for the Instagram channel, as well as, obviously, your website. Well, thank you, Dr. Founas. All right, Rob and Bruce, future of Glidewell, what can we expect?

Rob Brenneise: Bruce, our TikTok guru for Glidewell. Yeah, I think, you know, similar, and it’s all things technology. And even on our topic today around the Glidewell IO system, we, you know, Dr. mentioned the upgrades and updates. This coming next three, four months, we’ll have two software updates, two product releases that are gonna allow our users to mill Bruxer screw retain crowns in the office. And then a new product release of a material, lithium disilicate material that doesn’t require an oven. So you can just mill it, polish it, place it, which is really the key to our test and the mill space and our adoption is eliminating that having to be a lab tech and go through all those steps of firing, glazing, etc.

Bill Neumann: So Bruce, if people want to find out more about Glidewell or contact you, they have an emerging group or a DSO and they want to find out more about Fastmail or Glidewell’s in-office solutions, how do they do so?

Bruce Tuck: So obviously they can go to Glidewell.com, but I can give you an email address to drop in. If you email the DSO support team at Glidewell.com or myself, reach me by my cell phone. DSO support team at Glidewell.com goes to all of our DSO team members, as well as myself and Rob. So we’ll pick up on that immediately and everything that’s available to them. We can usually run them through everything that we offer DSOs in about a 30 minute teams meeting. And it’s, it’s like a, it’s like smorgasbord. You can pick what you want from the mills, the scanners, the free implant program, free education, uh, aligners that have no in-office visits, IPRs or things like that. Yes, I’m shoving in a commercial right there. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, anything that we have to offer, um, uh, DSS support team at glidewell.com and then we’ll schedule something right away and then I’ll get everybody’s contact information to them from there.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Well, thanks, everybody, for being on the podcast today. We’ll make sure we drop all the contact information, the Instagram handles, the websites, the email addresses, so you can get in touch with everybody, find out what’s up with Dentologie. find out what’s going on at Glidewell, and really appreciate the conversation. Very enlightening. Thank you to Dr. Founas, Rob, and Bruce of Glidewell. Great conversation. And thanks everybody for watching us today. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann, and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.

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