How does your practice rate in orthodontics?

Short term orthodontics (STO) is a rapidly changing area of dentistry and as with all emerging fields, understanding the trends, obstacles and benefits is imperative to be able to provide maximum patient care.

Individual practices rarely get provided benchmarking statistics to help them make decisions about where next to take their practice clinically.

The average fee for cosmetic short term orthodontics is around $5500. Let’s say that you have an average-sized practice and that this group contains 150 patients who are suitable for cosmetic orthodontic treatment. With proper training, you should be able to easily treat 70% of these cases, and the rest you refer to a specialist in order to take advantage of their additional training.

You now have a group of 105 patients. If every one of these patients accepted your treatment, your increase in production that year would be $577500. At 50% acceptance, your increase would be $288750, and at 25% it would be $144375. To be as realistic as possible, landing somewhere in the 50% range is quite feasible. Don’t forget to figure in the extra revenue that these patients will provide with bleaching, cosmetic restorastive work such as veneers and crowns and ongoing general periodontal treatment and basic restorative work. Although there is no way to quantify this in advance, know that it will occur and will be significant.