IRVINE — The company best known as Pacific Dental Services is celebrating its 30th anniversary in big ways.
In April, it changed its name to PDS Health, which is more than just a rebranding, founder and Chief Executive Stephen Thorne IV said.
“It’s about focusing the organization on patients’ overall health and the role that oral health plays in that,” Thorne told the Business Journal. “Our purpose is to integrate these two back together.”
PDS Health, which became known for providing back-office services to dental clinics, is on a quest to combine dental and health services. In 2022, the company began an unusual collaboration with Fountain Valley’s MemorialCare to eventually provide 25 practicing clinics where dentists will work in the same office as physicians. The first such facility, Culver Smiles Dentistry in Irvine, began operations last December.
PDS Health also moved its headquarters to Henderson, Nevada to be closer to where Thorne resides; he moved there about 10 years ago. It unveiled its new 36,000-square-foot building on April 22.
The company’s support center in Irvine is still the largest in its network with 1,260 local employees, making it the second-largest dental company in Orange County by headcount (see list, page 26).
It plans to open another center in Miami later this year to further expand its national presence, officials said.
Dental Hotbed
PDS Health is creating a new business model to reflect its shift into more comprehensive care.
PDS Health currently comprises of a dental unit and medical unit and has recently added a new dental plan unit. The industry hasn’t seen much change in 40 plus years, Thorne said.
“The key is having them all working together in the same electronic health record, looking at the same data, same blood work, same biomarkers, understanding how they support each other in that particular patient’s overall health,” Thorne said.
Its medical business unit is growing steadily with PDS Health operating in 12 primary care practices located in Las Vegas and Phoenix. Thorne expects to increase to 18 practices by the end of this year.
Thorne said he wants PDS Health to continue to operate in OC as he believes the region is a “hotbed for large group practice.”
“Orange County has a history of dentistry that’s pretty deep,” Thorne said.
He cites the growing tech sector in OC as a key driver of innovations within the dental space.
Besides PDS, Irvine-based Glidewell provides custom dental restorative services, Brea-based Envista Holdings Corp. (NYSE: NVST) has a $2.9 billion market cap by providing a range of dental products, and Irvine-based Smile Brands Inc. has 7,500 employees with $1 billion in annual sales.
30-Year Anniversary
After graduating from UCLA in 1989, Thorne found a tough job market, so he began working at his father’s dental practice in Victorville.
“My father asked me to put a computer system into his practice, and since I was pretty good with a computer, he asked me to computerize his practice,” Thorne said in a prior interview.
That initial step led to Thorne learning in-depth how a dental office works. In 1994, he started Pacific Dental Services, which has often been on Inc. magazine’s 5000 list of the fastest growing private companies in America.
It wasn’t always easy, such as during the 2020 pandemic when dentistry wasn’t declared crucial and only 5% of dental practices were open.
Thorne started off in 2020, believing his company could grow sales 25% to $2 billion. Two months into the pandemic, he thought sales might fall as low as $1 billion. He had to furlough 8,000 of his 13,000 employees. As it was, sales rebounded in the second half of 2020 and were down 1% to around $1.6 billion.
Thorne won a Business Journal’s 2022 Excellence in Entrepreneurship award.
PDS Health has since grown to become the third-largest dental support organization, often known as DSO, in the nation, with now over 1,000 supported practices in 24 states. Its 1000th practice, Dentists of West Ashley, opened in Charleston, South Carolina on June 25.
PDS Health hit another milestone when it completed the full implementation of electronic health record software made by Epic Systems Corp. in all of its supported dental practices in 2022, which Thorne called a “massive undertaking.”
It took two years for PDS Health to convert the operating platforms to 1,000 practices and train its 14,475 employees on how to use it, he said.
The system integrates patients’ dental and medical data in one record.
Doctors and Dentists Together
Thorne has long emphasized that dental health is closely linked to a person’s overall health.
The impetus for closer collaboration started with a Surgeon General report in 2000 that emphasized good oral health, said Thorne, who in 2015 started a task force to study solutions.
PDS Health has its own program called “The Mouth-Body Connection,” where it attempts to improve the overall health of the patient, not just his or her mouth. Thorne has also been part of a Harvard advisory panel, where he was asked to create “the first fully dental medical integrated plan.”
At the joint venture with MemorialCare, Culver Smiles Dentistry houses dental care and oral surgery with family medicine, gynecology and pediatrics under one roof.
The joint venture embodies PDS Health’s mission to highlight the impact oral health has on overall health, Thorne said.
“Dentistry has been isolated and removed from overall healthcare for way too long,” Thorne said.
He pointed out the link between periodontal disease, a type of gum infection, and chronic health issues such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and pregnancy complications.
“There’s so many areas dentists can help with because periodontal disease is the most common chronic inflammatory disease in the world, and it’s a medical condition with a dental solution,” Thorne said.
