Do you know how much your practice spends on supplies?
Dental offices across the country are facing increased financial stresses in order to stay open and competitive. Smaller boutique dental practices contend with better-capitalized competitors, cost-conscious customers, and rising overhead. Many practice have turned to increased advertising, or working hard to build a loyal clientele. Costs, though, need to be kept in check as well.
As of last year, Vitaldent was a hugely successful chain of dental practices throughout Spain, Italy, and Portugal. Its founder and owner, Ernesto Colman, was a well-respected businessman on Spain’s list of 100 richest people.
Now, Colman is being held in jail with no bond, where he’s keeping company with the rest of Vitaldent administration.
Henry Schein, Patterson, and Benco have allegedly been fixing prices for years according to court documents, and dentists are finally taking notice. Clinicians across the country are suing these companies for colluding to squash smaller supply vendors and keep prices high. These marked up prices may have cost dental clinics tremendously, and could be making worse the financial pressure that practices are already facing. Based on numbers in court papers, it’s possible that they owe more than $2 billion to dentists in the US.
An update on the lawsuit is available here.
A post on the more recent, related FTC complaint is available here.
2015 has been an incredible year for Supply Clinic. One year ago today, we were in the process of converting an idea into a website. If you visited supplyclinic.com then, you would have seen something resembling this:
Supply Clinic has found a unique niche in the dental supply marketplace; we’ve made ourselves accessible to global dental supply and instrument manufacturers. Many high-end dental manufacturers are itching to gain access to the American market, and in many cases we are providing them with the platform to do just that.
We have none other than my friend Dr. Konstantin Gromov to thank for first leading us down this path. Konstantin has the uncanny ability to make connections, both didactically and strategically. After all, he was dual trained in Periodontics and Prosthodontics at the University of Pennsylvania – his profound interdisciplinary knowledge base allows him to treat the most complex of cases.