I was looking at the list of speakers on the doctor’s session of the upcoming AAO meeting in Washington, DC and noticed that on the doctor’s program there is not a single lecture or presentation on practice management. I then looked at the PCSO meeting in Hawaii and found that again there was not a single Practice Management speaker on the doctor’s program. Is this really what you want from your associations?

I am certain that some will consider my comments to be self serving, but the bigger picture is a bit more important. In my experience, I have learned that most doctors do a pretty good job of straightening teeth but do a relatively poor job of managing what is often a one or two million dollar a year business. Management problems such as staff turnover, weak case acceptance, patient and insurance delinquency, scheduling problems, marketing problems, etc., cause exponentially greater frequency of lost profitability and lost quality of life in practices than clinical problems could ever cause. A single percentage point (1%) of improved case acceptance in a mid-sized practice can generate $30,000 a year in additional net profit, but still the associations continue to give short shrift to the greatest issues in the “business” of orthodontics.

I know there will likely be exclamations of protest from certain persons in charge of speaker selection, some of whom will say that there is plenty of practice management training available on the staff programs, “which the doctors are welcome to attend.” In fact, there is very little actual practice management on the staff programs of the two meetings presented, but even when there are good practice management presentations on staff programs, lecturers speaking to staff generally, and properly, design their presentation for the ears of the staff, which often is an entirely different presentation than a lecture on the identical subject to doctors would be. Also, even if the staff lecturer’s message is powerful and important to the well being of a practice, even if the staff hearing the lecture leaves the lecture pumped up and excited to make changes in the practice, their ideas often fall on deaf ears because the doctor hears the recommendations out of context because he was not at the lecture. The staff ends up deflated and the practice runs along as it always has.

Some will disagree of course, but it seems to me that the orthodontic profession is not being well served when annual meetings are so unbalanced in content. When meeting attendance is poor, and even when, due to location, attendance is strong but exhibitors howl at the lack of exhibit hall traffic, perhaps the solution is a bit more balance in the choice of lecture topics and a bit more attention to what makes the business of the orthodontic profession successful.