I met Sandhya Suresh who found the site on one of the search engines. Sandhya happened to live by me. He's an Indian national living in the U.S. with his wife who works in IT. Back home. Sadhya has two endodontic clinics which he is running remotely from abroad. In the U.S., he's looking to study for the ADA Part I exam but also pursuing other business ventures that would yield shorter term income. It was great meeting Sandhya and hope to collaborate with him on ideas over the forseeable future. I encourage others to contact me or get involved and contact me directly (acgarcia21@yahoo.com) or through this website's forums to join the conversation.

As we all know or will find out, the road to practicing dentistry is a long one with little or know financial recompense until you finish the courses. In a world where bank loans are drying up, only a few of the potential wealth of medical resources available to Americans can make it through this thin passage. This site will continue to solicit and build on ideas of our own and from others.

One idea Sandhya introduced to me is that we as foreign trained dentists can invest in and manage a practice, do dental assisting and office management from day one. We just need to plan and find an opportunity. Still a daunting task but perhaps easier or in some situations more palatable than the path offered by the ADA. We all still need to feed families be they our own or sending money back to our parents back home.

The idea is that in some cases you or you with a group of business partners perhaps other foreign trained dentists buy into an established practice or build one from scratch. You handle all the risk of starting a new business and the tasks off building a turn key dental office. You hire U.S. dental grad who has passed the boards to do the work and start making appointments. Partner with the dentist to build the practice. The assumption here is that there are dentists out there that want to practice but are not looking to take on the hugh debt and other workload of starting a practice. I imagine you should go into things knowing the dentists goals - work a few years in a place or in it for the long run. Then, go out and markket the dental office. Decide on a fair split between you and the dentists. I imagine something more than 50-50 since you are taking all the risk. If you're living in a good dental school town, perhaps you can leverage the fact that there is supply out there.

If the dentist is not in it for the long run, perhaps you work out a transition plan. I'd suggest being transparent with the dentist and let he/she work out with you a plan to build up, transition to a replacement dentists, and exit strategy. Knowing ahead of time lets you manage the expectations of your customers, the patients, that you may be interchanging dentists but you are also a trained dentists making sure the quality of work is there even though you can't practice in the U.S.

Sandyha came up with a great idea and I plan to expand on it. Perhaps I may even implement it myself with my wife Melissa in our hometown outside of Philadelphia. I'll start by guaging the interest of dental graduates on craigslist.com.

This will be a living arcticle which I may ammend or add other related arcticles to over time. I've just been to Drupalcon and have learned a lot of new methods for enhancing the website. I'd love to hear from the people joinging. I've got over 60 folks signed up but not returning or participating. I'll need to work on that and make the site more accessible to you all / get the site more organized.