Owning dental practices

Thank you, Joseph, for posting the summary by state.

I presume you're asking whether corporate entities which are not owned by dentists can own dental practices. As others have said, rules vary by state. Currently 34 states have some form of "corporate practice of medicine" doctrine (CPOM) which prohibits or limits ownership of medical practices by non-licensed practitioners. Some states are stricter, some less so, and states vary on which forms of licensed professionals are covered by the doctrine (e.g., occupational therapists, psychologists etc.).

The common "workaround" is to split out the non-clinical ops into a separate entity that serves as a "management" or "service" organization (a DSO in the dental world, MSO in the medical world) and charges the clinical entity for all the back office services it provides (e.g., operations, non-clinical staff, marketing, billing, recruiting, leasing space, equipment purchasing/maintenance...). In many states the charges can't be a percentage of revenue/profit so you can't just hide the ball. In these states people tend to charge cost-plus or a fixed fee that can be adjusted yearly. If you're doing this really cleanly, people will often get an FMV analysis from a specialist to support the fact that the fees from the practice to the DSO are actually FMV for what's provided.

You can see a 50 state summary of which states have CPOM doctrines here:
https://ndlegis.gov/assembly/###-###-#### /testimony/SHUMSER###-###-#### 3125-F-TRAYNOR_PAT.pdf
And here: https://www.permithealth.com/post/the-corporate-practice-of-medicine-50-state-guide