Independent news, insights, profiles, and recognition for modern dentistry.
Latest edition · September 3, 2026
A clinician reviews a full-mouth series before a first consultation. At several of the practices in this story, the review happens with the patient in the room.Photograph · Unsplash
Featured story
InsightsThe Patient IssueAcross the country, a small group of practice owners is rebuilding the dental visit around the patient's constraints rather than the schedule's. Their methods differ. Their arithmetic does not.
Reporting on the business and practice of dentistry.
Several programs have begun moving clinical contact earlier and compressing the basic-science sequence. The change is less about pedagogy than about who is still willing to enroll.
Solo ownership was supposed to be finished. A cohort of dentists in their thirties is choosing it anyway, and their reasoning has less to do with independence than with arithmetic.
The bills differ in scope but converge on the same three provisions — and on a disagreement about who should be allowed to decide what a covered service is worth.
Imaging, artificial intelligence, materials, and the technology reaching the chair.
Innovation
The referral has not disappeared. It has been rewritten by systems that summarize a practice before a patient ever visits its website — and that increasingly decide which practices get described at all.
Diagnostic software is now good enough to be worth arguing about. The arguments that matter are about liability, workflow, and who is accountable when the machine is right.
Single-visit restorations were a clinical success and a financial disappointment for two decades. What changed was not the mill.
A minority of well-equipped practices have started deliberately delaying adoption. Their argument is not nostalgia — it is that the first three years of any dental technology are paid for by patients.
Hardware cost has fallen far enough to stop being the barrier. What replaced it is a set of integration problems that no vendor has an incentive to solve.
Dentists, founders, and researchers whose work is changing what the profession expects.
Owner and Dentist
Houston, Texas
Owns and runs a Spring Branch general practice built around affordable care, PPO coverage, and six-day hours.
Prosthodontist & Practice Owner
Portland, Oregon
Takes the complex cases other practices decline, and takes them slowly — sometimes over years.
Orthodontist
Atlanta, Georgia
Rebuilt orthodontic scheduling around adults who cannot take a weekday morning off.
Researcher, Dental Materials
Chicago, Illinois
Studies why restorations fail, and argues the honest answer is usually not the material.
Independent offices where the structure of the business is organized around the chair.
01Houston, Texas
Cosmetic Dentistry · Orthodontics · Invisalign
A general practice on Houston's west side built around affordable routine and restorative care, PPO coverage, and six-day availability.
02Portland, Oregon
Prosthodontics · Restorative Dentistry · Implant Dentistry
A restorative and prosthodontic practice built around long treatment horizons and unusually patient sequencing.
03Atlanta, Georgia
Orthodontics · Clear Aligners · Adult Treatment
An orthodontic practice that rebuilt its scheduling model around adults who cannot take a weekday morning off.
Analysis and long-form perspective on where dentistry is heading.
Analysis
Patients cannot evaluate clinical quality, and they know it. What they evaluate instead is remarkably consistent, and almost none of it appears on a practice’s website.
Analysis
Not predictions. The unresolved questions we expect to spend next year reporting on — and the reasons we think each one is genuinely open.
Analysis
The chair has been redesigned roughly every twenty years, always in the name of the patient. Most of the changes were for the dentist, and the profession is better for admitting it.
Recognition
The dentists and practices setting a higher standard for modern dentistry.
Editorial selection. No application fee, no paid placement, and no sponsored tiers — nominations open to anyone.
Explore the 2027 listClinicians whose work sets a reference point for the rest of the field — chosen for judgment, not volume.
4 honorees
Independent practices where the structure of the business is visibly organized around the patient in the chair.
6 honorees
Early-career clinicians whose choices are already changing what their corner of the profession expects.
3 honorees
