Illinois dental licensure currently requires 48 hours of CE courses every three years. For the most current licensure information, contact the Illinois State Dental Society.
ISO Fall Meeting 2026
Maggiano's OakBrook- Friday, November 13th, 2026
Business Toolkit for Customized Practice Solutions
For our Fall 2026 meeting, the featured content seeks to enlighten ISO membership on practice finance and efficiency concepts. The world of finance collides with orthodontists in ways that can be intimidating and complex, requiring post-graduate business education for mastery of concepts and analytics that many practice owners confront commonly. Our speaker is an orthodontist who has gained expertise in the world of finance. The goals of his lecture are to share his business knowledge with his orthodontic colleagues.
Agenda:
7:30 - 8:15 REGISTRATION and BREAKFAST (Exhibit area)
8:15 - 8:30 Welcome Remarks and Announcements
8:30 - 10:00 Speaker session 1
10:00 - 10:30 BREAK (Vendor introductions, Exhibit time)
10:30 - 12:00 Speaker session 2:
12:00 - 12:15 Panel Discussion/ Questions
12:15 - 1:00 NETWORKING/ cocktails and light bites (Exhibit area)
Speaker:
Keith Nicholson , DDS, MS, MBA
Keith Nicholson , DDS, MS, MBA, is an orthodontist and published author who has been active in various domains of dentistry. He has owned a four-location private practice, served as part-time faculty,and earned an MBA in Finance from Wharton.
As a consultant, Keith is passionate about creating value for patients, teams, and practices. Leveraging his 15 years of clinical experience and his dynamic background, he partners with peers to unlock their potential and deliver customized business solutions. He applies data-driven strategies to streamline operations and optimize profitability while delivering excellent care. Additionally, Keith supports dentists and dental specialists with practice transitions as a consultant at PMA.
He enjoys spending time with family and friends, traveling, and coaching sports.
Lecture Title:
"Business Toolkit for Customized Practice Solutions"
Course Summary:
As providers, we face an increasingly complex professional landscape that demands more than clinical excellence. During our time together, we'll apply operations and finance principles to solve diverse business challenges. We'll reveal operational models to analyze workflows and identify schedule bottlenecks. These insights can be an ally for data-driven strategies to optimize operations and reduce patient pain points (e.g., wait time). We'll also illustrate frameworks to calculate the profitability of various services, providing insights for service mix and schedule design.
For finance strategy, the orthodontic industry is innovative and presents exciting opportunities for capital expenditures and new technologies, including indirect digital bonding (IDB) or remote monitoring. We'll show how financial forecasts can strengthen your decision-making about these critical practice investments. Additionally, CPAs provide standard services related to financial statements and taxes but we'll summarize other CPA services that can augment practice performance, such as ratio and liquidity analyses.
Lastly, we'll examine practice transitions, exploring both traditional (doctor-doctor) transactions and OSO sales. For OSO deals, the seller's proceeds are enveloped in much more than the sales price so we'll review various OSO structures. Since OSOs are often backed by private equity (PE), we'll describe PE's value creation levers and how profits are distributed among PE shareholders.
CDS Midwinter Meeting 2027-ISO Sponsored Lecture
Friday, February 26th 2027- 8:30-11:30am
Dr. Max Emmerling, DDS, MD, FACS Division of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery Cook County Health