Improve Profitability through Clean Claims

With almost 11 ADA recognized dental specialties and having a burgeoning market share, the specialty dental business is here to make significant gains in the coming years as we take a cursory glance on the latest trends of the dental industry.

Listen to Ryan Arnold, Principal, Wisdom Teeth Guys as he explains the possibilities that lie ahead for Dental Specialty business and how he has paid attention on patient care,technology adoption and brand management to further sustainable practice growth for his specialty.

Dentistry's Inner Circle bg 37

Creating Sustainable Specialty Dental Businesses

Dentistry's Inner Circle Podcast

A series of podcasts from practice owners on how they navigated the change and successfully transitioned to CareStack. 

Beatrice Perez

Ishtiaq Rouf

Dana Veach

Dr. Himesh Kana, DDS

Himesh Kana

 Penny Filipe

Operational Performance Will Define the Next DSO Era

Building CareStack's Partner Ecosystem

Dental Revenue Cycle Management: Automating Fee Schedules

When Capital Tightens, Operations Matter More Than Ever

Reducing patient no-shows and cancellations begins by accepting that 

it’s impossible to guarantee that your patients will always keep their appointments

. Once you accept that this falls outside your control, you can pool your efforts on the aspects that are within your control, and which help reduce no-shows and cancellations.

missed appointments cause a ripple effect

 that impacts your schedules, revenues, and the effectiveness of treatments. It strikes a serious blow to your bottom line. But with that said, there are 

effective safeguards you can put in place

 to address this issue. Before we explore these safeguards, let’s examine the key reasons behind no-shows and cancellations. 

Typically, patients miss their appointments when they:

Don’t understand the importance of keeping their appointments

Misunderstand when their appointment is scheduled

Self diagnose and decide to skip their appointments

Worry about bad news and try to avoid the situation

Have a shallow relationship with the provider

There is a wide range of reasons for patients to miss their appointments, but most can be mitigated with improved patient-provider communication and by implementing the following safeguards.

It became widely accepted as a care delivery method after the 2020 pandemic, but thanks to the convenience offered to patients, 

 is here to stay. Outside the initial check-up and actual treatment, consultations and routine post-op visits can be performed remotely. The virtual interactions offer patients the opportunity to 

receive treatment in the comfort of their living room

 or office. The added benefit of leveraging teledentistry is it adds one less reason for patients to rethink or opt out of their dental appointments. 

Another approach that has gained traction is using 

 to collect vital patient information. E-forms are a key feature of modern practice management software (PMS). This feature is now used widely to stay in line with the COVID-19 safety protocols. With this new norm, practices have completely replaced the clipboard and embraced digitization. Another fact that supports this approach is that 

98% of patients who take time to fill out online forms commit to their appointments

COVID-19 has added fuel to the fire of dental anxiety among patients. The risk of exposure is a valid fear. The best way for you to 

 is with communication and education. Ensure you convey the safety protocols and measures followed at your practice to reduce the risks from COVID-19. Launching targeted email campaigns, and updating relevant information on your practice website and 

convey your commitment to patient care and safety

 and encourage patients to follow through with their appointments.

When you provide your patients with the option to make payments in advance, it reduces the instances of no-shows and benefits your collections and accounts receivable. Get paid upfront instead of having to wait for 2-3 months. Paying cash in advance leads to 

. You can provide this option during patient checkout, especially when both you and your patient agree with the importance of scheduling the next appointment.

Offering upfront payment at this stage is apt, as the patient is likelier to take action and commit to their oral health. Another way to make it easy for them to pay is by providing an 

. Make sure that you inform your patient about your prepaid payment options. Market it through your campaigns, newsletters, and phone scripts.

Reminders are an effective way to reduce patient no-shows. Plan your 

and decide on a frequency that works best for your target clientele. Start off with a postcard, followed by email and text reminders. Add a phone reminder a few days before the scheduled appointment. Ensure that you cut down on reminders once you receive confirmation from your patients. Practice management software aids you to launch, coordinate and track your recall campaigns effectively.

reward patients who keep their appointments

. The reward initiatives can include discounts or gift cards. The benefits of such an approach are twofold. You encourage your patients to follow through on your appointments and 

convey how much you value their participation

. Moreover, curating such experiences helps you retain your customers.

Sometimes, patients simply forget an appointment. Send 

 that can include a “We missed you at the practice” message. Follow this up with a phone call to encourage them to reschedule immediately.

It is crucial that your patients know the impact of your treatments on their oral health. If your patients are not invested in the outcomes of your treatment plan, it is unlikely that they will uphold their commitments. 

 before every appointment. Remind them of the benefits of the procedure and the progress they’ve made so far. 

 of the scheduled appointment and ensure that they are fully onboard. A phone reminder before the appointment will help refresh what they already know about the 

Patients skip appointments because they owe your practice money or are worried the procedure will be too expensive. When this happens, it’s time to 

. It’s important that payments never come as a surprise to the patient. This causes anxiety in the patient, especially when they expect hidden expenses from each visit. When 

 and benefits are discussed upfront and agreed upon, patient no-shows due to financial concerns can be avoided. 

 allows you to effectively educate and communicate with your patients. Automating tasks like appointment reminders or confirmation/cancellation emails, filling last-minute openings, and sending online forms and other notifications to engage patients, practices can drastically cut revenue loss and staff workload while reducing patient no-shows and cancellations.

Eliminating No-Shows and Cancellations at Dental Office

For a dental practice, revenue cycle management is the equivalent of the body’s circulatory system and the heart of a practice’s financial success. The revenue cycle incorporates data capture, claims and denials management, and the collection of payments from both patient and insurance receivables. A healthy system works in concert with industry best practices and technical solutions to optimize efficiencies, identify “leaks” and improve operational workflows. As every practice is unique, it is difficult to prescribe a “one size fits all” approach. However, there are key performance indicators, which can and should be followed to measure practice performance. There are several potential KPIs which provide valuable insight into the collection’s performance and financial health of practice including, but not limited to: Collections percentage, Production growth, Aging accounts receivable, Days sales outstanding, Adjustments percentage, and Credit balances. 

Since 2011, the dental industry has experienced a steady and upward trend in aging receivables, with the majority of balances aged greater than 90 days. The good news is that CareStack offers a solution that combines modern technology, effective processes, and industry expertise to kick start the heart and breathe life back into the revenue cycle.

Revenue Cycle Playbook for Dental Professional

Revenue Cycle Playbook for Dental Professionals

From small, solo practices to large, multi-location clinics, these case studies demonstrate the versatility and value of CareStack in improving the patient experience and driving practice . 

The Safe Bet Is Getting More Expensive: Why Dentistry’s Next Era Will Be Won Through Operational Performance

 The source of value creation in dentistry is changing. The safe bet preserves familiar systems and processes to minimize short-term disruption. The performance bet makes the difficult operational, technology, and organizational changes required to improve productivity, margins, patient experience, and enterprise value.

 was not that dentistry has stopped growing.

It is that the source of growth has changed.

For years, value creation across the DSO market was driven by acquisitions, aggregation, inexpensive capital, and multiple expansion. Organizations could create value by adding practices, increasing scale, and waiting for the next transaction.

That model has become much more difficult.

Interest rates remain elevated. Capital is more selective. 

Labor and supply costs continue to rise while reimbursement remains largely flat

. Regulatory scrutiny is increasing, and affiliated doctors are asking harder questions about alignment, distributions, and long-term value.

Dykema’s opening sessions framed this shift clearly. The next phase of the industry will require dental organizations to implement technology, right-size overhead, integrate specialty care, maximize clinical productivity, and build stronger cultures.

The next era will not be won simply by owning more practices.

That creates a choice between the safe bet and the performance bet.

It is maintaining the current process because changing it will require leadership attention, training, and accountability.

It is delaying a platform upgrade because implementation could create short-term disruption.

It is allowing locations to continue operating differently because standardization may create resistance.

It is adding another point solution rather than addressing the 

It is choosing the software “everyone else uses” because the familiar option feels easier to defend if the outcome falls short.

These decisions are not irrational. They protect continuity and reduce immediate disruption.

But familiar does not necessarily mean low risk.

When labor costs are rising, reimbursement is flat, systems are disconnected, and teams are stretched, maintaining the current operating model may simply preserve its limitations.

The apparent safe bet is becoming more expensive because it preserves the labor dependency, fragmentation, and inconsistent execution that suppress performance.

The safe bet preserves the operating model that got the organization here.

The performance bet is the deliberate decision to build the operating model required to create value from here.

It does not mean spending more money or adopting every new technology.

It means making the difficult changes required to operate at a higher level.

That may include standardizing workflows, 

, upgrading the core platform, redesigning responsibilities, 

, centralizing appropriate functions, and holding teams accountable for adoption.

The performance bet accepts some short-term disruption in exchange for greater long-term capability.

For practice owners, that can mean less administrative friction, stronger practice performance, and more time focused on patients.

For DSO leaders, it can mean greater consistency, visibility, productivity, and operating leverage.

For investors, it can mean more predictable cash flow, better reporting, stronger margins, and a business that can scale without adding overhead at the same rate.

The performance bet builds the operating model required for what comes next.

Why Value Creation Is Moving Toward Operations

Capital has not disappeared from dentistry. It has become more selective.

The lending discussion at Dykema emphasized predictable cash flow, experienced management, clear growth strategies, and strong financial reporting as characteristics of fundable organizations.

That changes the value-creation equation.

Scale alone is no longer enough. A larger organization with fragmented systems, inconsistent processes, weak reporting, and rising overhead may simply be a larger version of the same operational problem.

A premium dental organization must demonstrate that it can convert scale into performance.

That means improving provider productivity, strengthening 

, integrating specialty care, controlling overhead, creating visibility across the enterprise, and growing without adding labor and complexity at the same rate.

Acquisitions may continue to be part of the strategy, but operational performance will determine whether those acquisitions create durable value.

Every dental organization is discussing automation, 

, revenue-cycle management, centralized services, and same-store growth.

The question is no longer whether those initiatives belong in the strategy.

The question is whether the organization can operationalize them consistently across every location.

Greg White’s keynote captured the shift well. He argued that efficiency and optimization are now table stakes and that future winners will be defined by ingenuity, talent, alignment, and the ability to build better solutions.

, but technology by itself is not a strategy.

The best technology should reduce friction, connect workflows, create visibility, and make the organization easier to operate. It should function quietly in the background rather than becoming another layer employees must manage.

That requires more than purchasing software.

It requires adoption, standardization, leadership alignment, and a willingness to redesign workflows around a better operating model.

A powerful platform creates little value if teams continue working around it, entering the same information into multiple systems, maintaining separate spreadsheets, or following different processes from office to office.

The organizations that win will not necessarily have the most technology.

They will be the organizations that turn technology into measurable performance.

How Technology Supports the Performance Bet

Making the performance bet requires an operating foundation that connects the clinical, operational, and financial sides of the business.

That foundation should create one source of truth across locations while reducing the number of systems, handoffs, and manual processes the organization must maintain.

A single patient record across general and specialty care

Consistent clinical and operational workflows

Enterprise and practice-level performance visibility

Actionable business intelligence rather than static reporting

Growth without a proportional increase in labor and complexity

This is the role CareStack is designed to play.

CareStack provides a unified dental operating system that helps practices and DSOs connect workflows, standardize execution, reduce manual work, and create visibility across the full patient and business lifecycle.

The value is not simply replacing software.

It is creating the infrastructure required to improve productivity, margins, patient experience, and enterprise value.

Why Culture and Adoption Still Determine the Outcome

A platform upgrade does not create transformation by itself.

Dental organizations remain highly dependent on discretionary effort. Providers determine how productive they will be. Practice leaders influence whether new processes are adopted. Front-office teams affect whether patients schedule, return, accept treatment, and recommend the practice.

Greg White described the value of a dental business as something that walks out the door every evening. His framework was to hire talented, curious, and accountable people while using external partners for supporting expertise. He also identified complaining, procrastination, and siloed work as behaviors that erode execution.

Culture is not the soft side of strategy.

It is what determines whether operational change takes hold.

The right technology should support the culture by removing repetitive work, clarifying expectations, and giving teams the information they need to act.

Leadership and adoption convert that capability into results.

Why Patient Experience Is an Operational Outcome

Patients do not evaluate a dental organization based on its ownership structure, acquisition strategy, or technology architecture.

They experience the organization through 

Did someone respond when something went wrong?

A patient-experience session at Dykema emphasized resolving complaints rather than disputing them. The speaker reported that many patients who received an active resolution ultimately changed their review or became promoters of the organization.

Patient experience is not separate from operations

Disconnected systems, missed calls, billing delays, inconsistent communication, and overextended teams eventually become patient-experience problems.

The performance bet should therefore make the organization easier for patients to navigate, not just more efficient internally.

What the Performance Bet Means for Dentistry

One of the strongest challenges from the conference was to build the business that could put your current business out of business before someone else does.

That requires leaders to ask different questions.

Where is friction slowing down the patient or the team?

Which tasks no longer require human effort?

The Integration Marketplace: How CareStack Is Turning Partners into a Growth Engine

Almost every conversation we have with DSO leaders eventually lands on the same question. It's not about features, and it's not about price. It's some version of this:

"We've picked great tools. Why is it so hard to make them work together?"

And it's a reasonable question. These groups are choosing the best tool for each job—AI diagnostics, patient engagement, payments, revenue cycle automation, analytics—because no single vendor does all of it well. The problem shows up after the purchase: the tools don't actually talk to each other. Teams end up managing extra logins, chasing sync issues, and maintaining spreadsheets just to move data between systems that were supposed to be integrated.

's partner ecosystem is built to answer. And the honest way to tell this story is in the order our customers pushed us to build it.

It started with data: "Let us decide where our data goes."

The first thing groups told us was blunt: their data was theirs, and they wanted control over it. They didn't want to ask permission every time they needed practice data in their BI platform, their call center, or a tool they'd built themselves.

The program works in two directions. For customers, it means direct access to their clinical, financial, scheduling, and operational data—so it flows into their BI platform, their call center, or any other software they've built in-house. For our partners, developers and vendors, it provides a straightforward way to connect to 

, with a built-in mechanism for easy data exchange. Instead of a long, complicated integration effort, vendors get a clear, well-supported path to connect—so they can focus their time on building value for customers rather than on integration overhead.

Both sides of the program point to the same outcome: the DSO stays in control of its own technology decisions. No two groups are solving the same problem—one is investing in AI diagnostics while another is focused on revenue cycle, patient engagement, or reducing administrative work. With the Developer Portal, each group can bring in what its strategy calls for, on its own timeline, and the vendors it chooses can be up and running quickly—all without disrupting the core system their operations depend on.

If you're interested in learning more about our Developer Portal, visit 

While Groups and DSOs remain the driving force behind data democratization, we also focus heavily on enabling our partners and developers to easily consume, explore, and build. Developers have evolved into a core customer persona. The easier we make it for them to consume, explore, and build, the faster our clients see outcomes. As I write this piece, our engineering leadership is building a completely new documentation platform—one where developers can test APIs and validate contracts and payloads directly in the docs, and customers can generate their own security keys. The goal is simple: a development experience that's completely self-serve.

Then they raised the bar: "Connected isn't the same as working together."

Once the data was flowing, our customers taught us the next lesson: an API gets you connectivity, but a partnership gets you a solution.

A technically successful integration can still fail operationally—if the two vendors never align on the workflow, if implementation falls in the gap between them, if support turns into two companies pointing at each other. Groups told us they didn't want integrations; they wanted outcomes.

So we changed our approach. We work deeply with a select group of partners who care as much as we do about creating value for our mutual customers. With them, we build together—sharing customer feedback, aligning roadmaps, and solving real operational problems side by side. And we go to market together too, so the customer gets one cohesive experience from evaluation to support. To share some examples of these deep partnerships, 

 is bringing AI-powered clinical intelligence into everyday workflows. 

 is simplifying insurance verification and cutting manual work for office teams. And 

, a third-party financing partner, is offering CareStack clients favorable rates so more patients can say yes to treatment.

Different problems, same standard: it has to work as one solution, because that's what our customers actually want.

Then their teams weighed in: "Stop making us switch screens."

The last piece of feedback didn't come from the C-suite. It came from the people inside the practice—front-office teams, office managers, hygienists, clinicians, and billing staff who live in these systems all day.

Even when systems exchanged data perfectly, they were still jumping between applications—a front-desk coordinator searching for the same patient again between screens, a clinician leaving the chart to check an AI finding, a billing team member logging into yet another portal. Every transition chipped away at the efficiency the integration was supposed to create. The leaders bought the tools; the teams lived through the friction.

Partner applications open right inside CareStack, with the patient's context already loaded. Whether someone is at the front desk or chairside, they move between tools without losing their place. Partner tools stop feeling like separate products stitched together and start feeling like a natural extension of CareStack. The best integrations are the ones people barely notice—they just fit how the team already works.

What this adds up to: a flywheel, not a feature list

Put those three answers together—open data, real partnerships, integrations inside the workflow—and something bigger emerges. The ecosystem starts compounding:

Customers get freedom of choice without vendor lock-in, and integrations that actually get used because they live where the work happens.

Partners get a growing customer base and the technical depth to build experiences a surface-level integration never could.

The platform gets more valuable with every partner that joins—which attracts more customers, which attracts more partners.

That's why we call it a growth engine. Not because of the number of logos on an integrations page, but because every piece of it exists to answer something a real customer asked us for—and each answer makes the next one more valuable.

Looking for the best cloud-based dental software?

Book a demo with us!

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We are absolutely thrilled to announce that 

 has been officially recognized as a top-performing leader in the 2026 software landscape! This year, our commitment to revolutionizing dental practice management has earned us prestigious placements in the 

, we believe that dental professionals should spend more time with patients and less time navigating clunky software. Our all-in-one, cloud-based platform is designed specifically for DSOs and growing dental practices, integrating everything from advanced scheduling and clinical charting to comprehensive revenue cycle management (RCM) and patient engagement tools. By centralizing operations, we empower practices to increase productivity, improve the patient experience, and drive clinical excellence. You can explore our community's feedback and learn more on our 

CareStack

 has earned an impressive overall rating of 

Our 2026 accolades highlight CareStack's standing as the go-to choice for dental teams looking to modernize their clinical and administrative workflows. We are proud to be featured in the following categories:

Here’s further look at what our users have to say about their experience with us

“Wonderful! If I ever can't figure anything out I just call their support number. It does not take long to get an answer or they walk me through how to do what I am asking.” - Paula S. 

“Very user friendly. Everything is in one spot, no need for multiple sites. The team is very efficient in getting you set up and helpful for your success.” - Ivana M. 

“I have been working with CareStack for over 4 years, and the team is amazing—very professional and knowledgeable. The PMS offers comprehensive systems that enable practices to grow both internally and externally, making it an excellent solution for DSOs.” - Penny F. 

 as a 2026 leader reinforces our mission to eliminate the friction in dental practice management. Whether it's through our deep analytics that track practice performance in real-time or our automated insurance verification that saves hours of staff time, CareStack is dedicated to the success of your practice. We are grateful to our community of dentists, office managers, and clinical staff for their partnership and constant feedback that drives our innovation forward.

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