Can You Explain Your Fees For Treatments & Care?

Hey everybody, its Dr. Lepore back with another frequently asked question. We get asked in our practice a lot about our fees and so it thought I will take this little opportunity to tell you how we base our fees – and we really base it on three things. The skill it takes to do it right, the time it takes to do it well and the materials that we use to make it last. So let’s start with that first one – the skill it takes to do it right. When I came out of dental school I prided myself by wanting to be the best that I possibly could at what I did and so I started to take a lot of advanced education after graduation. Now just so you know it is an uncomfortable topic for me to talk about – how much I take especially for my wife God Bless her but we are required to take 32 hours of CE every two years as dentists. In our office we take close to 200 or 250 in some years. so we do that so that we could provide the best care and the most modern and current care. Secondly if you are going to do something well it takes time to do it – so when I started my career I worked for one of the corporate chain practices and I would see anywhere between 25 and 30 patients a day and that doesn’t even include the time I would go and do exams for patients in hygiene. In our practice now I may see 8 – 10 people at most and let me tell you why – in order for me to do the best work, I have to be attentive, present and I have to be able to not be interrupted when I am doing the best care that I possibly can and I found that if I spaced myself accordingly I was able to provide just that. Some models are much more volume driven – you will see 8 to 10 people sitting in the waiting room. We see 8 to 10 patients maybe all day. Lastly I want to talk about the materials we use to make things last, there are so many different types of crowns and filling materials and different cements that we can possibly use an I can tell you that the good isn’t cheap and cheap isn’t good – so we take that mantra not just to our practice but to the materials that we use. So rather than send your work to an overseas laboratory where we might pay a third of what we might pay here – we use a very high quality lab right here in the US and the same goes for the other materials we use – we use the top materials that are backed by research that are going to give longevity. We certainly won’t be the cheapest dentistry that you’ll find and we actually take pride in that for the same reason that you probably take a lot of pride in your work, we certainly take a lot of pride in ours.