SGA Dental Partners — 17 West (pre/post go-live) + 21 East (trailing 12-mo) — Data: Dental Intel, Mar 2024 – Mar 2026
Each point is the cross-office average at that many months before/after each office’s own go-live. Month 0 = go-live. Dashed horizontal lines show the before and after averages for each cohort. The ex-Stoner line removes the 2 Ohio satellite offices (SPS Stoner Arlington + Dublin, same doctor) — they’re operational outliers (one missing month + a persistent step-down) that drag the All-12 average down and don’t represent how surcharging landed at the other 10 offices.
Each row is one office. Left dot = 12-mo before go-live. Right dot = post go-live through Mar 2026. Red = declined, green = improved. The two Stoner offices (flagged) sit at the bottom.
Each dot is one office. Above the gray diagonal = improved. Below = declined.
| Office | Phase | Go-Live | Before | After | Δ pp | DI Location | Note |
|---|
Each row is one office, sorted high to low. Bar shows the trailing-12 value for the currently selected metric.
Trailing 12-month average = Apr 2025 through Mar 2026. 6 offices have no Dental Intel data — flagged in the notes column.
| Office | Patient CA% | Dollar CA% | New Pt CA% | DI Location | Note |
|---|
Surcharging = passing the credit card processing fee (typically 3%) along to the patient as a line-item at checkout when they pay by credit card. Patients paying by cash, check, ACH, or debit are not charged the fee. The rationale is to offset the merchant's cost of card acceptance. SGA turned on surcharging at 17 West Perio offices in three phases: Mar 2025, Apr 2025, and May 2025.
Dental Intel monthly export (Case acceptance data.csv), covering Mar 2024 – Mar 2026 (25 months).
Case Acceptance % (patient-level) — percent of patients with presented treatment who accepted treatment. Also available: Dollar Acceptance %, New Patient Acceptance %.
SGA canonical office names mapped to Dental Intel location names via SGA Location Mapping.xlsx plus pattern matching on DI location strings.
See the full research brief for the legal landscape (CA SB 478, TX), behavioral-economics literature (pain-of-paying, price salience), industry guidance (ADA/CDA/DMA), and recommended alternatives (cash discount framing, financing-first workflow, interchange-plus renegotiation).