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Dentists may not think about their supplies much, but they typically spend $50,000 each year stocking their offices with everything from anesthetics to x-ray holders.¹ Historically, dentists have turned to large, established distributors to purchase their products, but today's landscape is rapidly changing.

There seems to be a trend of late of individuals increasingly taking control of their oral care. In some respects, this is wonderful for the profession, and for oral health more broadly. At long last, more folks are recognizing the importance of oral care for overall bodily health. One can only hope that, over time, this leads to greater emphasis on regularly seeing a dentist and better adhering to prophylactic treatments and methodologies, from fluoridating teeth to flossing to brushing.

Chicago Dental Society - September 2018.
The stereotyping says young dentists are risk-averse, don’t want to scrimp and save to venture into the dog-eat-dog world of small business ownership, and would rather work for a lucrative salary so they can plunk down monthly payments for a shiny new “beamer.” However, there’s a 29-year-old named Scott Drucker who splits his time between nurturing a start-up business in a healthcare incubator hub in the Merchandise Mart and traveling the country supporting that business, and also spends a day practicing dentistry at an office more than 40 miles from his home

Supply Clinic is an online service interfacing between dentists and those firms that sell dental supplies. This article mentions a range of emerging technologies dental practices will be using from the front end, upstream for patient recruitment and management, to back-end services such as teledentistry and Dental Service Organizations (DSOs).

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."

So many company founders wind up circling back to Joseph Heller's brainchild, Catch-22.That's all starting a company is, really. Our protagonist Yossarian's fight, and his buddy Orr's, was one of survival during WWII. Most companies have loftier goals, certainly, than merely staying alive (if that's a goal at all in the long term). But the journey is riddled with Catch-22s, which tend to require more than disregarding safety to move past.