To Dental Schools:

 

• Meeting and surpassing all requirements for accreditation in the appropriate CODA competencies using less class and faculty time while delivering comprehensive and in-depth instruction to produce successful practicing dentists.
  
  
• Maintaining continuity of instruction in spite of faculty changes or reduction of faculty positions.
  
  
• Adding an effective recruitment tool for both faculty and students by demonstrating how students are guided toward professional maturity in the areas of dental management and economics.
  
  
• Holding evidence for engaging constructive dialogues with financial institutions and other organizations interested in supporting dental management and economics education and the future of the dental school.
  
  
• Being able to offer portability of the didactic material outside the classroom.
  
  
• Using quizzes that are graded by the program with feedback to students and instructors at submission.
  
  
• Monitoring and evaluating individual students and class performances through online statistics.
  
  
• Using technical assistance with a turnaround time of 24 hours or less.
  
  
• Having access to the authors of the program via email or phone.
  
  
• Receiving free training sessions.
  
  
• Using periodic feedback conferences with the Practice Ready team.
  
  

To Dental Students:

• Being able to access learning material and complete assignments anytime anywhere.
  
  
• Accessing many features of the program on mobile devices.
  
  
• Benefitting from increased small group study options through remote communication.
  
  
• Using online app to create professional resumes.
  
  
• Receiving online guidance for selecting and securing a suitable associateship.
  
  
• Acquiring or perfecting the skills of planning strategically for achieving personal and professional goals and of managing personal finances for a peace of mind and reducing student debt.
  
  
• Mastering key non-clinical skills for succeeding in private practice as well as in the military, public health, and academic careers.
  
  
• Applying acquired knowledge to the solution of actual dental cases.
  
  
• Experiencing creating and managing a virtual dental practice mirroring real-world operation.
  
  
• Receiving guidance on how to avoid or minimize the neuromusculoskeletal problems (occupational pain) affecting dentists and hygienists.
  
  
• Acquiring or perfecting the skill of drafting a business plan that would be favorably reviewed by a loan officer.
  
  

Practice Ready - Q & A's

The online Dental Practice Readiness Curriculum (DPRC or Practice Ready for short) addresses the challenge of learning dental practice management and economics during the pre-doctoral dental school years, in spite of compressed curricula and limited time for non-clinical topics. It is the only totally web-based educational program of its kind available anywhere.

Who developed the program and why? How many dental schools are using Practice Ready?
 

• The UT Health Science Center at San Antonio School of Dentistry began working on the DPRC in 2004. The program evolved from lessons learned in conducting a national study funded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation on assisting small organizations to employ strategic planning for achieving and maintaining sustainable operations.
• It was created for San Antonio dental students and later shared with other dental school interested in the unique training provided by Practice Ready. Licensing fees have been kept at the lowest level possible to allow (1) periodic upgrading of the information content and enhancements of the educational methodology, (2) continuous maintenance of the program in today’s Web environment requiring frequent adjustments of the operating software to address new browsers, changes in technology and user preferences, (3) continuous technical and implementation assistance to all users, (4) maintenance of a secure data base for all students’ assignments.
• Dental Schools currently using the program found the adoption of Practice Ready cost effective when considering the saving of faculty and class time to attain an educational offering of comparable quality. The per-student cost of the program is approximate that of an average technical book.
• In 2018, the Practice Ready curriculum is being used by eight dental schools.

Was DPRC tested outside the San Antonio School of Dentistry before being shared with other dental schools?

Yes. In 2009, the DPRC was evaluated by the School of Dentistry of the Medical College of Georgia, the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Dentistry, the Department of Professional Studies of the University of Las Vegas School of Dental Medicine and by Howard University’s College of Dentistry during a collaborative six-month project. Results were reported in a two-hour symposium at the 2010 American Dental Education Association (ADEA) national meeting in Washington, D.C.

What products and services are included in a DPRC/Practice Ready license agreement?

• Access to the program by students and faculty.
• Continuous technical vigilance and support. Rapid turnaround response (usually within 24 hours or less) to technical questions.
• Software updates.
• Access to the authors of the program by email and phone.
• Scheduled GoToMeeting discussion sessions with interested current users.
• Training sessions at San Antonio campus.
• Feedback telephone conferences, periodically scheduled at users’ preferences.

Is a short description of Practice Ready available?

A five-minute video to be accessed from the login page is in production. Following are few highlights.

• The Practice Ready curriculum consists of four sequential levels of learning corresponding to progressively higher levels of students’ competence over the four years of dental school.
• It applies the methodology of strategic planning, first, to personal and professional aspirations and, then, to dental practice. The modular organization of the program allows different groupings of the learning material, the compression of the curriculum to less than four years and the customization of the program to meet special didactic needs.
• Practice Ready uses online self-learning, cases, and virtual practice environments to complement or substitute classroom meetings. In keeping with the preferences of today’s students, course materials may be explored and assignments completed "anytime, anywhere."
• The Practice Ready web based curriculum contains all the educational material traditionally used in class lectures, with enhancements and links only possible online.
• Online quizzes are graded by the program. Scores are returned to students and instructors immediately after submission. Class and individual performance statistics are available on line to instructors.
• Bulletin board announcements are posted and archived online.
• A self-assessment tool, titled "My Progress," keeps track of completed assignments, informing both students and instructors of work still to be done and functioning as navigation tool to the assignments’ pages.
• A CV/resume builder is accessible from most pages for recording significant events and accomplishments soon after they occur. The entries are automatically organized to produce a professionally looking, short resume or a detailed CV as needed.

Which educational domains are addressed by Practice Ready?

• Dental Practice Management: Exploring, understanding and applying best methods for developing a dental practice that realizes the dentist’s aspirations while providing the best oral care possible to patients.
• Practice Policy: Addressing dentists’ responsibilities to society, patients and the dental team while building practice success.
• Dental Economics: Understanding the economic forces producing dental practice financial successes and failures.
• Dental Informatics: Developing the skill of searching, retrieving, organizing and using data from patients care, dental team activities, professional, economic and social sources.
• CODA standards: 2-10, 2-11, 2-17, 2-18, 2-19, and 4-7/g.
• Professionalism and leadership.
• Personal finance and personal debt.
• Dental ethics: the awareness of ethics in dentistry.
• Behavioral sciences: the importance and the responsibility of interacting with personnel and patients.

A dental office is
 

• part hospital (it provides its own x-rays)
• part learning center (it provides patient education), part fabrication area (the dental laboratory)
• part assembly and production areas (the operatory/treatment and laboratory rooms)
• part informatics area (appointments and record keeping)
• part finance area (billing, accounting and inventory control)

Therefore

Successful Dentists must have the skills needed to oversee the integration of all these aspects of delivering dental care. In other words, a successful dentist must function as CEO (chief executive officer}, CFO (chief financial officer), COO (Chief Operating Officer), and HR (Human Resources) director often at the same time, while performing complex dental procedures.

Practice Ready provides sufficient depth of knowledge to enable students to experience real world decision-making after creating, with on line guidance, a virtual practice and completing the assignments of test-drive it to address dental practice prevailing operating issues.

What are some noteworthy educational characteristics of the program?
 

• Practice Ready provides an estimated 128 hours (32 hours per each level/year) of comparable class time via faculty-assisted self-directed learning. Interactive learning and assignments are online and do not require extensive classroom sessions. Discussion seminars and presentations by invited speakers may be added as valuable complements of the knowledge foundations created by the program.
• Online grading facilitators shorten the time and simplify the task of grading students’ performance.
• Practice Ready assignments are preceded by relevant learning material, supported by guidance, clarified by examples, and, at instructors’ choice, guided with rubrics.
• The program emphasizes professionalism, critical thinking and problem solving.
• Practice Ready didactic objective is the acquisition of key non-clinical skills for providing financial and psychic rewards to the dentist while creating value for patients, offering opportunities to personnel and contributing to community welfare.
• The "learn by doing" approach for developing personal finance and practice management skills is more effective than mere study directives and induces better retention of essential knowledge and skills.
• With Practice Ready students become better prepared to control student debt, to take on practice ownership or to offer valued competencies when seeking associateships, entering military or public health careers, joining the faculty of a dental school or pursuing other career choices.
• The Practice Ready four-level progressive learning guides students through an educational journey that uses the strategic planning method to bring about the acquisition of skills needed to attain personal and professional goals.
  
  At Level 1, students complete a career strategic plan and draft a personal budget to support it and to manage debts.
  
  At Level 2, they apply what they learned about personal strategic planning components – mission and vision statements, goal setting, strengths and weaknesses strategies - and personal finance to drafting a strategic plan for a virtual dental practice.
  
  At level 3, they add personnel oversight, patient management and business finance to the practice plan. Additional Level 3 topics are selecting and securing an associateship, ergonomics and chair-side techniques to avoid the onset of neuromusculoskeletal pain.
  
  At Level 4, the dental students learn how to select a practice location, review Q&A’s on transition to practice and using the work done at previous levels, produce a business plan good enough to support a viable proposal for a loan toward acquiring or building a dental office. The business plan testifies to the level of competence in dental practice management and economics that is attained with the Practice Ready curriculum and it is rarely possessed by new dentists.

What can educators expect from Practice Ready?

• Productive student-teacher communication on learning requirements and expectations.
• The advantages of a well-organized curriculum with online comprehensive learning material and teaching tools as well as with the flexibility of adapting to dental schools’ and instructors’ special needs.

How many faculty hours are needed to teach Practice Ready?

• The program provides flexibility in allocating faculty time to meet individual schools’ needs. If only coordination, advice and evaluation have been provided, faculty time could be reduced to a minimum of four two-hour classes complemented by instructors’ preparation time per learning level. This minimum allocation is equivalent to sixteen two-hour classes for the whole four-year program.
• Variations of the minimum allocation have been employed by some current Practice Ready users for the first year of implementation in order to transition from current curriculum structures.
• Current allocations are eight or more two-hour classes per learning level, equivalent to sixty-four hours or more for the whole program. Current allocations include class lectures, seminars and invited speakers.

Have there been scholarly reviews and presentations of the DPRC?

The DPRC/Practice Ready authors and instructors have coauthored:

• A poster presentation at the 2009 American Dental Education Association (ADEA) national meeting in Phoenix, Arizona.
• A two-hour symposium at the 2010 American Dental Education Association (ADEA) national meeting in Washington, D.C.
• A videotaped seminar, workshop and a TechExpo table at the 2012 ADEA national meeting in Orlando, Florida.
• Roundtable discussions with DPRC users at the 2014 ADEA national meeting in San Antonio, Texas.
• A TechExpo table in the program of the 2015 ADEA meeting in Boston, Massachusetts.

All DPRC faculty and administrators are coauthors or contributing reviewers of a paper on the DPRC/Practice Ready educational experience currently being prepared for publication in peer-reviewed journals.