Emerging Groups To Watch
Select Dental Management: Doctor retention, patient retention and practice growth go hand in hand By Graham Garrison
Elliot Zibel could see that his childhood friend Dr. Jonathan Mason had a good thing going. The fee-for-service practice Dr. Mason had bought in Manchester, Vermont in 2015 had more than doubled in growth in a couple of years. Intrigued, Zibel wanted to better understand how Dr. Mason drove growth. The answer, he found, was in Dr. Mason’s patient-centric approach. “Growth was driven by more comprehensive patient care and improved patient experience,” Zibel said.
Elliot Zibel
The duo was confident they could recreate that success on a larger scale, so in 2018 they started Select Dental Management, a Dental Partnership Organization, in the Northeast. They initially partnered with four practices and grew them organically 60% the first year they
were in operation. Today, Select has over 120 doctors and 39 practices in eight states. “Building SDM has been an enormous challenge and our success has not been linear,” said Zibel. “We have made a ton of mistakes on this journey, but we learned from each one. Every obstacle we faced
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has truly represented an opportunity for individual and organizational improvement.” Perhaps the biggest lesson learned from researching the industry was weak organic growth experienced in practices post affiliation with DSOs broadly. “We asked ourselves, “Why weren’t these groups able to drive growth in line with, or above, the market?” The answer came down to doctor retention. The groups able to retain a higher percentage of their doctors almost always performed better than those that didn’t. So, Select started with a focus on being doctor-centric and built out its organization from there. “A true doctor partnership model was the best way for us to create alignment and drive doctor retention,” Zibel said.
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