Ask most dentists how they make money, and the honest answer is three words: drilling, filling, and billing. Dr. Ryan Lee thinks that model rewards the wrong things, and he has the experience to make the case.
In this episode of The Margin Line, Joe Lynch sits down with Dr. Ryan Lee — dental oncologist, dental director at CVS Health’s Aetna, dental interoperability consultant at BCG, dental subject matter expert to the FEHRM, and a Lieutenant Colonel in the Army Reserve — to unpack what dentistry looks like when you stop thinking about the tooth and start thinking about the patient behind it.
He gets into:
- Why "drilling, filling, and billing" makes up roughly 80% of dental income, and what he'd change
- Why dentists are best positioned to catch oral cancer early but almost never get paid to
- The brutal economics of dental oncology outside a hospital
- Why PDS Health putting Epic in every office signals real medical-dental integration
- The case for patient-owned dental records
- His unique role as the Dental SME on the federal effort to unify health records
- The one rule he uses to decide when to take on yet another job
Whether you're a DSO leader trying to make medical-dental integration more than a buzzword, a dentist wondering what's on the other side of the handpiece, or anyone who's ever asked why the profession best positioned to catch oral cancer gets paid the least to look — this conversation reframes what dental care is actually for.