Transforming Associate Development and Retention Through Structured Education
episode
Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry
34 min
2 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 1 month ago
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is the purpose of the Group Dentistry Now episode on clinical education?
Hi everyone, and welcome to the Group Dentistry Now show. I am Bill Newman, and always appreciate everybody tuning in. Over 250 episodes, so a lot of great content, and today is no different. We're really going to focus today on clinical education. And are DSOs really, you know, are they doing what they should do when it comes to clinical education or are they falling short? I have my own opinions on that. Dr. Sharma probably has his own opinions on that. So we're going to discuss that and really dive deep into what What does clinical education really mean to an organization as well as to the individual clinicians that actually work at the organization? In some cases, they're partners there. But we have with us Dr. Vishal Sharma.
He is the vice president of clinical education and operations at Spear Education. Dr. Sharma, prior to joining Spear, oversaw 580 practices as the Director of Clinical Operations for Dental Corp. You may have heard of them before. They're actually doing some acquisition work down here in the States now, and you continue to practice dentistry today in Calgary. Also a resident faculty member of CDOCs, international lecturer known for his expertise in digital technology and orthodontics. So Dr. Sharman, it's nice to have you here.
Bill, it's a pleasure to be on your podcast. I look forward to this really interesting discussion topic.
Excellent. And, uh, we have a lot of listeners up in Canada too. So we're not, we're not just, uh, us listeners. We've got quite a few, uh, group practices that are fans. And, uh, I worked closely with, uh, a couple of, uh, Canadians in my younger days in the dental industry and one that is now over one, two, three dentist and still keep in touch with him and see him on a regular basis. So, uh, strong affinity to Canada. And we'd love to get your thoughts north of the border and then what's going on south of the border here when it comes to clinical education. But first off, a little bit more about your background, maybe your role at Dental Corp. And since we're focused on clinical education, maybe some of the things that you saw there when it came to clinical education and mentorship.
Yeah, so I partnered with Dental Corp, rolled in my five practices that I'd acquired since 2009 into a DSO framework, and then shortly after took on the role of their director of clinical operations. So really energetic organization, young leadership team, growth-oriented, as you mentioned, they've now expanded down into the US, so cross-border DSO. And education, which is really my passion, one of the challenges that we saw was was that implementing things that independent dentists were successful with, technology, protocols, workflows, when you had to scale that, that's where the difficulty came in place. So we tried building our own educational platform. Obviously, that is a very onerous and heavy lift.
There was some success with that. But reinventing the wheel in any aspect, especially with dental education, may not be the best way to focus efforts for a DSO. So we created a hybrid component where there was a lot of internal education. It's a big network. There's a lot of great dentists and educators who we could leverage for that. but also partnering with outside sources, OEMs or educational institutes like Spear Education to fill in some of the gaps that we couldn't create internally. That seemed to be a really good recipe for us. So I learned a lot in that role, going from an independent dentist to learning about the machinations of a large corporation, corporate lingo, how boardrooms and meetings work.
It was a really informative and transformative experience for me, one that I was appreciative of.
So you made the move to Spear Education. Can you talk a little bit about kind of making that move and the reason behind it and what your role is currently?
Yeah, 2018, I had the opportunity to give my first solo presentation on digital dentistry. It was probably a terrible presentation. I don't even know if I knew what keynote was at the time.
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Chapters
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