We had a great discussion with Dr. Smith (her name has been changed for privacy), and she had just left a practice in Illinois and moved to the southeast to start her own practice. The office she is leasing had some old equipment, but she had started from scratch. Not a single patient.
She put her head down and started working, and 3 months in, she was starting to make traction.
Until a pipe burst.
Generally, the damage could have been worse, but there was one casualty: the panoramic x-ray.
So now she had a decision: she knew that implants would eventually become part of the practice. However, she had hoped she could build the cash flow to a more comfortable level before making that leap to the cone beam system from the old pano.
However, now she had to decide – should she invest in the cone beam now or just focus on replacing the pano and then look to the cone beam later on.
Now, there are lots of options here. Buy a used pano to bridge the gap until she’s ready for the cone beam. Get a new pano and then trade it in toward a new cone beam when she’s ready. There isn’t one right answer for the individual, because besides the financial pros and cons, every dental professional has to honestly assess their own risk tolerance.
However, here is one framework to think about the finances.
If the office knows they need a panoramic x-ray, the question becomes whether the cone beam will generate incremental income vs the incremental cost.
So, to run these numbers, the typical cone beam is going to be about $30,000 to $45,000 more expensive than a similar quality panoramic x-ray. These numbers will be less if they went with refurbished equipment.
Let’s use the higher end of the range of $45,000 of incremental cost. If you were to finance this over 5 years, it would be about $850 per month of incremental cost.
So just based on the numbers, the question becomes: would the cone beam enable more than $850 of incremental production per month for the dental professional?
However, that’s not the end of the analysis – because every individual’s risk tolerance is different. Many would say that the probability of increasing production above that $850 mark is very high – and feel the cone beam is the right decision. However, others may look at this and say “What if I can’t generate that production?” and feel that the implications are too severe for them, even if it’s a low probability.
The numbers should lead the way when deciding on a significant investment. However, there’s not a single right answer for any dentist – and the variable not to overlook is the risk tolerance.
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