Series 9 of 'Top 50 Oral Healthcare Opportunities': KEEN's Refined Management Model Builds a Competitive Moat for Its Chain Dental Service Brand

KPMG China’s Top 50 Private Dental Healthcare Enterprises is part of the KPMG China Healthcare 50 series. KPMG China has long maintained close attention to the development trends of China’s healthcare industry. Through this public welfare initiative in the dental sector, it aims to identify outstanding benchmark enterprises in the dental healthcare market, facilitate the healthy growth of more high-quality private dental healthcare providers, jointly explore new trends for the future development of China’s dental healthcare market from a global perspective, and support the transformation and rise of China’s dental healthcare industry.

To support the “Top 50 Private Dental Healthcare Enterprises in China” initiative, KPMG China has specially curated and launched the “Dental Top 50 Opportunities” series. This series focuses on companies across the upstream and downstream segments of the dental healthcare industry supply chain, exploring topics such as the current market environment, investment hotspots, and industrial transformation, to provide insights into the future development trends of the dental healthcare sector.

In this article, we share insights from the “50 Opportunities in Dentistry” interview series in a Q&A format. In this session, Yu Yu, Associate Director of Transaction Strategy and Financing Advisory at KPMG China, speaks with Qi Qingguo, President of Ke’en Dental Group.

Margin:With nearly two decades of professional background in dentistry, you have successfully transitioned from a dental specialist to an executive managing a chain of dental hospitals. Compared to administrators with purely managerial backgrounds, your approach and perspective on business operations are distinct. Please share your insights and experiences during this transition from medical expert to management professional, as well as the impact this has had on the development of your hospital chain.

Qi Qingguo:In fact, it is common throughout the dental healthcare industry for managers to have a medical background. Outsiders generally believe that physicians may not be the best candidates for managing chain dental institutions, citing doubts about their competency and growth potential in such roles. If asked whether one can seamlessly switch between the dual roles of physician and manager, the answer would be yes; however, those who truly understand the nuances and successfully practice this balance are as rare as phoenix feathers and unicorn horns.

At its core, the issue stems from fundamental differences in mindset between administrators and physicians. To maximize the potential of the physician community, it is essential to approach problems from their perspective.

The professional nature of dentists positions them as a critical touchpoint for direct patient engagement, granting them inherent advantages in fostering patient loyalty and shaping patient perception. This enables them to focus more intently on the medical service itself, adhering to clinical diagnostic reasoning and operational techniques tailored to specific issues. By looking beyond superficial symptoms to uncover the root causes hidden beneath, they can deliver precise, targeted treatments.

For example, dental restorations often aim to achieve a shade that closely matches the natural teeth for aesthetic harmony. Consequently, attention must be focused on micro-aesthetic parameters such as tooth color, shape, and texture. Dentists are required to precisely position and meticulously execute each step to ensure a well-sealed restoration with a bright, aesthetically pleasing appearance. Undoubtedly, this is a fundamental clinical competency that every excellent dentist must possess.

However, applying such an approach to management would naturally create unnecessary complications. The role of a manager demands acute and nuanced industry awareness, as well as high-level strategic foresight, to drive the achievement of strategic goals for chain organizations from the top down. Their energy is distributed across key priorities, including strategy formulation, operational processes, talent development, and service design. The ability to integrate and allocate resources effectively is a critical factor that enables outstanding managers to distinguish themselves from their peers.

From Physician to Manager: The Role Changes, but the “Customer-Centric” Service Mission Remains Unchanged. Although this transition necessitates significant personal adjustment, managers with a medical background possess the following two key characteristics:

Beyond standardized procedures, managers with medical backgrounds possess their own criteria for evaluating the quality of healthcare services and the competence of physicians. This expertise prevents practitioners from cutting corners and serves as a professional foundation to support high-quality dental care.

Unlike physicians, who view the achievement of operational goals as rooted in their clinical labor, managers often pursue these goals through management philosophies and processes they personally endorse. Clearly, a cognitive gap exists between managers and physicians; if managers lack an understanding of medical practice, the operational strategies they take pride in may fail to resonate with physicians. Managers with a medical background are better positioned to empathize with physicians, which helps build consensus and supports the hospital in achieving its operational objectives.

In addition to these two major features empowering hospitals to achieve their operational goals, some managers with a medical background can also draw on foreign experience that aligns with local hospital practices by studying various dental clinics in different countries and regions, thereby leveraging external insights for their own benefit.

Margin:In recent years, Keen Dental has implemented a refined management model, establishing new operational roles such as Executive Dean and Operations Director, which has enhanced the company’s operational efficiency. Could you please share the successful experiences of Keen Dental’s refined management model?

Qi Qingguo:As the dental healthcare industry matures and its earlier growth dividends gradually fade, every leading dental service brand must now consider how to fortify its competitive moat through refined management capabilities and establish a clearer, more stable, replicable, and controllable profit model. Drawing on years of deep expertise in the dental healthcare sector, Keen Dental has developed a refined management model tailored precisely to its own business operations and capabilities, thereby achieving improved operational efficiency, cost savings, and enhanced quality of medical care.

Keen’s refined management philosophy centers on integrating the entire service chain of dental care, fundamentally eliminating inefficiencies and waste during service delivery, and thereby reducing the recurrence of issues through root cause analysis.

The so-called "business chain" refers to a complete medical service process comprising online consultations, front-desk reception and triage, treatment planning by specialist assistants, fee communication, clinical diagnosis and treatment by doctors and nurses, follow-up visits, and return visits. This integrated approach replaces the previous model where service links operated in isolation, thereby enabling the identification of high-growth operational mechanisms and the targeted remediation of gaps. Operational roles such as Executive Director and Operations Manager are established to enhance end-to-end collaboration between clinical staff (doctors and nurses) and administrative functions, preventing patient attrition due to loopholes in the business chain. Specifically, these loopholes refer to situations where a hospital fails to contact patients after an initial treatment to schedule follow-up appointments. For instance, if a patient calls months later to inquire about returning for further care, but the hospital has no record of the prior interaction, the patient is effectively forgotten, resulting in a loss of trust. If patients fall through such cracks and become unresponsive, the hospital must invest additional time and resources to acquire new customers, representing a significant waste from the perspective of refined management.

If each business and operational role fulfills its responsibilities to enable closed-loop management of customer experience, Ke’en can leverage its deep insights into dental healthcare service users to deliver high-quality services across the entire business chain, thereby truly building customer stickiness and loyalty and establishing a “moat” for leading dental healthcare institutions.

Margin

Margin:On February 28, the sixth cohort of KEEN Education’s “Future Stars” training camp kicked off, launching a 62-day, world-class, practice-oriented systematic course meticulously designed to enhance clinical procedural skills for young dentists. Meanwhile, KEEN Education has rolled out an extensive library of free online courses, organizes more than 100 examinations throughout the year, and issues electronic course completion certificates to participants who pass the exams. What was the original intention behind establishing KEEN Education, and what impact has it had on the development of Keen Dental?

Qi Qingguo:The expansion of chain dental medical institutions is inseparable from the sustainable development of their physician workforce. Only outstanding dentists can uphold unified service philosophies and values, which requires chain organizations to mass-produce talent through internal training in order to secure a competitive advantage in talent acquisition amidst fierce competition. In light of this, Keen Dental has consistently persisted in its talent training initiatives by establishing the KEEN Education program to build a standardized medical service system, thereby breaking the curse of “chain without cohesion” that often plagues chain dental institutions.

Notably, up to 90% of Coen’s core medical technical staff are developed internally rather than recruited externally with high salaries, serving key hospital departments such as orthodontics and dental implants. Therefore, to ensure that physicians fully adhere to a standardized set of operational procedures upon joining, Coen Dental must address the inconsistencies in standardized clinical practices among young doctors arising from differences in their alma maters and faculty training, given that its core physician team is built primarily through campus recruitment.

This process cannot be achieved overnight; it requires Keen Dental to engage in forward-looking, systematic thinking, increase investment in basic teaching infrastructure, plan a phased implementation path, establish a long-term commitment to talent development, and continuously build core competitiveness, thereby laying a solid foundation for the cultivation of its physician team.

To implement standardized procedures at the individual physician level, KEEN Education provides newly hired doctors with daily simulation training and dedicated assessments through the phased intensive training program of the “Future Stars” Bootcamp. Doctors who pass the assessment are awarded a certificate, granting them the qualification to perform independent clinical operations at Keen Oral Hospital.

As the saying goes, only by strengthening the workforce of dentists, comprehensively improving their clinical proficiency, strictly controlling entry into oral healthcare services, and implementing standardized operational protocols can a long-term mechanism for medical quality management be established.

In addition, KEEN Education leverages its online platform to develop a series of structured training courses, empowering dentists to continuously acquire cutting-edge knowledge and cope with the rapid iteration of dental medical knowledge in the era of information explosion. While facilitating physicians’ proactive learning, the online platform also imposes continuing education requirements, using the number of completion certificates earned each year as a key reference for promotions to positions such as department head or hospital president. This mechanism drives physicians to master new knowledge, materials, and concepts, ensuring that Keen provides medical services that keep pace with the times.

Driven by a strong sense of mission in the service industry, Keen Dental is committed to shouldering multiple social responsibilities, including fostering the development of dental professionals, promoting the widespread availability of dental care services, and enhancing the quality of dental care. In the future, Keen Dental aims to provide support to grassroots dentists who are willing to engage with KEEN Education, at a lower cost.

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