Three Industry Shifts Dental Providers Can Expect in 2021

Every year brings new changes and challenges, none more so than this past year. The COVID-19 pandemic brought some new technologies to the forefront, forced us to adapt and accelerated the pace of change in many areas of dentistry.

Here are the top three trends we’re talking about in 2021.
 

Move Toward Holistic Care  
We know that oral health directly impacts overall health outcomes — and patient care has to reflect that reality.

Increasingly, dental providers are starting to see a shift towards holistic value-based care models, where the focus is on the quality of care given and overall health outcomes, not just on volume of care. It’s a shift happening across the industry. 

Patients are looking for care that takes all their health needs into consideration. Medical-dental collaboration between health care physicians and dental providers is going to become increasingly more popular and common. We’ll continue to see movement toward treating patients as a team, with more referral systems and technology enabling communication across disciplines.

Restructuring and Consolidation of Practices
We’ve seen in recent years a trend toward the consolidation of smaller dental practices, and that is continuing to grow at a rapid pace. Dental Service Organizations (DSOs), for example, have been expanding exponentially. According to the ADA, 10% of U.S. dentists were affiliated with a DSO in 2019, up from 7% in 2014. In Massachusetts, specifically, 7.2% of dentists are affiliated with DSOs.

This could reflect a broader trend, as dental offices may continue to move toward restructuring and consolidation into larger practices. These DSOs may also attract a new generation of dental professionals who are joining the workforce with high amounts of student debt and are not looking to follow the older model of running a small business. 

Rise in Consumerism
As consumers, we have all become accustomed to a  high level of service and engagement with every company we work with. For the dental industry, that means patients are approaching their care with an increased reliance on convenience, value, reviews and success metrics.

The new generation of patients is shopping around for dentists the same way they’d shop around for a new laptop or phone. They do their research, they compare prices and locations, and they want to know what others have said about the product. Dentistry must be ready to embrace that shift. Patients’ expectations around convenience, value, service, and getting results in the form of quality health outcomes will only increase as technology expands. 


For more on these trends, watch our Pearls of Wisdom episode in which Delta Dental President & CEO Dennis Leonard and VP Clinical Management Dr. Linda Vidone discuss the future of dentistry.