Institute For The Future

Take your (dental) health on the road

Regular readers will know how much I like a small, random story that illustrates some of the principles we talk about at IFTF: for example, anytime, anyplace health; new business models; the power of "people like me" in health care decisions. I haven't seen one in awhile, so I was tickled by this blog post: "Bringing your healthcare practice to the people." It highlights Dr. Roemer, who opened a dental practice inside the Iowa 80 Truckstop, at Exit 284 of Interstate 80.

Blogger Eric Brody lauds Dr. Roemer—as do I—for his creativity and capacity to innovate in deciding to offer on-site dental care to the estimated 35,000 people, mostly long-haul truckers, who flow through the world’s largest truck stop every week. Roemer used to have a traditional dental practice in Davenport, based on building a loyal client base of individuals and families who come in regularly for teeth cleaning and other dental care. With his new business model, he usually sees a patient once for an immediate problem and then never again. A CNN piece on Roemer quotes him:

 

Truckers aren't going to say to me, "I'll be back for a cleaning on September 23 at 2 in the afternoon." They can't plan where they're going to be. I make patient files for the people who come in, but I know that I'll probably never have a reason to open the files after they walk out the door. These are mostly one-time patients.

 

What led Roemer to the brilliant idea that he should open a dental office at a truckstop? Turns out he had noticed that many of the calls he got in response to the Yellow Pages ad he ran for his traditional practice came from the phone booth at the Iowa 8 Truckstop. He realized that he could bring his services to these customers, and has found that word-of-mouth among the trucker community has kept him in business.