🦷 This wiki covers dentistry only, and covers it completely. For the same structure in medicine, behavioral health, med spas, veterinary, and the rest of US healthcare, see our sibling reference, the MSO-PC Wiki.
What this site covers
Dentistry is where the management-company model was invented, litigated, legislated, and enforced first. In most states the person who owns the business legally cannot be the person who owns the practice — the corporate practice of dentistry doctrine — and in dentistry the rule is usually written directly into the practice act, sometimes with criminal penalties, occasionally with a registration regime aimed at DSOs by name. That single constraint produces the DSO structure, and the structure produces a long tail of consequences: two sets of books, one professional entity per state, a Delta Dental relationship per state, payer benefits capped per patient per year, and a banking setup no generalist bank understands. This wiki documents all of it, at four levels of depth:Start Here
Learn. Guided, sequential tutorials with a guaranteed outcome. Follow a fictional dental group from idea to first paid claim to first acquisition.
Guides
Do. Task recipes for a competent reader with a specific goal: form a dental PC, enroll with Delta, work a downgrade, register a DSO, buy a practice.
Concepts
Understand. The mental models and the why: the CPOD doctrine, fee-splitting, DSO economics, the dental payer landscape, where DSO profit actually lives.
Reference
Look up. Cited: 51 state CPOD pages, the dental case-law canon, the enforcement record, dental payer profiles, CDT and 837D anatomy.
Who this is for
How we source
Every legal claim on this site carries a citation to a primary source: a statute, a regulation, a court opinion, an agency release, or a payer’s own documentation. Case law gets full citations. Legislation gets bill numbers and effective dates. Where a rule is genuinely unsettled (and parts of CPOD are), we say so rather than manufacturing false precision.Who maintains the DSO-PC Wiki
The DSO-PC Wiki is a neutral resource maintained by Lemma, who builds dental-first banking for DSO groups. Lemma’s banking product is documented at docs.getlemma.com; the sibling reference for the rest of healthcare lives at mso.getlemma.com. See How we keep this current for our sourcing standards and how to report an error.Next
What is a DSO?
The five-minute orientation: two entities, one business, and the century-old doctrine that splits them.