DentalAce Review: How the right ecosystem can make a dentist successful

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DentalAce Review: The ecosystem of a dentist 

As patients, we have all seen it during our regular dental check-up visits: the clean practice, the invitingly decorated waiting room with a stack of magazines to pass the time, and the clinically sterile exam room with its modern and just as clean dental care equipment and tools. Also, there are the always friendly and professional dentist assistants and, finally, the dentist himself, who competently explains the upcoming procedure, which he then executes with razor-sharp precision. While all of this seems completely normal and like basic table stakes to patients, dentists must put a lot of work into ensuring that their patients always have a fantastic experience. Thus, it takes a lot of time and effort to both build up a new dental practice as well as to run an existing one. To shine more light onto this topic, the following article examines what exactly it takes to build up a practice and with which other organizations a dentist must work to do so. 

The dental practice – Every beginning requires a few interim stops 

What many dentists learn already during their training is that it is an expensive and lengthy process to build up a new practice from the ground up. Most dentists who choose this path have to first work with more established dentists for a few years to gather the necessary capital and experience to open their own practice. In many cases, this residency-type period also involves earning additional professional certificates.

Of course, some dentists decide to turn their residency into a full-time job and stay with their mentor until he or she retires, at which point they take over his or her practice. For these dentists, life is significantly easier, as they are stepping into an already established structure and, hence, the information contained in this article will only be partially applicable and interesting to them.

On the other hand, for those dentists who decide to become entrepreneurs and to open their own practice, the build-up period is significantly harder and so they may find the contents of this articles that much more useful. To review each of the key steps for establishing a new practice, we have to first provide a basic and foundational understanding of the ecosystem that a dentist must navigate:



Ecosystem of a dentist


As can be gleaned from the graphic above, dentists have to work with a large number of other organizations, service providers, and individuals in order to build up and run a successful practice. For simplicity’s sake, we have placed all of them into one of four categories so we can more easily address them in more detail.

Human Capital & IT

This category includes organizations and activities focused on optimizing practice operations via providing the best possible personnel and software because highly-qualified personnel and the right IT (information technology) backbone are both crucial factors for an efficiently operating practice. Among the most important partners of a dental practice are companies that simplify the recruitment of skilled personnel, operational activities such as the creation and maintenance of patient files, and the safe handling and administration of patient data. 


  • Expert Staffing Agencies: Finding the right employees and assistants for a dental practice is definitely a difficult task because, contrary to other professions, working effectively in a dental practice requires not only talent but also excellently trained and specialized professionals (e.g., with a focus on dental prophylaxis) who excel via strong and detailed clinical knowledge and the precise handling of dental care tools. This group of employees includes dental hygienists and dental assistants. To more quickly find such rare talent, dentists can avail themselves of the services of specialized hiring agencies, such as zahnumzahn.
  • Practice Software Makers: There are several companies in this space in the Austrian market, all of which develop very flexible and versatile computer systems that exactly match the expectations and needs of dental practices. To be exact, running a dental practice is virtually impossible without such a system nowadays, given that it significantly simplifies and speeds up administrative processes while ensuring the safety and correctness of patient data. This allows dentists to not only save valuable time but to also work with significantly fewer mistakes while always staying compliant with the most important data protection laws and regulations.

Technology & Tools

To enable seamless practice operations, a dentist also needs suppliers of frequently-used and, in many cases, only one-time-use medical tools and instruments. Since these instruments are required for virtually every procedure and exam, finding reliable suppliers here is absolutely necessary. Some patient treatments require specialized and custom-made equipment, such as permanent or removable braces. Since their manufacture can not happen at the dental practice (unless it is one with an in-house dental lab) itself, a dentist has to find one or more competent partners in the area of dental tools and technology so he can have the ability to quickly and effectively serve patients who require complex medical appliances.


  • Dental-Labs & Technicians: As already mentioned, experienced dental technicians are an absolutely essential part for the professional network of a dentist because, without high-caliber partners in this area, a dentist may not offer as broad of a palette of services because he or she may not be able to execute them (e.g., the creation and placement of permanent braces). For this reason, dental labs are seeing very high interest from the dentist community because they fulfill this very essential role in the dental care value chain. Competent companies and experts in this specialty include our partner Dent-Tech HG or the company Dental-Technik Meisterbetrieb owned by Ivo Kolodziej.
  • Praxis Tools & Instruments: As every patient has already witnessed, dentists use a certain set of multiple- and single-use tools for every procedure and even for check-up visits. This is why it is important for dental practices to find reliable suppliers very early on (ideally, prior to opening up) so they can get just the right utensils at exactly the right time. Nowadays, dentists can place such orders via the internet and even set up automatic repeat purchases so they can get all of the instruments that they need delivered to them without any additional effort. Reliable online shops for dentists are, for example, those of Pluradent or those of Henry Schein.

Practice Interior

An additional prerequisite for opening up a dental practice is to equip it with the most up-to-date and modern furniture that is specifically designed to house medical equipment and instruments as well as with  the cutting-edge, state-of-the-art equipment itself. To accomplish this, a dentist needs to find the right professional interior design firms to produce custom-made dental practice furniture that fits perfectly into his or her practice rooms. Also, he needs to reach out and work with the best dental practice equipment manufacturers to make sure that he can service his patients in an optimal way.


  • Practice Interior Designers: As already mentioned, professional practice furniture is enormously important for a dental practice because it must have the exactly right proportions to house, for example, x-ray machines with extendable arms and dental exam chairs have to be specifically made for use in dental practices anyway. Good point people to talk to about custom-made practice furniture are the experts from the companies Mediadent and Gether.
  • Dental Equipment Makers: In addition to the right practice furniture and interior, a dentist also needs the right technical equipment to constantly offer patients the latest and most modern procedures and treatment approaches. This is why dentists should get in touch with leading manufacturers of medical technology not only when they start out but also after they have successfully opened their practice in order to receive a continuous stream of information about the latest medical technology in the dental care field. Some of the leading manufacturers of medical technology for the dental care space, including equipment for laser therapy, are the local companies HELBO Medizintechnik and Fotona. What is also important to remember is that even the best pieces of equipment need to be serviced from time to time. This is why every good dentist has a partner who focuses on equipment maintenance and who conducts routine checkups in an effort to detect and fix any issues as soon as possible. The experts from Kutzer Dental and Pressl Dental Solution are perfect options for dentists who seek a new equipment service partner.

Patient Care

The last, but nevertheless still vital, category that we would like to address here concerns the acquisition and handling of new patients. Since dental practices focus on and live from patient care, a constant and continuously growing stream of new patients is essential for continuing successful operations. Though many activities fall into this category, we will now focus on the likely two most important ones:


  • Appointment Management: Though, as already mentioned above, there is specialized software for dental practices, which includes flexible calendar tools, appointment scheduling and moving is most frequently still done manually and happens in response to patient inquiries via email and phone. Lately, some software makers have developed new modules that allow for online appointment bookings via the internet. However, while these new modules somewhat reduce the administrative burden of manual appointment entry, their utility is limited because they do not cover all incoming appointment requests (only those that come through a dentist’s website). Hence, the handling of appointments that come in via phone and email is still done manually. Fortunately, DentalAce has come up with a solution to this problem and we have provided a bit more information on this a little farther down in this article.
  • New Patient Acquisition: The traditional way of successful patient acquisition is and remains oral recommendations. This is why many people in Austria still rely on recommendations from friends, family, or co-workers when picking out a new dentist. Since the introduction of the internet in the mid-1990s, online marketing established itself as a viable marketing channel and has grown in importance with every year. Nowadays, many dental practices cannot achieve viability as a business without relying on one or more kinds of online marketing and so, many of them use the most popular online search engines (Google. Bing, Yahoo!) to upload online ads in order to appear on the screens of dentist-seeking patients for relevant search results. The same is true for the use of popular social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.) where dentists can place ads in the form of small banners, other pictures, or videos to make a name for their practice. Placing individual banner ads on relevant websites is certainly also an option. However, though these ad channels are becoming increasingly effective over time as more an more young and older people flock to the internet, they also come with a correspondingly high cost. Good things cost money, as the saying goes, but there are also exceptions here, such as DentalAce.

Of course, none of our articles is complete without a mention of how our platform can help you with building up your practice. To say thank you for reading this far, we’ll keep it short and merely link to an article with more information about our services. Feel free to take a look at any time and, in short: We’ve got you covered in the Patient Care category.


DentalAce Focus


We hope that you found this article both interesting and helpful and wish you all the best for establishing your new dental practice.

Feel free to reach out with any questions at any time, as we are only a message away at dentalace@acemydental.com.

For more interesting stories, feel free to check out the DentalAce blog and join our online community via a free online subscription directly through our portal website.

All the Best & see you soon, Ace!






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