One-on-One An Interview with Dr. Paul Homoly Simply Beautiful A ...

the time, my grandfather, my mom’s dad, was committed to the Cook County Sanitarium for tuberculosis. He didn’t
have any insurance so my mom’s brother, my Uncle Frank, went to all the brothers and brothers-in-law—my mom
had six brothers and three sisters—and asked each family for $200 to $300 to spring Grandpa out of the sanitarium.
Well, my dad was a carpenter and my mom was a housewife and we had four kids, we had a 900 square foot home,
we were very modest in our lifestyle. We didn’t have $200. I later found out that when my mom took me down to
Little Town, the store she walked into was called Household Finance. You could get a little signature loan. My mom
borrowed $200 and it scared the living hell out of her, and that’s why she burst into tears. The reason for the story
is that money has always been a very highly emotional issue in my family. My family—my mom, my dad, my uncles
and aunts do not have any prosperity consciousness at all. They are blue-collar workers; they lived from check to
check. Money was always frightening to them and a source of continual stress. I grew up in that environment, and
I still have a little bit of York Road in me. And you know what? So does everybody else. So do all dentists, so do
all team members. Money is one of the cultural things that we inherit from our parents. How we perceive money is
one of the things we inherit from our family.
MD: Well, I remember once lecturing actually to a group of therapists—this was something that I was doing through
a dentist friend—and I mentioned to one of the therapists about people having issues when they come to the dentist.
And he said, “Well, we see people all day about all kinds of issues. What do you think is the biggest issue we see people
for?” I said, “Probably related to marriage?” He said, “Yes.” And I said, “Probably sex?” And he said, “No, this one’s
not even close to sex.” When I couldn’t guess what it was, he said, “Money. If you think people are messed up when it
comes to their thinking about sex, wait till you get two people together in a marriage and you try to bring up money and
what you should do with it.” He said everything else pales in comparison to how people struggle with how they feel
about money.
PH: (Laughter) Well, that doesn’t go away when they go into the dental office does it?
MD: No, it doesn’t, it might even get worse.
PH: Sure, and it doesn’t go away when you go to dental school or the institute, or if you’re a dental hygienist or
dental assistant. It follows us. But what are we going to do about it? Well, what we want to do is raise our Crossover
Zone. Look at that chart, Mike (Page 23). I’ve got that person crossing over at $5,000. What do you think the impact
on his practice would be if we could get him to cross over at $10,000?
MD: I think he would certainly diagnose more completely, more ideally, and really let the patient come to decide about
the suitability—I’m speaking like you now, Paul (laughter). There are a lot of dentists I talk to who don’t like to diagnose
more than two crowns at a time because they hate rejection. They end up doing the case piecemeal instead of getting the
patient’s input. So obviously it would lead to an increase in production and collections in their practice, an increase in
professional satisfaction, an increase in the strength of the team if they are getting bonuses on collections, and probably
an increase in the satisfaction of patients.
PH: You bet. And put on top of all that an increase in the standard of care in that office. The cultural center being
clinical quality is now well-served, isn’t it?
MD: Yes, it is.
PH: So this fringe item that we’ve been talking about, prosperity, has a direct and immediate impact on our cultural
center. It cannot and should not be ignored. It is as important to clinical quality as is the quality of our impression
material, the quality of the lab we use, the quality of the die stone, the quality of the alloy and our diagnosis. And
yet dentistry still has its head in the sand when it comes to issues that are non-clinical, that are related to what impacts
standard of care. If a dentist crosses over at $5,000, chances are this dentist is going to treatment plan a lot of
cases that are in the $3,000 to $4,000 range and be successful with them. If the dentist then increases the Crossover
Zone and crosses over at $10,000, he or she is going to do a lot of cases in the $7,000 to $9,000 range and do them
pretty well, you know what I’m saying?
Interview with Dr. Paul Homoly25