Author’s Biography

Nicholas: My name is Nicolas and today I’m joined by Dr. Angela Leung, dentist and a practice owner in South San Francisco. Dr. Leung, thanks for being here.

Dr. Angela Leung: Thank you for inviting me.

Nicholas: To start this simple, what’s the quick story of how you got into dentistry.

Dr. Angela Leung: Well, you know we were trying to pick a profession that would work with the lifestyle that, I would like to work in. And dentistry was good fit. And then I came out pretty much practicing as a full-time endodontist. Now over the years, dentistry has change and evolved implants became really huge in the early two-thousand. so I was, certainly one of the first early adopters as an endodontist getting into implant dentistry. So fascinating in terms of how implants work. I combined that into my practice. Our practice has evolved from a full-time endo practice to a full-time endo implant practice. Obviously we work a lot with a general dentists. There’s such high demand and as the world has changed, full large implants became really one of the mainstreams. So the practice have morphed into now a full-time or full-service practice but the emphasis is obviously on dental implants, as well as still… endodontics, as that’s my original specialty

Nicholas: I would to touch more on one of your biggest accomplishments and the remote dental VA’s. Could you say more about that?

Dr. Angela Leung: In the dental practices in the US, I think a lot of us have issues with staffing. In fact it’s more like an epidemic in the US. So it’s tough because the staff demand higher and higher wages but they really don’t have the skillsets to really substantiate what they’re asking for. And so most of the dental practices that I know throughout the country really have problems getting good staff members that are knowledgeable. So I’m no exception. I was in the same category as other dentists. I was determined to find a solution because I was experience the same stress level, the same chaos as everybody else. And they can remote in and they can serve as my front desk talking to patients live, from speaking to them, scheduling their appointments, collecting payments, whatever a typical front desk can do. In addition, I added the use of robotics. And we use robotics, same concept where we can get any assistance remote in. They could be in the back office, in the operators with me. Creating plans, doing period charting, doing anything a typical dental assistant can do administratively. So it really revolutionized, really, and transformed my practice from, my God, there’s high turnovers, people are not showing up for work, to now I have no stress. I have dependable staff. The office pretty much runs automatically All the way to helping them, building insurances and helping them understand how their particular policy works. it sucks up a lot of our time, to be honest. But that’s the US system and that’s just how things are at this stage.