05/18/2020 11:01AM

Thanks to each of you who participated in our dental office PPE costs survey! We truly appreciate your experience so we may help the community realize the costs PPE is having on independently owned dental practices.

Please CLICK HERE to read the full results report & see the graphs.

After reading the results of hundreds of dentists nationwide, key PPE trends are:

• Billing Patients: 61.2% of dentists said they will bill patients for the extra PPE costs. Overall, dentists share they are billing $10-12 per patient; however, one office is billing $30. When adding the up front, fixed costs for PPE to the variable costs per patient seen, the additional invoice amount would need to be higher than $12 per patient for most offices–if trying to recoup 100%.
• Re-Opening: 81.5% of dentists who responded will re-open by today with only 14% expecting to re-open after June 1.
• PPE Out of Stock: although offices are reopening, they have very limited supplies and some are staying closed due to this issue. 90.18% of practices have N95 masks on back order and 74.9% state that gowns are on back order.
• Time Between Patients: 67% of dentists will be adding up to 20 minutes between patients, with 29% of those practices adding only 10 minutes for room turnover. For practices with 45 minute hygiene appointments, this can mean as much as a 40% increase in time needed per patient appointment.
• N95 Masks: On average, spending has ranged from $4 to $5.30 per mask. 67.5% of dentists are spending more than $4 and 63.5% are spending less than $5.
• Gowns: 57.76% of dentists are spending more than $5 per gown, due to using reusable gowns. Many offices shared that they are using gown rental services.
• Face Shields: This PPE expense had the widest response range. 49.28% of practices are spending less than $12 per shield yet 39.56% are spending over $15.