🦷 Who’s winning in dental

March 03, 2026

Good morning. You didn’t need to be a dentist to know it wasn’t going to be good news for Jack Hughes’ oral health when he took a stick to the mouth in the third period of the Olympic gold medal men’s hockey game.

While it sure looked painful, Hughes went on to score the game-winning overtime goal, snag an endorsement deal with Colgate, and get some pretty unforgettable photos out of the incident. 

Maybe that’s a fair trade for a few teeth.

Inside this issue:

- New report shows how you stack up
- To brand or not to brand?

⏰ Your reading time today: 5 minutes 59 seconds

🏆 Enjoy your coffee break with Word of Mouth, a dental-themed word game inspired by Wordle.

MARKETS

📉 3D Systems Corp ($DDD) – 2.04 | -0.020 (0.97%)
📈 Align Technology ($ALGN) – 189.02 | +4.14 (2.24%)
📉 Colgate-Palmolive ($CL) – 97.30 | -0.0050 (0.0051%)
📈 Dentsply Sirona ($XRAY) – 14.31 | +1.67 (13.21%)
📈 Envista Holdings ($NVST) – 29.44 | +0.48 (1.66%)
📉 Henry Schein ($HSIC) – 81.37 | -2.39 (2.86%)
📈 Park Dental Partners ($PARK) – 19.10 | +0.50 (2.69%)
📉 Straumann Holding AG (STMN.SW) – CHF 89.68 | -1.90 (2.07%)
📈 Weave Communications ($WEAV) – 5.33 | +0.38 (7.68%)

Stock data reflects market close yesterday, showing changes over the past five days.

THE DRILL DOWN

📉 Dental job postings dropped 11.6% over the past year, per Indeed's Hiring Lab, though wages held steady—the only healthcare category to avoid a wage growth decline in the second half of 2025. Fewer openings, but the pay doesn't need filling.

🤖 ADA calls on HHS to fund AI adoption in rural and small dental practices, citing limited tech infrastructure, workforce gaps, and high upfront costs as barriers while also pushing for a standardized definition of "non-medical devices" to clarify liability and privacy rules.

🚸 Pediatric dentists blast the EPA’s fluoride review, with the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry claiming that the assessment relies on “discredited reports and inapplicable information” and could lead to “public health crisis for American children.” They aren’t sugar-coating it.

📐 ADA proposes three new standards covering endodontic irrigants and dental data sets, including frameworks for electronic dental records and dental plan coverage interoperability, with a public comment window open until March 22.

📊 Nevada adopts new reporting requirements for standalone dental insurers, mandating an annual filing by May 1 covering all losses incurred and premiums earned for the prior calendar year, with the first deadline set for May 1, 2026. Vegas wants insurers to show their cards.

📋 California Dental Association sponsors two bills to force dental plan transparency, pushing legislation that would require insurers to disclose provider network data, honor assignment-of-benefits requests, and publish standardized reimbursement information. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

🦷 Oklahoma Attorney General kills proposed prior authorization rule for tooth extractions, ordering the state's Health Care Authority to withdraw the rule after deeming it invalid, citing excessive bureaucracy and out-of-state managed care organizations pushing red tape on patients.

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INDUSTRY

New report reveals the numbers behind who's winning in dental

A new report analyzing more than 8,000 dental practices shows the most successful quickly pulling away from the competition.

What happened: The Planet DDS 2026 Dental Industry Outlook report found that, across roughly 3,300 practices with year-over-year comparisons, weighted average same-store production growth came in at 4.0%. The simple average—which treats every practice equally regardless of size—was 6.6%.

Dig deeper: The data also shows that growth was not equally distributed. A full third of practices (33.5%) grew by more than 10%, while nearly 14% declined by more than 10%. That spread between top and bottom performers is enormous.

  • The numbers paint a picture of an industry where high-performing practices that master same-store growth and use technology to drive efficient operations are quickly pulling ahead.

The operational benchmarks: Curious how you stack up? The report offers a useful set of benchmarks for DSO leaders looking to see how their practices compare.

  • Case acceptance: 58% average, up from 57% in 2024

  • Case completion: 47%, up from 42%—a meaningful jump, though still meaning more than half of accepted treatment plans go unfinished

  • Cancellation rate: 12.9%, down from 15.5%

  • No-show rate: 6.9%, down from 7.4%

  • New patients: 46 per month per practice (including specialty), up from 43

  • Hygiene reappointment: 63%, up from 60%

  • Average daily production: $8,764 per practice

Yes, but: Those benchmarks are averages. The picture is dramatically different when you compare top-performing practices to the lower end of the pack.

  • Case acceptance varies wildly across practices—nearly 10% of practices sit below 30%, while another 9% convert above 90%.

  • New patient volume is similarly lopsided: Almost 39% of practices see fewer than 20 new patients per month, while nearly 18% see 80 or more. That's a 4x gap in the single metric most closely tied to growth.

Why it matters: The broader industry context makes these numbers more urgent. DSO deal volume has fallen sharply, from more than 30 sales and recapitalizations in 2021–2022 to fewer than 12 from 2023–2025, according to DC Advisory's Rich Blann. Investors are now zeroing in on DSOs with efficiently run, integrated platforms and a track record of strong growth.

Bottom line: The 2026 outlook paints a picture of an industry where the organizations pulling ahead are the ones nailing the basics of getting more new patients in the door, keeping the schedule full, converting accepted treatment into completed production, and collecting what they're owed.

BUSINESS BITES

👔 Notable leadership changes: DentaQuest's Chief Dental Officer Dr. Todd Gray joins TeamSmile's Board of Directors and Forward Science promotes Ellen Myers to VP of clinical affairs.

📈 Park Dental Partners posts $244.5 million in 2025 revenue, a 6.4% year-over-year increase, with Q4 revenue up 7.5% and same-practice growth of 5.8% for the full year, as the Minneapolis-based DSO reported more than 700,000 patient visits across its 86 supported practices.

🔧 Dentsply Sirona launches restructuring plan targeting $120 million in savings, an announcement that saw the company’s stock surge more than 13% over the past five days. Dentsply gets lean.

LAST ISSUE’S POLL RESULTS

MARKETING

To brand or not to brand: The pros and cons of changing the sign above the door

Every time a DSO closes an acquisition, a familiar question lands on the integration checklist: Do you keep the old name on the door, or paint yours over it? The answer you pick ripples through everything from SEO rankings to reputational risk.

What's happening: For a growing rank of large DSOs, "brand architecture" has graduated from marketing jargon to an important part of any integration strategy. The industry generally splits into two camps:

  • Branded house (one consumer banner everywhere): Think Aspen Dental or Ideal Dental, where every location shares a single brand and identity.

  • House of brands (keep the local name): Major examples include Heartland Dental or MB2 Dental, where each supported office maintains its own brand, logo, and local identity.

Why it matters: Choosing a lane is about more than just picking a logo. A DSO’s approach to branding will inform the rest of its marketing, ops, and risk management strategies.

The branded-house play is the scale play, letting you ramp up marketing, new locations, call centers, websites, and offer more efficiently. Every new location opens with built-in recognition, and your marketing dollars compound instead of scattering across dozens of names nobody's heard of two zip codes over.

  • The upside: Marketing efficiency compounds fast. One brand means one website, one ad budget, one call center script, and stronger domain authority on Google. You're not reinventing the wheel every time you close an acquisition.

  • The risk: Reputational contagion. A single viral complaint or negative press is a risk to every location in the network. One bad day in Phoenix becomes a Google problem in Philadelphia.

The house-of-brands approach preserves local goodwill, and there’s some evidence that patients prefer an experience that feels like they’re going to their dentist rather than a chain.

  • The upside: Trust preservation. Dentistry is personal—patients chose Dr. Martinez's office for a reason, and that reason wasn't a management company's balance sheet. Retaining the local name keeps the relationship intact and the chair full while you optimize behind the scenes.

  • The risk: Brand equity goes nowhere. You're investing marketing dollars that don’t scale to other locations, and you miss out on the compounding effects of multiple locations that help with discoverability online.

Bottom line: There's no universally right answer to the brand question, but there is a wrong one: not deciding at all. The DSOs that treat brand architecture as a strategic pillar of their integration playbook will scale faster, protect their reputation, and build patient loyalty.

🗳️ The Check-up:

⬆ VOTE: How does new patient volume in your practices compare to the Planet DDS benchmark of 46 per month?

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CLINICAL NOTES

🦷 Anterior crossbite is linked to higher rates of posterior tooth loss, according to a large cross-sectional study of 17,349 adults published in Clinical Oral Investigations, which also found that patients with open bites had a lower prevalence of tooth loss compared to those with normal occlusion.

🩸 Dental offices may be an untapped frontline for diabetes screening, with a King's College London study of 911 patients finding that 35% had undiagnosed prediabetes or diabetes, and that HbA1c levels rose consistently with worsening periodontal status. When it comes to blood sugar, the gums don’t lie.

✨ Potassium sodium tartrate may whiten teeth as effectively as peroxide without damaging enamel, as a recent study found the compound, which works via an electrical charge generated during brushing, achieved equivalent stain removal to carbamide peroxide while preserving enamel microhardness.

💰 The cost-effectiveness of fluoride varnish remains uncertain in high-income countries, according to a Journal of Dentistry meta-analysis that found no significant difference in cost-effectiveness between FV and other preventive approaches, though FV did outperform oral health education and no intervention in caries reduction. Prevention proven, price point pending.

FUN AND GAMES

BEYOND THE CUSP