Category: Legal Issues

During ODA’s upcoming Annual Session, I will be presenting a course along with Dr. Mark Alexandrunas regarding issues that dental practice owners and dentist-employees are frequently confronted with during their relationship with each other. We hope to share ideas in order to head off potential conflict between employer dentists and their ... [continue reading]

Being a member of organized dentistry provides plenty of benefits. Those benefits range from savings on products and services used in dental offices to continuing education opportunities to legislative advocacy. Along with these benefits, your membership also offers you access to necessary information in the dental community. This information ... [continue reading]

Closing a dental practice many times is much more complicated than turning off the lights and locking the door. As dentists contemplate the closure of an office, there are several key points to consider. Avoiding patient abandonment Announcing the closure of a practice is a critical step in the process that could cause difficulty for the ... [continue reading]

We are now four months into the COVID-19 vaccination process in Ohio. I am hopeful that at this point those of you who wanted to receive the vaccine have been given that opportunity. The ODA lobbied to have dentists and dental team members included in the 1A group of those vaccinated.  Fortunately, in the guidance from the governor, dental ... [continue reading]

Since the beginning of this pandemic there has been much discussion around the COVID-19 vaccine. Now that we are a little over a month into vaccinating people, there are still many questions left to be answered. For many the vaccination is a light at the end of the tunnel and a way out of this pandemic. However, others are skeptical about the ... [continue reading]

In the world that we are currently living in there are very few people, if any, that can say they do not know someone who has COVID-19 or has had COVID-19. The virus has spread throughout the country and likely has had an impact on each of us. Having said that, and with the current spread of the virus, we have been receiving phone calls about ... [continue reading]

A common question I receive at the ODA is how to terminate the dentist-patient relationship in a proper way. I think this is the case because it is not something that a dentist does on a normal basis, and when they do they want to ensure they are doing it correctly. Terminating the dentist-patient relationship requires the dentist to exercise care ... [continue reading]

Way back in February, before the COVID-19 pandemic, during a time that was not as crazy as now, I wrote an article about patients requesting to film in a dental office. At the time this was something that I had not given much thought to because it seemed to be somewhat of an obscure question. Fast forward a few months and dentistry looks much ... [continue reading]

Over the last few months, I have received many calls from dentists regarding the Terminal Distributor of Dangerous Drugs license (TDDD). Most of these calls have stemmed from a document sent by suppliers asking for TDDD license numbers. The paperwork also includes a response where a dentist can indicate he or she is exempt from having a TDDD. The ... [continue reading]

Last month we looked into patient documentation and record retention. This month to finish the two-part series we will look at the documentation of the office and employees. As is always the case, documentation in the dental office is of the utmost importance. As the saying goes in dental offices, if it is not documented it did not happen. That is ... [continue reading]