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Meet Our Team
Dr. David Pier is owner and practicing dentist at Mount Pleasant Dental Care and North Pond Dental Care. Dr. Pier is constantly looking for, as Pete Dawson would say, "a better way" leading him to take thousands of hours of continuing education and to join Ted Morgan, Dan Steinke, and Kevin Devine in creating DenVantage - the premier dental membership program. DenVantage has been so successful for Dr. Pier that he has gone from a small practice with six employees to two locations with four dentists and 30 employees!
Dr. Ted Morgan, a 50-year veteran of private practice, is one of the four dentists who created DenVantage. An avid student throughout his career, he has always sought to learn from the best and share with others, which he did as chair of Maine's CE Council for 35 years, and in writing articles, and in creating and teaching programs for dentists on leadership, communication, and case acceptance. DenVantage is another opportunity to share a powerful tool and strategy to help dentists thrive and become less dependent on insurance.
Dr. Kevin Devine was born in southern Illinois and, after spending a few years as a dentist in the US Army, he returned to his hometown to take over the practice of his childhood dentist. He and his wife lived and practiced there for 35 years. After selling his practice, he semi-retired to work as an associate with Dr. Dan Steinke in Downeast Maine.
Focusing his undergraduate college career on football and nutrition/biochemistry at the University of Iowa, Dan stayed for Dental School and then has enjoyed providing comprehensive dentistry in rural Maine. His education centered with the Pankey continuum and AGD, through which he received his Mastership and two LLSR awards. Working with 3 friends to develop DenVantage has been exciting for him as they all share the same passion for the special doctor/patient relationship that he has built his practice around.
Service Delivery Manager
Megan joined the DenVantage team in 2017 and is our Service Delivery Manager. She loves to help new offices get started with their own membership plans, help existing offices make their membership plan successful, and to also help patients see the advantages of and utilize their dental memberships. Megan was born and raised in Maine, but now currently resides in Colorado with her husband. In her free time, Megan enjoys reading, hiking, baking, and traveling.
Results We Have Seen
Results We Have Seen
"I began using DenVantage almost five years ago and currently have over 800 members. I originally incorporated DenVantage to decrease the impact of the ever-encroaching reach of insurance companies and to be able to maintain my insurance independence. It has worked better than my highest expectations.
During that time, I have had double-digit growth in my bottom line every year while working less. In fact, over the past 4 years my collections have increased by 66% which I attribute almost entirely to DenVantage. That alone is enough to declare the success of DenVantage without even considering the benefit of a 50% reduction in the number of broken appointments and a doubling of case acceptance for DenVantage patients. It seems once patients perceive they have a "plan" for their dental care, they are much more invested in their dental health and make the best choices in every way from maintaining their preventive care or periodontal care schedules, to finally moving ahead with needed restorative dentistry or even the cosmetic dentistry they have always wanted. Not a day goes by without a patient thanking me for offering our membership plan so they can get the dentistry they've always wanted.
For dentists considering offering a DenVantage membership program I would say, "Just do it - it's one of the best things you can do for your practice, for your patients, and to help save fee-for-service dentistry."
For offices who are not considering offering a membership plan I would say, "Why not? - it's one of the best things you can do for your practice, for your patients, and to help save fee-for-service dentistry!"
-Dr. Pier
"Practicing as I do in a competitive market dominated by employer-funded insurance plans, maintaining a strictly fee-for-service practice is challenging. When I started my in-office membership plan, the economy was down, patients were losing their jobs and their dental insurance, or their employers were opting for less expensive PPO plans. Our schedule had many 'holes' and we had to do something: start signing PPO contracts? or try membership. We hated the idea of joining PPOs, so we did the latter as an experiment. Three close colleagues also made the same choice and ultimately we produced what DenVantage is today.
Initially, I didn't expect much more than to see a reduction in cancellations and no-shows and prevent a few retirees leaving the practice because their insurance coverage ended. And I expected to gain some new patients looking for a 'plan'. Well, I got all of that: cancellations and no-shows decreased 40%, some of our retired patients came to thank me personally for making a way for them to stay in the practice; and we got occasional calls from people without dental insurance seeking an alternative to make their care affordable.
We didn't expect how readily, even enthusiastically, patients would sign up. We didn't expect to see the size of the jump in production and profitability we saw, either. Yearly production increases since DenVantage went live have been 18% (2015), 35% (2016), 20% (2017) and 10% (2018). Profitability over that same period rose 120%. Of course, many factors go into practice growth, but there is no doubt that DenVantage played a key role, and the following data shows how:
We were noticing that DenVantage patients were more likely to accept large treatment plans than our other patients. So we did an analysis comparing DenVantage patients to our insurance patients. What we found: our DenVantage patients in the three consecutive six-month periods we looked at had accepted more treatment than our insurance patients by a factor of 4.2, 3.6 and 2.4 times as much treatment per patient, average, as our insured patients!
Results like these and similar results of the other three DenVantage partners are the reason we believe that every dentist wanting to survive the new reality of dentistry as an independent fee-for-service practice, must use the membership strategy effectively. The many tweaks made through the years to DenVantage insure that your membership plan will be optimized and avoid the many pitfalls from errors in design of the plan."
- Dr. Morgan
