CAREERS

Can DSOs help solve clinician burnout?

You've upgraded equipment, tightened schedules, and centralized billing, but if your best clinicians are running on fumes and sprucing up their CV, you’ve got a major problem on your hands.

Catch up: It’s no secret that dentistry can take a toll on clinicians’ mental health. One peer-reviewed analysis put clinical burnout among dentists at roughly 13%, with about a quarter showing high emotional exhaustion.

• The problem seems to be getting worse. The ADA found anxiety diagnoses among dentists more than tripled between 2003 and 2021, to 16%, with 13% of dentists reporting depression. Another ADA survey from last year found the youngest dentists struggling most.

Why it matters: Burnout is a morale problem, but it also shows up in the numbers. In one study, higher distress scores among dentists tracked with more reported clinical errors and a higher intent to leave.  

• Losing clinicians to turnover hurts the bottom line, too. Research from DANB and the DALE Foundation found that a single dental-assistant vacancy can put roughly $110,000 of annual revenue at risk for an average practice, and that losing one midyear pushes about a quarter of practices to reschedule patients—a 6% hit to daily revenue. 

The good news: DSOs are well positioned to attack some of the biggest burnout drivers in dentistry through technology and centralized systems that take billing, staffing, and compliance off of clinicians’ shoulders. Those are all pain points that modern tech platforms can help solve.

• For example, a 2025 study of 263 physicians in a broader healthcare setting saw burnout fall from 51.9% to 38.8% after just 30 days on an ambient AI scribe. Eligibility checks, claims scrubbing, and automated RCM can all ease the administrative burden further. 

Yes, but: The same model can manufacture a different stressor driven by production targets built on private-equity return expectations, loss of autonomy, and rigid scheduling—all factors also linked to burnout.

• This may be one of the reasons why the ADA Health Policy Institute found new dentists in affiliated practices are about six times more likely to plan to leave than those in unaffiliated ones (48% versus 8%), often citing insufficient autonomy and influence over business decisions.

What you can do: If you’re making clinician mental health a priority, you can stand up dedicated programs (Heartland, for example, has created a dedicated Director of Wellness role), but the larger impact may come from operational decisions, like:

• Reducing admin burden with technology. Offloading paperwork and manual administrative tasks is a win that should bear fruit for your bottom line as well. Modern dental tech platforms can relieve your staff of many of these unloved jobs.
  

• Pressure-testing your production math. Understand that ramping up targets beyond what is sustainable may be a way of funding this quarter’s growth with next year’s turnover.
  

• Protecting clinical autonomy. Loss of control is a leading driver of burnout, so give clinicians a real voice in protocols, materials, and scheduling.
  

• Measuring mental health like you measure other key metrics. Adopt a validated tool—the Well-Being Index is free to ADA members—and track scores by location and manager, not just enterprise-wide.

Bottom line: Dentistry's mental-health problem is older than any DSO, but DSOs are now big enough to do something about it that no solo practice can. Operators who take clinician well-being seriously will build a hiring edge that goes beyond just competing on compensation.