Circumventing staffing issues | DSO deep dive | The medical-dental link

Dear DrBicuspid Member,

With May underway, so begins a busy portion of the dental trade show calendar for me (and likely many of you as well).

Personally, I will be speaking at an American Association of Dental Office Management chapter meeting in Walnut Creek, CA, on Tuesday night before heading to Seattle to lecture all day at the Pacific Northwest Dental Conference on Friday. If you'll be at either meeting, I hope you'll say hello. I always love chatting with DrBicuspid.com readers and seeing what articles are drawing your attention.

Speaking of articles drawing eyes and ears, let me take a few moments to point out some of this week's most-read (and most interesting) articles.

I will start the tour with a pair of podcasts, including the latest installment of our continuing series with Dr. Roger P. Levin on the current state of the staffing shortage in dentistry. These information-filled podcasts have been among our most popular since we relaunched "The DrBicuspid Podcast" back in the fall, so I hope you will take a few minutes to listen to this week's installment.

Also in the podcast realm was a deeper dive into a dental service organization (DSO) article written by Kim McCleskey. I always love picking the brains of our authors to get a little more information about what they wrote and why they emphasized certain points in their article. McCleskey's talk about the transition process and DSOs is well worth your time.

We also launched this week our series of information-filled webinars that will be eligible for continuing education (CE) credits. Our initial webinar comes from former Dentrix National Trainer of the Year Dayna Johnson as she unveils 10 things you may not be using in Dentrix right now. This is not an infomercial but rather a way for you to boost your software's effectiveness. If you have Dentrix in your practice and need CE from the Academy of General Dentistry Program Approval for Continuing Education, Dayna's course will be a boost on many levels.

Are you worried about having the "tough conversations" with your patients? If so, this article on why those conversations are important could be a plus for your outlook.

Additionally, this week we tackled the dental-medical connection with a pair of articles, including this one on hip replacements and the dental impact as well as five ways that dentistry and medicine working together could help in the battle against oral cancer.

As always, thanks for reading DrBicupsid … and May the Fourth be with you on Saturday!

Kevin Henry
Editor in Chief