What characterizes the "sinking middle" dental practice model that most general practices drift into? Commodity pricing under contractual write-offs, shrinking insurance pools, mandatory high-volume throughput, and technology costs that become increasingly difficult to justify on the margins available. The sinking middle is where most general dental practices have ended up by default. Providers battle each other for the same shrinking pool of insurance reimbursement dollars, services get capped by what contracts allow rather than by what the work is genuinely worth, and the practice survives only by pushing volume harder and harder. The arithmetic eventually breaks. Technology investments that used to [...]