Behind the Scenes at a Pioneering Dental Service Organization B Corp
Rodeo Dental Aims to Expand Access to Care for Texas Families
Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease among children in the U.S. It is five times as prevalent as asthma and four times more common than early childhood obesity. More school days are missed by children due to caries than the common cold! It requires a concerted plan of prevention and treatment by providers, patients and families. To further underscore the scale of this problem, more than 18 million underserved children live without dental care, including routine exams. As more evidence proves the connection between oral health and overall systemic health, solving the access to care problem is more important than ever.
Socially conscious leaders understand the dire sense of urgency for action to address this problem. When my partners and I began practicing dental medicine, we witnessed endless cases of pediatric dental mistreatment or neglect. We experienced the scale of the problem, both in urban and rural communities, and set out to correct it. Launching Rodeo Dental in 2009, we intended to rectify important widely held misconceptions. We set out to disprove the notion that dental offices are “supposed to be scary” and that access to high-quality, affordable care for underserved families is nearly impossible.
Rodeo would be a place where children actually look forward to meeting with our dentists, where our employees are pillars of community service, where high standards of oral care are available to everyone —regardless of means, status, or location —and where we offer our patients high-end care by world-class general dentists as well as every dental specialty from pediatric dentists and dental anesthesiologists to oral surgeons and orthodontists. All of our patients’ needs can be taken care of within a Rodeo office.
Core Values Guide the Impact Journey
We have largely executed that mission by developing a set of core values that serve as a guidepost to our impact journey. Tireless Pursuit of Impact informs our high-performance culture, community-based health and wellness education initiatives, themed patient transformations, and delivery of affordable preventative and specialty dental services to all. Patient Safety is Paramount means that we build and operate state-of-the-art sterile facilities and surpass the latest regulatory guidelines. This has been one of our most important core values throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and the culture we have created is one of safety and world-class compliance. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented rigorous screening protocols, infection control, and PCR testing available every week in every region to ensure our staff and patients’ health.
Our leadership team wanted to expand the Rodeo footprint to a farther reach, and partnered with Bain Capital Double Impact in 2019. Aligning with Bain Capital was the perfect partnership for Rodeo. Our missions and core values match up perfectly, as do our strategic objectives for growth and social responsibility. The Bain team has offered guidance and resources to scale our impact and to help us to achieve our goals. One of these goals was to become classified as a Certified B Corporation. While many companies are highly ethical and aspire to do great things in the communities they serve, the B Impact Assessment (BIA) channels intention into action. Through this framework, we’ve identified social and environmental gaps and delivered against specific initiatives. We’re humbled to be included in the company of other B Corp organizations.
Behind-the-Scenes Stakeholder Work
We want to share some behind-the-scenes work that helps capture and organize our mission-driven orientation into a productive force for community good.
Board and Management
We are all aligned at every level: By tying goals to specific impact metrics, our management team is aligned, accountable, and motivated to deliver. We are proud to say that as a health care company we do not tie financial goals to practice goals. We believe this tension in dentistry can create unhealthy friction points in the patient experience. Instead, with impact metrics, we can drive and measure success through quality outcomes, which ultimately lead to excellence in the patient experience. The team sets goals, tracks progress against them, and reviews impact at each board meeting. These impact outcomes have included our diversity, equity and inclusion goals; annual improvement of our BIA score; and delivering patient dental health outcomes.
Environment
We are always committed to a sustainable environment and have taken numerous precautions over the years that back up this commitment. An example of this is that we switched to waterless machinery in 2019; this system not only reduces water and sewage consumption but also runs a low RPM, making it more energy-efficient.
Community
Since its inception, Rodeo Dental has championed the power of the LEAP leadership development program, hosted at UCLA. Historically, the company has sponsored more than 50 academically curious students from Brownsville to participate. Many of these students had never traveled on a plane before this event. In 2020, during the pandemic, with the help and leadership of our community partners, we sent over 1,000 students to LEAP’s virtual program. Students attended from all over Texas and Louisiana.
We also partner with Dentists Who Care, a nonprofit that provides free dental services up to $1,000 for uninsured individuals without any coverage, including Medicaid or Medicare.
Workforce
To solicit great feedback from our workforce and ensure great consideration for their safety at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we launched pulse surveys and held weekly town halls. We used these as opportunities to communicate safety protocols, remote work and return to work considerations, vaccine education, and much more. As a result, the staff infection rate maintained at 1% or lower.
Customers
Rodeo has served 250,000 patients over the past two years, and a whopping 89% of patients say they would refer us to a family member!
The combination of our core values in action and the intentional progress driven in partnership with Bain Capital Double Impact and the BIA has led us to become the first Dental Support Organization certified as a B Corp. As pioneers in our field, we now have the responsibility to lead others on this journey, and we welcome the challenge.
B The Change gathers and shares the voices from within the movement of people using business as a force for good and the community of Certified B Corporations. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the nonprofit B Lab.
