Dental

Static reference. Automations consume this when generating strategy documents. Never injected into client briefs as client-specific fact — always layer through the resolver so client overrides win.

Structured data lives in content-system/industries/dental.ts. This page is the narrative companion. Keep them in sync.

1. Industry Overview

Dental is a high-trust, local-first professional healthcare category. Patients choose providers based on proximity, insurance acceptance, and reputation signals more than price. The market is bifurcating between independent and small-group practices competing on patient experience, and DSO-backed practices competing on scale, convenience, and marketing spend.

Patient acquisition is expensive and slow. Lifetime value is high — a single retained family can generate $15K–$40K+ over a decade. This asymmetry is why retention nearly always outperforms acquisition spend for established practices.

2. Default Affinities

When a client hasn't yet picked traits in the portal, these are the pack's starting affinities. Clients always override.

Independent practices skew warmer and more conversational; cosmetic boutiques skew more Refined + Modern; pediatric practices skew Playful + Approachable. The pack defaults aim at the median general-practice independent.

3. Common Patient Pain Points

• Cost anxiety — surprise bills, unclear coverage, sticker shock on crowns/implants/ortho
• Dental anxiety — ~36% of adults report moderate-to-severe dental fear; top reason for avoidance
• Insurance confusion — PPO vs HMO vs FFS, in-network vs out, annual maximums
• Trust deficit — suspicion of over-treatment ("do I really need this crown?")
• Scheduling friction — long new-patient waits, inflexible hours for working parents
• Continuity of care — patients stay for years; hygienist/dentist turnover triggers churn
• Cosmetic hesitation — 3–12 month shopping cycles for veneers, Invisalign, implants

4. Seasonality

5. Competitive Landscape

• Independent solo/small-group — relationship, community ties, owner-dentist continuity
• DSO-backed (Heartland, Pacific Dental, Aspen, Smile Brands, MB2) — ad spend, extended hours, standardized experience
• Specialty (ortho, endo, perio, oral surgery, pediatric, prosthodontics) — referral-driven, board-certified authority
• Cosmetic / boutique — design-forward, concierge, premium pricing, Instagram-native
• Budget / insurance-heavy — high-volume, Medicaid/HMO, compete on access
• DTC aligner disruptors — Invisalign, ClearCorrect (SmileDirectClub's collapse slowed but didn't stop this)

6. Listings Requirements

Required: Google Business Profile (primary category "Dentist" or specialty variant), Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, Yelp, Healthgrades, Zocdoc.

Conditional (insurance-accepting practices only): Delta Dental, MetLife, Cigna, Aetna, Humana provider finders — verify annually.

7. Regulatory Summary

• HIPAA — patient photos, reviews, testimonials require written authorization; responses to reviews cannot confirm patient status
• State dental boards — vary by state; common restrictions on "best," "#1," "specialist" (unless board-certified), "painless"
• Before/after photos — require signed release; most states require "individual results vary" disclaimer
• ADA specialty recognition — only 12 specialties are ADA-recognized; "cosmetic dentist" and "implant dentist" are NOT specialties
• ADA/WCAG 2.1 AA — healthcare sites are frequent ADA-lawsuit targets; compliance is non-negotiable

8. Vocabulary — Avoid

9. Navigation IA

Default site-header shape for dental. Drives the BDS <SiteHeader> component in @brikdesigns/bds/blueprints-astro when consumer sites build. Clients can override any field per-engagement in the portal Intel tab, but the pack default represents Brik's curated recommendation for the vertical.

Design intent: keep the top bar quiet (4 primary links, not 6) and route service discovery through a grouped mega-menu so cosmetic + restorative + comfort live in separate columns rather than a flat list. The frosted-glass-past-80 scroll behavior lets hero photography breathe at first load without sacrificing return-navigation reach.

// dental.navigationIA shape, from content-system/industries/dental.ts
{
  "primaryLinks": [/* 4 links */],
  "megaMenu": { /* services grouped by column */ },
  "scrollBehavior": "frosted-past-80",
  "ctaSlot": { /* primary CTA placement */ }
}

The <NavigationIASpec> visualization that renders this in Storybook will be ported to Fumadocs as a custom MDX component. Until then, the structured shape lives in dental.navigationIA.

10. Brik Strategic POV

Three considerations that differentiate Brik's dental strategy. These are not generic industry facts — they reflect Brik's POV and should surface in briefs where applicable.

Retention Economics

New-patient CAC ($200–$500+) vastly exceeds reactivation/case-close cost (under $10). A 1% hygiene reappt improvement on a ~2,000 active-patient practice produces $40–60K+/yr. A 5% case-acceptance gain can match 75–150 new patients in revenue.

Brik audits: Total Active Patients, Unscheduled Active, New Patients (Last Month), Total Lost (Last Month), Hygiene Reappt %, Case Acceptance %, Production/Visit, No-Show Rate, Hyg/Dr Visit ratio, Email/Cell capture, ASAP List.

Independent vs DSO

Independents should not out-spend DSOs. Structural moats: continuity of care, clinical autonomy, slower more personal experience, community embeddedness, owner-dentist visibility, decision speed, referral velocity.

Messaging posture: continuity, ownership, community, clinical integrity. Avoid corporate gloss. "Your dentist. Not a corporation." — the emotional posture, not the literal words.

FFS Transition

PPO write-offs commonly consume 20–40% of potential production. Transitioning toward FFS is typically the single highest-leverage long-term business decision for an established independent.

Prerequisites: ~1,500+ active patients, hygiene reappt >90%, case acceptance >50%, healthy review presence, membership plan ready ($350–$500/yr covering 2 cleanings + exams + X-rays + 15–20% off treatment), owner-dentist with 3+ years of runway.

Three transition patterns:

1. Selective drop — lowest-paying PPOs first
2. Full FFS — all-at-once
3. Hybrid / grandfather — honor existing; FFS for new patients only

11. Site Audit Extractors

When the portal audits a dental client's existing website, four pack-specific extractors run in addition to the universal ones (services, key messages, proof points, social links). Each turns live-site content into structured facts the content + preflight workers can reason about programmatically, rather than re-paraphrasing free text every run.

Page patterns

The pack declares URL / path / title patterns that route scraped pages to the right extractor:

Matches are case-insensitive. Multiple patterns can match a single page; each matched page routes to every applicable extractor.

Structured extractors

Why these four

• Membership plans — the most-missed dental fact. Content generators writing /membership copy must name tiers + prices verbatim; the paraphrase "plans starting at $X" reads as made-up. Birdwell's /membership-plan-1 was the validation case that drove this work.
• Insurance accepted — dental clients publish carrier lists specifically because patients filter on them. "We accept most major insurance" is marketing hedging; the actual carrier list is conversion-critical.
• New patient offers — live promos on the existing site are load-bearing on the hero. A redesign that drops them silently breaks conversion copy clients are actively tracking.
• Appointment systems — if the client has LocalMed or Weave wired up, the CTA must route there, not to a generic contact form. Misrouted CTAs are a common regression on template-based rebuilds.

Portal integration

The portal's website-audits worker resolves this pack via company_profiles.industry_slug === 'dental', invokes each matched extractor, validates output against the fieldSchemas shapes above, and enriches the profile with source: 'website_audit'. Generate-content for dental clients then renders the structured facts verbatim (no LLM paraphrasing on these fields).

Structured fields are also stamped to the design_decisions log with source: 'website_audit' so re-runs can see what was extracted last time and diff against the current run.

Adding extractors to a new industry

1. Implement siteAudit: IndustryPackSiteAudit on the pack's .ts file
2. Declare pagePatterns — URL / path / title rules that route scraped pages to extractors
3. List the extractors + the company_profiles columns they write to. Populate fieldSchemas with shape descriptions for each column
4. Add portal-side migration for any new columns; extend enrichProfile allowlist for website_audit to cover them
5. Implement the actual extraction logic in src/lib/website-audits/industry-packs/<slug>.ts on the portal side
6. Document the extractors here in the pack's .mdx under "Site Audit Extractors"

Consumers without siteAudit defined (the small-business fallback) run universal extractors only.

Related

• Content System overview
• Industries index
• Atmospheres — the mood layer dental defaults to
• Voices — voice patterns the dental affinities point to