December 04, 2024

Building a Dental Community: Meet Your Simplify Dentistry Podcast Hosts

📋 Episode Description

Join hosts Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan, Dr. Richard Offutt, and Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan as they introduce Simplify Dentistry Podcast – a new platform dedicated to building community among dental professionals. Discover how these experienced dentists aim to break down the isolation of solo practice by bringing valuable insights, expert guests, and practical solutions directly to dental practitioners, all in a casual, judgment-free environment.

⏱️ Episode Navigation

  • 00:00 – Welcome and host introductions
  • 00:09 – Dr. Richard Offutt’s background and vision for Simplify
  • 00:59 – Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan shares his journey to dentistry
  • 02:43 – Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan’s path and perspective on work-life balance
  • 04:21 – Introduction to Simplify Dentistry’s mission
  • 05:21 – Addressing real practice challenges
  • 06:05 – Discussion on practice evolution and growth
  • 07:18 – Preview of expert guests and valuable insights
  • 08:33 – Community benefits and free resources
  • 09:59 – Call to action and how to join

🎯 Key Takeaways

Community Support & Solutions

  • Creating a judgment-free space for dental professionals to connect and share experiences
  • Addressing real-world challenges in operations, staffing, practice management, financial management and clinical techniques
  • Leveraging decades of experience to bring industry leaders’ insights directly to practitioners
  • Focus on continuing education and practice evolution
  • Emphasis on building a successful practice while maintaining a personal life

👤 Meet Your Hosts

Leadership Team

Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan: UNC graduate and practicing dentist focused on work-life balance and community building in dentistry. Experience operating dental group purchasing organization. Bringing clinical, operational and industry experience. A contributing author for Dental Economics and other industry-leading publications.

Dr. Richard Offutt: Davidson College and UNC graduate with specialty training from the University of Pennsylvania. Experience operating dental group purchasing organization, built multi-location specialty practice, experience building a DSO as well as being a dental consultant.

Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan: UNC graduate and practicing dentist who developed his passion for dentistry through shadowing and hands-on experience. A former researcher, he is active in continuing education and dental volunteering. Owns, and practices in a successful single-doctor practice in Charlotte.

💡 Featured Discussion Topics

  • Personal journeys into dentistry
  • Solo practice challenges and solutions
  • Practice management strategies
  • Continuing education opportunities
  • Financial success
  • Work-life balance in dentistry
  • Community building
  • Digital dentistry innovations
  • Clinical success
  • Landscape of dentistry and current trends

🤝 Industry Experts Mentioned

  • Sameer Puri – Accomplished industry leader. Educator, community builder, and current Chief clinical office of Imagen Dental partners.
  • Mike Skramstad – Digital Dentistry educator. Involved in product testing and development in the digital world.
  • Ryan Molis – Invisalign educator
  • Meena Barsoum – Cerec training leader

📱 Connect With Simplify Dentistry

  • Website: simplifydds.com
  • Facebook Group: Join for case discussions, operational help, real time feedback and community support

Topics: dental community, dental practice management, dental continuing education, dental technology, practice growth, dental podcasts, dental consulting, dental practice solutions, dental professional development, dental industry experts, DSO insights, digital dentistry

Transcript

00:00 Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Welcome to Simplify Dentistry’s podcast. I’m Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan, along with my co-hosts. Dr. Richard Offutt and Dr. Murtuza. We’re here to introduce ourselves to you today.

00:09
Dr. Richard Offutt
Appreciate that, Moose. My name is Richard Offutt and I went to Davidson College and University of North Carolina for dental school, did a little bit of specialty training at the University of Pennsylvania, and been in dentistry for a long time. I’ve always loved it. I’ve enjoyed it. I enjoyed being a dentist. And Simplify gives me a great window to the world of dentistry. And I get to talk to people I like and some people I don’t like. And, you know, I mean, you know, I’m here with these two guys, right? So the thing is, what excites me the most about Simplify is that it gives dentists a chance to have a voice. For the dentists that are out there by themselves, they’re working their brains out, they’re going door to door, up and down the hallway, little rooms, little spaces, doing little things.

00:52
Dr. Richard Offutt
They need a group like ours to build a movement that lets them have a voice. So, Mort, Where are you from?

00:59
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Yeah, so I grew up in Morganton, North Carolina. I went to University of North Carolina for dental school and undergrad. I wish I could say dentistry has always been my passion, but that’d be a lie. My parents are physicians. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor growing up a medical doctor. Things changed when I got into college. I saw where medicine went and it wasn’t for me anymore. Dentistry became a great thing to look at. I went and shadowed in an office and, you know, kind of fell in love with it that day. Then I also had to make up for a lot of mistakes I made in college. So then it got me to this point and I got into dental school, have loved it, you know, ever since that one day of shadowing that guy.

01:45
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
So I’m not the guy that has the lifelong passion for this. I’ve built my passion. It’s been something that I do love. I love going to work every day. It’s fun. The community aspect that we’re trying to build with this is something that excites me. It’s. It’s nice to have something different besides your practice, where you can talk to your friends, you can talk to your peers, you can figure out what’s going on in their practices, what’s going on in yours. You start realizing that you’re not alone in this thing. If you’re a solo practitioner or you’re not alone, if you have other, you Know, if you’re in a group like this, you’ve got other guys and girls going through this same sort of stuff. You can have a community of colleagues and friends that will help you build off of that.

02:26
Dr. Richard Offutt
So you were very fortunate in that the office you visited, the dentist encouraged you to become a dentist. Whereas your brother, when he visited my office, he came away wondering whether I wanted him to be a dentist or not.

02:37
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
I don’t know what Rick wanted me to be.

02:40
Dr. Richard Offutt
So, clearly you grew up in Morganton, too.

02:43
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So, yeah, I’m Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan, and obviously Mort is my brother. So I grew up in Morganton, went to the University of North Carolina undergrad and dental school, in case you’re wondering. Mort does what I do, so that’s why he is a dentist. That’s why he went there. So I am a Tar Heel. You know, dentistry, like Mort, dentistry was never something that I really wanted to do. You know, my mom tried to talk me into dentistry numerous times, and I was like, you know, the last thing I want to do is be in people’s mouths all the time. But then a buddy of mine, worse.

03:17
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Places to my buddy of mine was.

03:18
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Like, do you want to do rectals? And I was like, I don’t. You know. So, you know, what I did realize is there’s so many things about life that I enjoy, and work is only a small piece of it, and work a lot of times is what kind of gives you the means to live the life you want to.

03:39
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Absolutely.

03:40
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
And dentistry allowed me to do that. Dentistry is one of the few things in life that gives you the opportunity to have a great living, to provide a great service, to be in healthcare and be able to be a leader in your community. And that’s kind of what led me to dentistry. You know, I get to do a lot of the things that I wanted to do as far as being a practitioner. I get to help people, but, you know, I don’t have to be in the office 80 hours a week. And that’s kind of what dentistry is for me. And, you know, I think the important thing is dentistry is a community, you know, and when doctors are on their own, it’s hard to succeed if you’re by yourself.

04:21
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
We need something, and we need something to be a part of, and we need to be able to lean on people. And that’s kind of why we started Simplify. We want this to be a forum where you guys can ask questions. You know, we can provide input, we can bring industry leaders in to provide answers to Things that you can’t get on your own. And that’s kind of what we’re trying to accomplish here for you.

04:42
Dr. Richard Offutt
That, for that providing a voice is really important to build that community and to shape a movement of people that are aligned in thinking. I think, I think that, that’s what makes me, that’s what I enjoy coming and doing, filming the podcasts and hanging out with you guys and working on the Facebook page and truthfully inviting my friends that I’ve had over my career to come join us. Right.

05:07
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Kind of.

05:07
Dr. Richard Offutt
Kind of. Let’s, let’s do it together.

05:09
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
And all your new Facebook friends, too.

05:10
Dr. Richard Offutt
And my new Facebook friends. That’s exactly right.

05:14
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
It’s not every day you get to have Rick on Facebook and.

05:17
Dr. Richard Offutt
No, that’s right. That’s right. Because I avoided it for the vast majority of my life.

05:21
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
You know what? You know, dentistry is a solo profession to a certain extent, so you need community. And things like this are what brings docs together. You know, you can ask questions in a non judgmental way. You know, you can be like, hey, look, I can’t hire a damn hygienist. How do you hire a hygienist? Or how do you manage this shit? How do you keep people from asking you every day for more money because they think they can get it? Yeah. I mean, those are the kind of questions that you can ask in a non judgmental way.

05:49
Dr. Richard Offutt
Yeah. I mean, what do you do tomorrow to make your practice better? How do you know that? You know, so best practices, best thinking, thought leaders. I mean, key people that have, that can help us explore those different areas. To me, that’s what’s best about this.

06:05
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Well, because too often you get used to it. You start, you’re in your practice every day, you’re doing the same sort of stuff. You’re doing the dentistry you like doing to a certain degree. But, you know, you don’t want to be the guy that wakes up 10 years later going, holy shit, I didn’t do anything different. I didn’t change my ways. I could have been doing this a different way. I could have, my buddy does it this way and this works for him. He expanded his practice into something else. Why haven’t I been doing that?

06:32
Dr. Richard Offutt
Well, that’s right. You can’t, you know, you can’t if you practice the way you were trained.

06:36
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Right. And you also can’t, I mean, if you don’t know, I mean, without exposing yourself to other groups, other ways of thinking other resources that we have. I mean, there’s so many different, you know, continuing education groups that people go to. There’s so many different things that you can do to help make yourself a better clinician and better provider and, you know, help yourself personally and professionally.

06:58
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
But let’s face it, like, you know, Rick and I have been in the profession for a little bit longer than you and we’ve done other things that have kind of exposed us to industry leaders. So, you know, the Simplify Podcast is kind of one of those things where what we want to do is we want to bring these people that we’ve been in contact with and we want.

07:15
Dr. Richard Offutt
To reconnect with them because they’ve got a wealth of information.

07:18
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
You know, you got a guy like Sameer Puri who has done about everything you can do in dentistry. You know, he came and was our guest and he talked about his whole journey. He talked about what has happened as far as his continuing education, his community aspect, his endeavor into the DSO space. Mike Skramstad came and talked about what is going on in digital education. You know, there’s lots of people that we can kind of lean on and can kind of lend information to our viewers that we think is really valuable.

07:51
Dr. Richard Offutt
I mean, the key is it’s a very casual setting so there’s, you know, we can ask and get information on anything we want and it’s great. I mean, we hopefully that our listeners enjoy it as much as I have done so far in making it right.

08:08
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
I think one good thing is that it’s in a casual atmosphere. It’s kind of like this, it’s you know, three or four or however many guys and girls talking, you know, shooting the shit, talking about things that you like to learn about things that are dental related and you also get to learn, you know, about the non dental aspects of these guys and girls lives. You know that Mike is still now a zero handicap even though he plays golf in the snow. That’s right, yeah.

08:33
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah. So I mean, that’s kind of what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to create a community. We’re trying to provide you information that, you know, you would normally have to subscribe to or pay to get to. You know, to get to some of these guys. You know, you have to sign up for courses, you got to travel. We’re trying to bring it to you in a free environment. We’re trying to create an environment where you can get on our Facebook group, you can ask questions, you can Post your cases. You know, you can find answers. You know, what kind of implant is this? What do I do? You know, who do I see to learn how to do Invisalign correctly? Do I. Do I look at Ryan Molis? Who do I look at? You know, who even is Ryan Molis?

09:13
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Before I got into a lot of this stuff, I didn’t know who any of these people were. So kind of, that’s the forum, you know, we try to vet a lot of these people through personal experience and. And find people that can provide you information that is reputable.

09:25
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Yeah. And even, like, along those lines, like, you talk to a guy like Sam, you talk to Meena, you know, those guys, you know, talk to you about sure Smile as well, and how that. How sure Smile has made a difference in their practices, where, you know, I’ve been an Invisalign doc for a long time, but it’s one of those things, you’re like, well, damn, is there really a better way for me to do. Start learning the best practice?

09:48
Dr. Richard Offutt
What can we get from these people who are the experts?

09:50
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Yeah.

09:51
Dr. Richard Offutt
How can we bring that to our listener?

09:52
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
That to me, is guys and girls that are doing it and living it and making a difference to help other. Other clinicians.

09:58
Dr. Richard Offutt
Exactly.

09:59
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So, you know, my takeaway. Would you just come spend some time with us? Check out the Facebook group. Check out our podcast register. Register to get notified about upcoming podcast episodes @simplify dds.com you know, come spend some time. Come be part of the community. Come dare to make dentistry simple.