Dental implants have moved from specialty territory into the mainstream of general practice, but the decision to bring them in-house involves far more than clinical training. In this episode of The DrBicuspid.com Podcast, Editor-in-Chief Kevin Henry sits down with Traci Nervo, a dental implant consultant with more than 30 years of experience in implants and oral surgery, to talk through what it actually takes to make implants work in a practice.
Nervo brings a perspective most consultants can't: She started as a surgical tech before moving into administration, which means she understands the clinical side and business side. Today, she works with both general practices looking to expand their treatment mix and dedicated implant centers, and she has strong opinions about what separates the practices that succeed with implants from the ones that struggle.
The clinical knowledge gap, she says, is real, but it's not the whole story. The bigger stumbling block is the administrative and operational infrastructure that must be in place before the first implant case is ever booked. Scheduling workflows, patient acquisition systems, supply chains, team training across clinical and front-office roles -- all of it has to be built methodically; otherwise, the addition of implants creates more chaos than revenue.
On the insurance question, Nervo is candid. Many insurers don't cover implants, and for full-arch cases like All on 4, out of network is essentially the standard. That reality, she argues, doesn't have to be a barrier -- it just requires that practices carefully plan their patient communication and pricing strategy before they dive in.
She also addresses the myth that implants are primarily about economics. The first reason most providers give for bringing implants in-house, she says, is continuity of care -- the desire to take a patient from diagnosis to final restoration without sending them across town. Revenue growth is real, but it stems from doing the first part well.
The conversation also touches on AI's growing role in dental practice management, the co-existence of implant centers and GP practices in the same market, and the referral model that still works well for some established practices that prefer to stay in that lane.
Nervo can be reached at [email protected] or LinkedIn. Listen to the full conversation below.
