Surviving practice downturn: a case study in dental marketing.

Unexplained downturns can destroy a healthy practice. This report details the warning signs and offers a blueprint for keeping your practice on track.

Avoiding the pitfalls of an associateship buy-in: a case.

The two doctors in this case made mistakes that could make it difficult for them to salvage their relationship and accomplish their mutual goal of Dr. Brown buying into Dr. Klein's practice. Such errors can seriously jeopardize a planned buy-in and should be avoided by others who wish to pursue this strategy. Dentists can avoid these mistakes by taking the time to discuss and clarify their intentions, and to specify the details of the arrangement at the beginning of the associateship or soon thereafter. They should also obtain qualified professional assistance to help plan and structure the arrangement. The information, knowledge and expertise is available to do it right, and there is no reason to make the kinds of mistakes made in this case. Successfully implementing an associateship buy-in or buy-out, or the outright sale or purchase of a dental practice, is no longer a mystery. These sorts of arrangements and transactions can be structured to accommodate the interests of both parties.

Designing and implementing relevant courses in dental management.

1. Dentist managerial behavior as defined by the dimensions described here is significantly related to dental team effectiveness. 2. Dental management courses and clinical experiences should be based, at least in part, on these dimensions of dentist managerial behavior.

Development of scales to measure provider attitudes toward expanded duty dental auxiliaries.

Much of the research on attitudes toward utilizing EDDAs has been rather haphazard in its measurement aspects. Examining responses to single items or summing across a series of items without any empirical rationale for such summing cannot be justified given current knowledge about measuring attitudes. The scales developed here are appreciably better from a psychometric point of view than scales reported in the dental literature to date. The use of standardized measuring instruments would facilitate cross-study comparisons. Such a process is presently not feasible because each researcher is using his own idiosyncratic scales of unknown psychometric characteristics. The three scales developed here to measure (1) the value of expanding auxiliary functions, (2) patient reaction to the use of EDDAs, and (3) satisfaction with changed dentist role may permit more standardized measurement of at least some aspects of provider and future provider attitudes toward the utilization of expanded duty dental auxiliaries.

Behaviorally based measures for evaluating the nonclinical performance of dentists in team settings.

Retranslations of expectations technique was used to develop behaviorally anchored scales for evaluating dentists' utilization of expanded duty dental auxiliaries. To enhance the reliability and validity of such instruments the project focused on specific acts and decisions of the dentist which are either effective or ineffective in accomplishing the health team's tasks.