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Office Visit: Doing Dentistry in the Desert by Kyle Patton, Associate Editor, Dentaltown Magazine

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Office Visit: Doing Dentistry in the Desert

As a dentist, you spend most of your time at your practice. It's understandable that you might not get many opportunities to see what it's like in another doctor's office. That's why we bring you an "office visit" six times a year. It's a chance for you to meet with your peers, see their practices and hear their stories. This month we caught up with Dr. Trevor Lines, an Arizona dentist practicing great dentistry in the desert.


What path did you take to become a dentist? Dr. Lines: I come from a dental family: my father is a dual specialist—oral surgeon/orthodontist—as was one of my uncles. My other uncle is an orthodontist. They have all practiced together for more than 30 years. I decided to go to dental school and follow in their footsteps.

Regarding your practice, how is it laid out? What's the workflow like?
Dr. Lines: We have a 2000-square-foot facility with six fully equipped ops, three for hygiene and three for the doctor's side. It's a tight package and we work efficiently in it. We do not have a consult room, so all of our consultation is done in the operatories.

Office Highlights

What is your practice philosophy?
Dr. Lines: My practice philosophy can be summed up in two words: improve lives.

What do you do to help set the practice apart from others?
Dr. Lines: We create systems for everything. We have a system for answering the phones, a system for checking patients out, a lab system, and a system for tracking case acceptance and re-care. It goes on and on. What I have done is very little, aside from giving my team permission to write their own systems. If you want a team-driven practice, read Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink, and visit drawtoast.com. Apply what you learn and your team will set the practice apart.

Office Highlights Cont.

What are your favorite marketing techniques? How do you get the word out about your practice?
Dr. Lines: My favorite marketing technique is a three-pronged approach: direct mail, answering phones correctly, and having convenient hours of availability. If you do all three, you will easily see 100-plus new patients per month.

What do you think is the biggest problem dentists face today?
Dr. Lines: The biggest problem that dentists are facing today is a changing marketplace. The consumer of dental services needs convenient hours of operation, and patients are starting to demand it. As dentists, we have to make a paradigm shift from bankers' hours to pharmacists' hours—we have to get comfortable with shift work—and we have to provide a better user experience than the corporations that are taking over dentistry.

What is your patient philosophy?
Dr. Lines: We are here to serve the patients. It's written on the front door. Our goal is to provide every patient who walks in the door with predictable, long-term health. This means financial health as well as oral health—we never want a patient to be in a bad place financially for any dentistry that we do, so we work very hard to make sure patients can get healthy in every way and stay that way for a long time to come.

Staff Entertainment

What is your treatment philosophy?
Dr. Lines: Fast, efficient, and high quality. You don't have to sacrifice quality by cutting corners and we do not. The goal of every dentist should be to create an "autopilot" procedure flow that creates very predictable results. This is easy to do when you break your workflow down into steps and master each step within the process. High-quality CE will help you to know which steps you should include in your workflow and which you should not. Ten thousand hours will make the procedures themselves automatic.

What is the greatest advancement of change you have seen during your tenure as a dentist?
Dr. Lines: The greatest advancement that I have seen in dentistry is a trend toward more open hours. There is an enormous market of patients out there who don't go to the dentist because it is not convenient. In opening more hours, we are providing access to care for a much bigger slice of the population.

Looking ahead, what would you like to see dentistry do in terms of the way it operates as a profession in the next five to 10 years?
Dr. Lines: Right now, I see dentistry as broken. There is a disconnect between doing good and doing well, which makes the field ripe for disruption. I would like to see a change in dentistry that would align humanist values with professional success. Most dental offices are about the dentist or the corporations that own them. I would like to see dentistry become more and more about the patient.

Looking farther into the future, I would really like to see dentistry becoming demonetized and democratized through the use of robotics, 3D printing, probiotic therapies, and advancements in materials science, which will drive down the cost of dentistry for the patient. Farther into the future, I would like to see a new branch of dentistry develop—regenerative dentistry—that will replace biological structures that have succumbed to disease with new, healthy biological structures.

What is your favorite procedure?
Dr. Lines: I have learned to really love doing removable procedures—particularly maxillary dentures. People come in with a disability in function, health and esthetics, and I feel lucky to be able to provide them with a prosthetic solution that gives them predictable, long-term health and excellent esthetics within their means.

Top Products

Describe your most successful or rewarding experience in your professional life.
Dr. Lines: My most successful experiences in my career have all been helping phobic dental patients. We have had many, many patients who come to us in tears with fear, and leave with a healthy mouth and—most importantly—are able to keep coming back because they have overcome their fears through repeated, positive dental experiences.

What could you not practice without?
Dr. Lines: I wouldn't want to practice dentistry without my CEREC, Isolite, or Zeiss loupes with a light.

Office Equipment

Dr. Lines


Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
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