The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry – Episode 52

Debbie Durako, Director of StellaLife, and Dr. Jeffrey Burch, Periodontist and owner of Burch Dental Partners, a dental group with three locations, discuss the use cases for StellaLife. We know that inflammation in the mouth can lead to disease throughout the body and even death. StellaLife provides a natural approach to pain & inflammation reduction without opioids, promotes healing, assists in periodontic health, and improves outcomes. If you want to learn how to make your good practice(s) great, this podcast is for you! 

Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry.

The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Africa, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, click here to leave a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 5-star review.

Choose your favorite listening app below and subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode! Full transcript is also provided below.Choose your favorite listening app below and subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode! Full transcript is also provided below.

Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Hey, I’d like to welcome everybody to the Group Dentistry Now show. Glad everybody is here today, whether you are watching us on YouTube or on the groupdentistrynow.com platform, or listening to us on apple, Google, Spotify, or the other listening platforms. Glad to have you here. We have two special guests today and going to hear some really cool stories about DSO, some products that we want to talk about. But first off, Debbie Durako, thanks for being here and Dr. Jeffrey Burch, thanks for being on the Group Dentistry Now show today.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Glad to be here.

Deborah Durako:

Thank you for having me.

Bill Neumann:

Sure. This is going to be a lot of fun. Do a brief intro and talk a little bit about Debbie’s background and then Dr. Burch and what he’s up to, and then we’ll get into some Q&A. First off, we have Debbie Durako. She’s been in the dental field for over 36 years. You actually beat me on that one. But nothing much, but you beat me. She’s been involved in all facets of the industry, so dental coach for hygiene, managing practices, consultant for dental practices and a dental speaker as well.

Bill Neumann:

Debbie brings her experience from clinical to marketing and management of multiple dental practices. And now she is the director of StellaLife. She has a hands-on approach and a passion for dentistry, and it’s allowed her to implement the value and clinical applications of StellaLife, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Into DSOs and also private practices around the country. Again, Debbie, thanks for being.

Deborah Durako:

Sure thing. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Feels like all that time has gone by really quickly when I think about where it all began. It’s an amazing journey. Dentistry’s evolved dramatically and the last, probably 15 years, we’ve seen so much technology and just wonderful, wonderful ways to be able to do what we do in dentistry. And it’s my pleasure to be a part of StellaLife, fascinating, fascinating company, but also a really strong mission in mind.

Deborah Durako:

We had from the very beginning, a very big desire to improve people’s lives and we wanted to do that through being able to use a natural product that actually would accelerate wound healing. It would also help relieve pain, opioid free, which is very, very important to us, as well as being able to accelerate that wound-healing your experience, giving the patients a much better outcome. And for our doctors as well, being able to have more predictable outcomes.

Deborah Durako:

So extremely my pleasure to be a part of this journey with StellaLife. And I’m excited to have Dr. Burch here with us today to share his experience as well. So thank you for having me.

Bill Neumann:

This is great stuff and I met Debbie a couple of years back at an ADSO meeting, I believe.

Deborah Durako:

Yes.

Bill Neumann:

And as you can tell, Debbie has a lot of passion beliefs strongly about StellaLife, and that’s how I met you. You were talking about StellaLife and I think it might’ve been at the cocktail hour.

Deborah Durako:

I think so.

Bill Neumann:

Let’s talk a little bit about Dr Burch. Debbie, you did talk about the changes from a product standpoint and technology standpoint over the past 10 and 15 years totally. But I think also on the provider side of things, things have really changed in the past 10 or 15 years. You’ve gone from really a lot of solo practitioners that own their practices and there’s been, let’s face it, a lot of consolidation in the industry. Some good, maybe some not so good, but the consolidation continues.

Bill Neumann:

And I think if anything, COVID has really accelerated some of that consolidation. You have some solo practitioners. We talk about seeking shelter from the storm, there was that, the 2008, 2010, that recession that happened and you saw a little bit of consolidation there. And then I think with COVID, you’ve seen some docs that said, “Hey, I’m looking for somebody to support my practice because I really don’t want to be out there on my own anymore.” Let’s talk about Dr. Burch.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Jeffrey Burch again, thanks for being here. He is a board certified periodontist and has been practicing since 2006. He studied dentistry at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville and periodontics at St. Louis University. He is a member of the first periodontist-led multi-location DSO in the U.S. Practices located in Northern Illinois and Southern Wisconsin region of the U.S. and he is happily married to his wife, who’s also a dentist, Dr. Leanne Burch, and a mom and a practice owner as well.

Bill Neumann:

And you have two kids, Jude, and I get this other one right? Bear?

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

You got that. That’s right.

Bill Neumann:

All right. Is that a nickname or is that a proper name?

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

It was going to be his first name, but when he was born, I thought, let’s give it to him as a middle name. So Bear is his middle name, Jeffrey is his first like his father.

Bill Neumann:

That’s very cool.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

I figured people wouldn’t forget his name once they met him. And they typically don’t, he’s a very special kid.

Bill Neumann:

Excellent. I love it. Good stuff, and again, thanks for being here. Let’s talk a little bit. Debbie talked about StellaLife touched on it. Let’s talk a little bit about your DSO, your practice and basically a little more background.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

I started private practice in 2016. I met my wife in dental school and we were married in 2014… I’m sorry, 2004. In 2006, I started practice in Rockford along with another doctor that had brought dental implants to the region. He was an amazing surgeon, an amazing person, a great mentor as far as what to be as a good, solid, honest dentists and specialists in the area, somebody that you can go to for help.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

The recession hit like you mentioned, in 2007. My wife had been working for a dentist, it didn’t work out. I had been working at the Perry office for about a year. Things were going great in the first year, and then the floor fell out. My wife ended up buying a practice at the end of 2007. And basically was a two operatory office that had about 200 patients. We basically got the practice for the cost of the building.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

She was one of the first practices in town to take insurance, so during the recession, her practice got very, very popular, so popular that she couldn’t keep it up herself. And we brought on associates. I continued to grow my perio practice. Back then, we would call them satellite locations, and that’s what a lot of doctors consider their smaller practices, satellite locations.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

As a periodontist, I’d thought that was cheap, cheapening of the patient experience. I thought it was a horrible idea that we go to your little town and we have like a side job. We’re not the local surgeon in town, so I never really looked at my practices as an extension of somewhere else. I thought that was poor customer service, I thought that was poor mindset and it limited the size of practices if you’re never considered a fully functional location.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

My wife had her practice and I focused on my perio practice and we built it up. We were one of the first ones to get out of the recession, much like now. Very successful dentists don’t even feel COVID is even happening and I felt like I got out of the recession in 2009 or 2010, because I built a strategy to add more locations. It gave me more stability, it gave me a better… I was able to cast a wider net and be able to secure better relationships with people that really were like-minded like I was and patient-oriented.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

When the recession ended officially, we were up and running. I brought on another doctor. I was in my early 30s and I had brought on an associate after the recession. My wife had successfully brought on an associate and we were feeling pretty good about life. She had her own thing and I had mine. And so we continued to expand, we continued to grow. And in 2014, we had two children at the time and my three-year-old developed leukemia.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

To make a long story short, he passed away two years later in 2016. I had to take over the entire organization, which was the general side. And instead of letting it fold, I used a lot of the resources I learned from the recession to, instead of letting it crumble, I built it up. So we brought on doctors, we stabilized the practice. And then I partnered with a few doctors. When my son was diagnosed, we were losing $15,000 a month at the general office, and we upgraded the ship and not only started breaking even, but we started profiting.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

And it kept getting more and more as time went on. And after my son passed away, I felt that having more time and a more flexible schedule for myself and my family was something I really wanted to pursue. And I wanted to focus on projects that would help improve lives of people and in this case, even save a few people’s lives by not using narcotics.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Give you a little bit more background, when I was 17, I joined the military and I was an infantry soldier for three years before college. Understanding how precious life is, is one of my specialties, I think. It’s one of the things that I carry with me and it helps it reflects through my core values of my practice and also through what I use as far as things to give patients.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

And reducing the amount of narcotics throughout the United States is one of those missions that is in line with what my value is as far as life and taking care of people. So I thought that this would be a good opportunity to highlight that.

Bill Neumann:

Absolutely. That’s pretty impactful story that you have there, and certainly understand why you’d be drawn to StellaLife. And I know again, when I talked to Debbie a couple of years back, and she talked about really alleviating the use for opioids or reducing it greatly, it just made so much sense. It’s nice that it’s not just the product that might make a practice more money, but there’s something, this greater good. It makes so much sense. So thanks, Dr. Burch for that.

Bill Neumann:

Debbie, let’s talk a little bit about maybe the… Because it’s not just one product, there’s a group of products, they’re a family of products. Maybe just talk a little bit about that, and then what I’d like to do is, as you’re talking about the products, Dr. Burch, if you want to talk about how you use those in your practices and maybe the impact that it’s had. If that’s okay, we can do it a little bit that way.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Absolutely, yeah. Great

Deborah Durako:

Yeah, that sounds great. StellaLife has three things that are available currently, a recovery kit, which I believe Dr. Burch and his organization use a combination of our products. But the recovery kit is what’s incredibly intriguing when it comes to the concept of reducing inflammation and helping therefore relieve pain. Because we all know it’s kind of connected. Inflammation is totally connected to discomfort and pain.

Deborah Durako:

So the recovery kit we’ll have a rinse and a sublingual spray and a gel, and it’s the synergy. Took 14-and-a-half years to develop this product. It’s all plant and mineral-based, which is very exciting because your patients who are at high risk can actually use this and be safe. The key mechanisms in this is the anti-microbial effect, as well as the anti-inflammatory effect.

Deborah Durako:

And recently, we discovered that there’s also some antiviral effects with it, which we sort of suspected, but we have some great science now that actually demonstrates that. And I think with Dr. Burch’s group and all of the doctors involved that the recovery kit is their go-to for their surgeries and for those high risk patients. And I believe that most of our doctors really find the value in this is the patient satisfaction levels changed dramatically, particularly post-op and the way it helps them with discomfort. And that’s our recovery kit.

Bill Neumann:

Okay.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

We’re using it because it’s, one it’s natural. It tastes really good. When we use chlorhexidine in our practice, it stains the teeth a lot. Not only does it look bad, but it’s very difficult to remove when the hygienists, unless they have polishing like baking soda type mix to get off heavy stain with like a Prophy-Jet. So if you don’t have a Prophy-Jet, it’s very, very, very difficult to remove. And then the fact that it reduces inflammation significantly helps surgical outcomes.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

If we’re doing a graft or some type of implant where we’re doing tissue manipulation, the reduction in swelling improves the hold on the sutures if we use sutures. And when you reduce inflammation in surgery, you reduce pain. We use a combination of StellaLife or for both the inflammation and the pain. We also use a pain pack that alternating ibuprofen and Tylenol along with it and we found that we can reduce our opioid prescriptions by about 95%.

Bill Neumann:

Wow.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Okay. And when you can do that, if you think about how many thousands of people get surgery every single day, how many people that will be and the statistics that show how the dentists are responsible for a huge portion of the deaths that are caused by heroin overdoses and Oxycontin overdoses. And we are just a gateway to that, and it’s proven. So there’s a lot of things that in the world that make change. One is something that actually has utility, and then there’s the money-making aspect of things.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

I think once corporations or practices understand that they not only have a duty to provide the best product, they can actually provide it on their shelves and provide retail space for it. And it’s not terribly difficult to inventory, and it’s a win all the way around. It helps the patient keep their mouth healthy, reduce inflammation, along with the mouth is connected to the rest of the body. And we can talk about that.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

And then we have the benefit to the team member, which is the hygienist doesn’t have to waste time cleaning a stain, because stain actually doesn’t hurt the periodontium. The plaque and bacteria do. So they can spend most of their time focusing on the patient instead of focusing on stain removal. And then finally, with the practice, I think that there is an opportunity, if you carry retail space, there should be some type of margin that you feel comfortable with providing that service and providing that education as well.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Just from a patient advocate company and team member advocation that, it’s a great product.

Bill Neumann:

It makes a lot of sense, and to your point about retailing, which some practices do it, some don’t. But if you’re retailing spin brushes, then it would it be logical that you would provide something like this that’s going to provide all sorts of benefits, versus just trying to make a couple dollars on a toothbrush.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Here’s the thing, most people can’t sell a toothbrush, but most people can do surgery or some type of procedure and sell less pain and less inflammation. If you’re not good at inventorying before, it’s because stuff isn’t leaving the shelves. If stuff leaves the shelves, then it’s something worth having in your office.

Bill Neumann:

Debbie, tell me about some of the other products that you have there. Then I’d love to continue on with some of the use cases with Dr. Burch and just you maybe get a couple examples of some patient experiences.

Deborah Durako:

Sure. Happy to do that. The second product we have is our StellaLife Rinse, and this is probably been studied more than any of our products we have available. The science is really intriguing behind this. The Rinse has this incredible anti-microbial effect, and now, as I mentioned earlier, we also know that it has an antiviral effect. We actually tested it against certain strains of that 20 word human coronavirus and we’ve been able to demonstrate that in fact, a kill rate of 99.8, 3%.

Deborah Durako:

So this is not only something that is excellent for a patient to use when they’re in active therapy, but this is a long-term rinse for them. They could use this every single day. And what’s great, it’s only a half a tablespoon. As Dr. Burch mentioned, they like it because it tastes good and that has made compliance much higher for these patients to be able to find something that really works for them. It can be used long-term.

Deborah Durako:

And then the third product we have is the gel. And our gel, again, is one of those products that is focused on anti-inflammatory effects and such a wide spectrum of application. Beyond the surgical components, we found it to be really effective for angular cheilitis, cold sores, canker sores. Dr. Scott Froum did a great study on canker sores with it, comparing it to lasers and some other things. And really intriguing of how well it works and how quickly and how pain-free it is as well.

Deborah Durako:

Those are the two other products, and I know with Dr. Burch’s practices, I think pretty sure they’ve implemented a little bit of all of that.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Yeah. Actually we are using the gel more often on site-specific areas like cold sores after laser treatment. And we are using the Rinse more often. Patients actually requested as well. Sometimes we break up the kids, but we’re going to see more and more in our practice. We’re going to be using it for more applications as time goes on.

Bill Neumann:

Interesting. I’ve got a short story to tell about the gel. When I met Debbie, I think I was complaining about an issue I was having. I still have all my wisdom teeth, but as Dr. Burch probably knows, most patients probably don’t do the best job of brushing their wisdom teeth. It’s a challenge, always has been, but I’m so proud that I have them. But I did have a deep pocket that formed, and so I had some swelling.

Bill Neumann:

And I was talking to Debbie about it and she’s like, “Take some of this back with you.” So I actually am a user and the gel worked really, really well. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t… Because I was having problems for quite a while, so I told my dentist about it. Anyway, my own testimony, which you probably didn’t know you were going to get, Debbie.

Deborah Durako:

No. We hear this all the time. That’s what’s so great about the stories, are significant, particularly those patients who’ve had treatment in the past and may be very concerned about doing a treatment again. When they’ve gone through our protocols, they seem to be more interested in continuing care and doing another procedure because their experience was so different than the first time around.

Deborah Durako:

And I think that’s where StellaLife can help grow practices by those patients that have those great reviews, because we’re in a world of reviews and you get the good ones and you get those good experiences. Patients tend to want to come to the practices that have those. And so, that’s a very important part of the goal, is to make our patients more comfortable and be able to help you grow your practice too by using innovation, and being able to use good things that actually do really well for patient care.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Burch, I have a question for you. How did you come to find Stella Health and StellaLife? And what were you doing prior to that?

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

In the past we would use chlorhexidine rinse or peridex. We would use steroids to reduce inflammations. We would use Vicodin, sometimes oxycodone. Darvocet when Darvocet was available. And to be honest with you, none of it ever really worked. It worked, but it wasn’t something that I could count on it taking care of things. I knew it was just a backup. And it was sometimes used and sometimes it wasn’t. But I’ve always wanted my patients to have something, some type of pain remedy.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

What makes my practice a little unique is I straddle between traditional research-based dentistry. I work with a lot of high level clinicians in the periodontal world and an oral surgery. One of my good friends, Mike Pikos is somebody who uses it very regularly in his implant surgical practice. And so is Jason Stone, one of my good perianal friends. It’s a really big influencer in the perio world.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Just learning from my fellow friends that are really into the researching, they introduced me to this product at a conference of periodontists a number of years ago, some very heavily clinical level practitioners, but also very business minded. So I straddled between what we see as a DSO that ADSO would consider a traditional DSO. So I straddled between that and entered initial clinical dentistry, which is what I was raised on.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

I’ve always been an entrepreneur and I’ve built practices from the ground up, and I love doing that. But my roots are in quality dentistry. We have a commitment to excellence in our practice and high quality clinical work is something that I hold dear and is one of our top business strategies. Retention of doctors is another one, and the way that you retain doctors is you always provide quality. You always provide a high level of care.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

And our philosophy is to be an innovative, progressive dental practice that isn’t like the ones that were around back in the day when all the patients were scared of in their minds. We practice sedation, we do all kinds of things that every thing that you can think of that helps with reducing anxiety, and pain, and displeasure from lack of people that care. That’s how we got into it. StellaLife is a really great piece to an overall ensemble and it fits our goals.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Part of my goal in life is to make the world a better place, and I think StellaLife is just one of those things that makes a good practice great and up-to-date.

Bill Neumann:

I love that, good practice great. I’d asked, I love your point about retention of the clinicians, because I think it’s one of those things that is not, especially with some of the larger groups. They don’t always look at retention tied to the products or whether it’s the new technologies, whether it’s solutions like this that make patient outcomes better, that the clinicians believe in. But really a lot of it does have to do with what they’re able to use, and what they feel good about, and that the new things being brought to them.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Right. That’s why in most DSOs, what you have is you have a director of clinical care. And 99 out of 100 times, it’s a hygienist. And that’s fine that it’s a hygienist. There are some super talented hygienists out there, amazing hygienists. We have amazing group in inside my practice, we have lots of hygienists that do lots of expanded duties and all kinds of things and management. But there’s no representation of the periodontist in DSOs as far as what I’ve seen. Okay.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

They work inside practices, but the clinical director or the director of things that are clinical should be based in the foundation of dentistry, which is the periodontium. If we have good foundation, you can’t put crowns on teeth that don’t have a good foundation. A periodontist works with endodontist. We work with orthodontists, we treatment plan with prosthodontist. We cover everything.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

If you have a problem with a pediatric patient that has gum issues, we take care of patients from birth to grave. And when a DSO is missing a periodontist in that mix as someone who is a leader of a portion of their DSO, at the very least. The chief dental officer should be split up into at least two positions and led by another clinician. So when that’s not inside of a practice, in my opinion, that is a practice that is lacking.

Bill Neumann:

Great points and what’s the percentage? I know it’s relatively high as far as patients that have some type of periodontal compromise.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

It’s 50% if you’re over 30 years old, and it’s 70% if you’re over 65. If there is no referral mechanism in a periodontal program involving a periodontist and involving reduction of inflammation, which that’s… If you talk to doctors that understand longevity, the first thing they focus on is inflammation. Okay. So if inflammation kills you and the most prolific disease that affects the most amount of human beings in the entire earth is gum disease, and we know what percentage there are, that should be the area of focus, helping people live longer.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

There’s people like Steve Thorne and are doing some amazing work in this and the people at StellaLife are fighting for that as well. One way to get dental into medicine is to fight the inflammation fight. We know how to run practices and we can run it better than medicine. I don’t believe in that. I believe in actually, let’s try to let people understand that your life expectancy goes down when you have a lot of inflammation in your body and your mouth is one of the largest sources of that.

Bill Neumann:

It makes total sense. Let me pivot here a little bit to Debbie and just ask you this question. A lot of use cases here, makes a lot of sense, but what is it like to, when we onboard StellaLife, talk about that. What’s the learning curve? How do we implement it when somebody goes, “This makes sense. We want to bring it into the group”? But that’s always one of those things. It’s not so much, he didn’t get buy-in for the product, but it’s, can we train? And so what does that look like, Debbie?

Deborah Durako:

That is always a great question. Because of my background, I really believe in team, and I think when you actually get your team to buy in to what you’re doing, which means that they have their own experience, or like you did with your experience and with Dr. Burch’s group, the training is easy. It’s a 30-minute training initially with the entire group. We really want our administrators to be involved in this because they are also a key component to the sales line, I used to call it from the beginning to the end.

Deborah Durako:

The patients often ask these front desk folks a lot of questions about what did they just give me, or what did they tell me to do? And so we felt it was very important to incorporate not only the clinical team, but the administrators. So it’s about a 30-minute training session. We go over clinical a lot, because I think it’s important to see before and afters that helps you understand a little bit more about the impact. And then we dive a little deeper into the science behind the product, but most importantly, how do we talk about it?

Deborah Durako:

How do we dispense it? How do we share that with our patients to help them understand the why? And when I was back in my days of consulting, one of the most important pieces of the puzzle, again, to me was that our patients understood why we were doing what we were doing and what was the benefit for them. And something that’s very interesting I’ve learned by talking to a lot of these offices is that there’s two things that come up very commonly when they’re sharing clinical treatment planning, your treatment coordinators.

Deborah Durako:

When they’re sitting down and going over the planning with the patient, they go through the treatment plan, and then they introduce StellaLife to them as not just another rinse or another gel. This is actually part of your care. It’s going to do two things for you. It’s going to accelerate your wounds healing so you’re going to heal faster, but better yet you’re going to be less pain. It will relieve your pain.

Deborah Durako:

And really that’s what is keeping patients away from the kind of care that Dr. Burch’s talking about still to this day. We have lots and lots of great opportunities to make it comfortable. The training comes from the component of clinical, as well as the administrative, because that’s an important piece of the puzzle. So we do a train the trainer program too, which is allowing the larger group practices to be able to have someone on the inside learn as much about this and be able to share that in team meetings, and staff meetings, and staff training, even online as the resource page within their organization.

Deborah Durako:

So we found a way to do it pretty efficiently, easy, and that’s most important. You all are very, very busy and there’s lots going on all the time. So we wanted to make it simple. And we also have recorded versions of the training so that it makes it easy to come back to it at any time.

Bill Neumann:

No, that’s great point. Dr. Burch, I’ll let you… What was the training like on your side when you started with this product line? Was it relatively simple, what was the learning curve like?

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

For a periodontal office, it’s not terribly difficult. We prescribe just about every procedure. We prescribe some type of rinse, like I mentioned or some pain medication, so it’s really easy for that. I think rolling out to practices, I think starting with practices that do the most surgery is where I would start. I would start with that because there is a significant need for something better, a significant need. So I would start there. And that’s how we’ve worked at my practice, is we started with a surgical practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

The surgical team, we take a comprehensive approach. So we have education programs and study clubs. So we talk about at the study clubs, as a board-certified periodontist, it gives me credibility to be able to make recommendations without having sabotage on the side of in-change management. There’s a program of overall improvement of health should be something that should be in a practice.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

So I would challenge practice owners to start building one. And whether or not StellaLife is part of that, that should be part of their practice goal, is to make a difference in the world. If millennials are the target audience for our team members, and that’s where the majority of DSOs get their team members from, here’s an opportunity to accommodate that need that would help out in the HR department.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

So just having just things in general of helping your company image by selecting things that make the world a better place. I think you could use StellaLife as just one of those starting points. There’s a way we can enter in retail that we’ve been kicking the side for years and years. Cause we don’t want to sound like we’re selling a bunch of stuff. Or the companies that do sell a bunch of stuff, maybe you should peel back some of the other things you’re selling and sell some at something that actually works well.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

It doesn’t have to be a product ad-on, like how most things that are sold to us that they have to be, it’s not an extra amount of money added onto another procedure. It’s an actual product itself. So educating the patient at the time of consultation is one of the things that we do. So we have the StellaLife information up on a screen in front of the patient. We do the training programs with the front office team and the clinic clinical side. And then we’re all bought in, the whole company is bought in.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

So when we’re all bought in to an idea, it makes it easy. And when you sell the volume that we sell, it’s profitable, plain and simple. Everybody’s happy. If you have the leadership capital to be able to add something progressive, then I think it’s worth it. But if you don’t, then you’re probably going to fail at other things too.

Bill Neumann:

It’s a great point.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

This is when you’re really, really wanting to take care of people and this is advanced leadership. It’s not even advanced stuff, it’s how do you get your team in change management to follow something that can actually save a life or a number of lives if you think about much you’re going to reduce your narcotic consumption by the patients.

Bill Neumann:

All great points and the number one, the life saving. You keep people off of opioids. They never get into them. Then you talked about other things which are secondary, but still important, and you talked about the retention. And you could probably look at it from a patient retention standpoint too, so not just the doctors, but also the patients. And then we talked about the ease of training, there’s so many different things, and the retail benefit too.

Dr. Jeffrey Burch:

Think about the people that have used chlorhexidine and then the next time they get it, they get some rinses, which these people, they get extractions all the time. They’re going to have something better and there’ll be a difference. There’ll be a stark contrast between their last dentist as well.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. Thank you, Dr. Burch for that. Debbie, I’m going to let you have a final word here. Why don’t you talk about how people can find out more about StellaLife and then anything else you want to end things on.

Deborah Durako:

Sure. Thank you both. Thank you, Dr. Burch for your kind words and your experience with it. That’s what it’s all about. I think with StellaLife, again, we’ve always been focused on trying to improve lives and we feel very strongly that our world is ready for this. Especially when it’s a natural product like we have, patient compliance is so much higher because they feel better about it and that’s really important.

Deborah Durako:

If you want to be able to learn how to implement and learn how it works within your own DSO or small group practice, then all you need to do is reach out to us. Our website has a link to it that you can send us a message. Let us know what you’re interested in. I highly recommend you pilot it into a practice so you can get your data, be able to really see the differences between what was happening before and after, and I love data.

Deborah Durako:

So I think numbers always speak the real language. It’s non-emotional then, we’re able to really digest what’s happening, how we can be profitable, how in most importantly, we can increase our patient satisfaction levels with the care, help them get more care because they sure need it. And not create barriers for patients to not be able to have the care they want to have, at the quality they want it to have.

Deborah Durako:

And so just reaching out to us through our website is a great way to communicate with us. Our team will help you. We have team members all over the country. We’re very experienced group, we understand dentistry, so we’re here to help. And that was always been our goal. We just want to help you have the experience to do the level of care that you really would like to do within your practices and retain those doctors, retain the staff, because they’re very excited about what they’re doing again, and we’re here to help. So whatever we can do, just reach out.

Bill Neumann:

Thank you, Debbie. I think we’re going to wrap things up now, but Debbie Durako, thank you so much for the information. And Dr. Jeffrey Burch, we really appreciate your story. You’re both very passionate about what you do and it certainly shows, and I appreciate the time. And I’m sure that Group Dentistry Now, audience really got a lot out of this today. And we’ll have some information if you want to reach out and find out more about Dr. Jeffrey Burch or talk to Debbie and connect with her and find out more about StellaLife. You can, we’ll put that in the show notes.

Bill Neumann:

Again, I thank you both for joining us today and thank the audience for listening and watching. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann with the Group Dentistry Now show.