The hygienist shortage is not improving, and Marko Vujicic says the market is not fixing it on its own.
In this episode of The DrBicuspid.com Podcast, sponsored by Overjet and recorded at the Dental Trade Alliance meeting in Phoenix, host Kevin Henry talks with Vujicic, chief economist of the ADA’s Health Policy Institute, about data he presented and what it means for dentists and the industry.
They start with the workforce. Vujicic says early-career dentists are about half men and half women, and 60% of this fall’s incoming class is women, putting dentistry on its way to a majority-female profession.
The hygienist shortage is not improving, and Marko Vujicic says the market is not fixing it on its own.
In this episode of The DrBicuspid.com Podcast, sponsored by Overjet and recorded at the Dental Trade Alliance meeting in Phoenix, host Kevin Henry talks with Vujicic, chief economist of the ADA’s Health Policy Institute, about data he presented and what it means for dentists and the industry.
They start with the workforce. Vujicic says early-career dentists are about half men and half women, and 60% of this fall’s incoming class is women, putting dentistry on its way to a majority-female profession.
He busts a common myth about hours worked: Female dentists now work about 97% of the hours male dentists do -- a gap far smaller than a decade or two ago. On ownership, he says it is being delayed for everyone, but at every career stage women are still about 10 percentage points less likely to own.
On hiring, Vujicic says hygienists remain the biggest pain point, with no year-over-year improvement in how hard they are to find, even though hygiene program enrollment is at an all-time high. Wages, he says, are rising at roughly the pace of inflation. The $70- to $80-an-hour stories are valid, he says, but they are not the national norm, and practices facing flat reimbursement struggle to offer big raises. An economist, he says, would call this a “low-level equilibrium,” and he admits he doesn’t know how it gets fixed.
The picture for dentist income is not much brighter. Vujicic points to several years of flat-to-down net income, a drop in patient volume and demand in the latest quarterly data, and sluggish reimbursement compared with rising expenses, all adding up to margin compression.
Vujicic still sees positives. Dental school applicants are up, he says, which signals strong interest in the profession. His bigger point is that dentistry may be on the verge of a “golden era,” thanks to the mouth-body connection and the role of oral health in healthy aging and managing noncommunicable diseases. With half of U.S. adults not seeing a dentist regularly, he says, even a few percentage points more would bring in many more patients. Getting there, he says, will take bigger reforms, and the industry needs to talk about the oral-systemic link more.
Learn more and see the data at ada.org/hpi.
Listen to the full conversation below.