Dental Operations
Treatment Planning Is the Practice: Why the Paperwork Is Not an Afterthought
Every practice I have worked in has had the same quiet leak. Not the schedule, not the hygiene column, not collections. The treatment plan.…
Dental Operations · IT & Security · Compliance
Byron Emmons
"Build the conditions for staff and practices to perform, then get out of the way." A Chief Operations Officer who builds dental practices from a clean greenfield — back office, IT, and security — then hands back systems that run without me. A decade across greenfield build-outs, DSO operations, Open Dental and AbelDent, Windows Server and FortiGate, and PHIPA/PIPEDA compliance.
Three subjects, done properly
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Each subject has its own home. Pick the one you came for — the writing stays focused and easy to follow.
Dental Operations
3 articlesGreenfield build-outs, back-office systems, billing and payroll, patient financing, and the PHIPA/PIPEDA compliance that keeps it defensible — the operational machine behind a practice that runs itself.
ExploreIT & Security
2 articlesOpen Dental and AbelDent, Windows Server and FortiGate, self-hosted infrastructure, and the practical hardening that protects a practice and its patient data.
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Latest writing
Dental Operations
Getting Extra Scaling Units Approved Under the CDCP: What Works and What Does Not
Extra scaling units are one of the most common preauthorization requests I see, and one of the most commonly rejected. The frustrating part is…
IT & Security
Open Dental on Ubuntu: MariaDB Server with Windows Workstations
Open Dental is a Windows application. Its database is MySQL/MariaDB, which meansthere is no reason the server half has to be Windows. Putting it…
IT & Security
Running the CDA’s ITRANS Claims Director on Ubuntu 26.04 with .NET 10
Most dental practices in Canada submit insurance claims through ITRANS, the Canadian Dental Association’s claims network. The desktop piece of that is ITRANS2 Claims…
Dental Operations
How I Build a Dental Practice Back Office from a Clean Greenfield
Most practices don’t get designed. They accumulate. A software subscription here, a filing habitthere, a firewall someone set up in 2016 and nobody has…
Career
Recent experience
Jan 2025 – Jul 2026
Aurora, Ontario, Canada · On-site
Chief Operations Officer
Aurora Borealis DentistryJun 2024 – Feb 2025
Kingston, Ontario, Canada · On-site
Chief Operations Officer
Cataraqui Woods DentistryDec 2023 – May 2024
On-site
Practice Manager
dentalcorpLet’s talk operations, IT, or systems
From greenfield practice build-outs to hardening legacy infrastructure — if it needs a system, I can build it.
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