MARK MURPHY, DDS, FAGD
BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY
AND THE DSM MARKET
I
n his book the Blue Ocean
Strategy, Chan Kim illuminates
the advantages of selling in an
uncontested space. eBay did
just that with the creation of
online auctions. Uber recreated
the Taxi Cab experience and
enhanced the value proposition,
so we no longer had to carry
money, wait long or tip. Chick-
fil-A’s secret sauce is not on their
chicken, it’s in the customer
service they lead the industry
with. Dental Sleep Medicine is an
uncontested space on steroids.
With over 30 million untreated
apneics in the US alone, it would
take 30 years with our current
capacity to treat just half those
folks (assumes the additional 50%
utilize PAP therapy). But I get
ahead of myself. medical space! We are a very
small part of the economy,
health care, and dentistry.
The good/bad news is, with
$1 billion sales to patients,
at approximately $2,000 per
device, we are only providing
Oral Appliance Therapy to
500,000 apneics annually. If just
half of the remaining 30 million
with the disease sought our
care, the 5,000 or so dentists
providing therapy would spend
the next 30 years treating
today’s patient population! And
this uncontested market space
is actually growing. As baby
boomers age and obesity rates
expand, the estimation is, we
will add millions more to the
unmet need.
According to Frost and Sullivan
as well as others, the US custom
Oral Appliance Medical Device
market is approximately $1
billion. Before we get too
excited, the aggregate US dental
market is just over $120 billion. What is the solution to the
enormity of this health care
crisis? Although the likely
solution will have many moving
parts and pieces, there are
currently initiatives in place
to work in the direction of a
solution.
The math puts OAT at just under
1% of the dental market and
0.034% of the $18 trillion-dollar
The two major initiatives in
place are improving Access
and Efficiency.
*Obesity trends in the US since 2004. Every 5 years
they have had to expand the category definitions
to include the increase in percent of the population
that is obese by 5% in some states.
Educating more providers is
underway with the AADSM’s
Mastery Program. The goal is
to increase access to care by
training Qualified and Diplomate
dentists. There is no shortage of
other education in DSM, from
their track (adding 400-500 per
year) to all-inclusive offerings
like Dental Sleep Solutions, DS3
(training, software, billing and
support) to University mini-
residencies. Other live and even
online programs abound.
If all the 150,000 estimated GP
Dentists in the US did just one
device per week, we could
treat the unmet need in two
years (150,000 x 1 per week x
50 weeks = 7,500,000 devices).
However, that is highly unlikely.
Even doubling the number of us
providing care would increase
access to 1 million. A good small
step, but far from enough.