GME Dental Professional Services runs Lean Six Sigma DMAIC on orthodontic and dental operations, led by a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in Healthcare. Most practitioners with the certification work inside hospital systems. Here it is applied to practices from solo through 50 locations, and every recommendation traces back to something found in your numbers.
We run Lean Six Sigma DMAIC on dental operations, the same discipline hospitals use to remove delay and error. Define what’s off, measure the current process, isolate what creates rework, redesign around what matters, document it. Every recommendation traces back to something we found in your numbers.
Lean Six Sigma came out of manufacturing and moved into healthcare because hospitals have the same challenge a dental group has: a process with handoffs, and a cost attached to every place a handoff drops. DMAIC is the sequence it runs on.
An owner was booked out weeks in advance and certain she needed more room to grow. Before she signed, we spent a week measuring the practice she already had.
Every dollar of it came down to the same two things: a standard, and one person who owns it. Three standards were built, one number each, reviewed every Friday. Her team was running all three on their own within 2 weeks.
Over the next 6 months the practice collected about $121,000 it had been leaving on the table, without adding a single new patient. The second location went on hold, because the first one finally worked the way she always thought it did.
Each of those is measurable, each has an owner-shaped hole in it, and each carries a number you can put on a page.
The certification matters less than where it gets applied. Most Lean Six Sigma practitioners in healthcare work inside hospital systems. Gretchen applies it to orthodontic and dental operations, across practices from solo through 50 locations, and every recommendation traces back to something found in the client’s numbers.
Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in Healthcare, applied inside dental and orthodontic practices rather than inside a hospital system. She built and ran practices on the operations side, designed the operating model behind a franchise-like orthodontic concept, spent four years taking practices to market as a sell-side broker, and since 2025 has run operational due diligence for buy-side clients of an investment banking firm.
Gretchen leads every engagement. Specialists join based on what the work needs.
A method for removing delay and error from a process, developed in manufacturing and adopted widely in hospitals. A dental practice is a process with handoffs, and every dropped handoff has a price: treatment accepted but never scheduled, a recall list nobody owns, a denied claim nobody works. Lean Six Sigma finds those and closes them in a way that holds.
Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control. Define names what is off, in dollars. Measure pulls the current process from the practice management system and from watching it run. Analyze isolates what creates rework. Improve redesigns around what matters. Control documents it and puts a cadence on it so the gain holds.
The Control step. Most improvement work ends at a recommendation, and the gain fades once attention moves elsewhere. Control means the standard is written, a named person owns it, and a number gets reviewed on a set day. GME also develops the client team to run it, so the system holds without GME in the room.
The method scales down. A solo practice has the same handoffs a group has, just fewer of them, and the same money sitting in unscheduled treatment and lapsed recall. What changes is the size of the build, not whether the sequence applies.
Gretchen M. Estapa holds a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt in Healthcare and leads every GME engagement personally, with specialists joining based on what the work needs. The certification is a healthcare one, and she applies it inside orthodontic and dental practices rather than inside a hospital system.
Usually with the Operational Diagnostic and Gap Assessment, starting at $7,400, which runs the define and measure steps and ranks what it finds. Where the gap is already clear and the timeline will not support a separate diagnostic phase, we scope the fix directly.
Tell us where the practice or the group stands. We will tell you what we would look at first, and whether there is enough in it to be worth the exercise.
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