Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Maria Kunstadter · The TeleDentists · September 2026
Here is the map Keira promised. Your businesses page names the organizations you wholesale to: telehealth companies, healthcare payors, hospitals and ERs, urgent care, retail, and other. So this page takes those groups, adds the places that hold a population with no dentist on site, and for each one shows who owns the decision and roughly how many exist. It maps the US market around The TeleDentists, not The TeleDentists. Two of these groups have no honest public count and the page says so rather than showing a number. There is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Where the decision sits
Seven rows. They overlap in places and they do not sum. Counts are banded on purpose. Where a row counts registrations rather than organizations, the note under the number says so.
Hospitals with an emergency department
Every hospital that runs an ED sees patients arrive with dental pain and nowhere to send them. The federal listing of Medicare-participating hospitals marks which ones offer emergency services: about 4,500 of 5,419 do. Inside that number are roughly 2,800 acute care hospitals and 1,300 critical access hospitals, which buy very differently, plus about 140 veterans and military hospitals that buy through federal procurement and are not a commercial target at all. A critical access hospital decides locally. A hospital inside a large system usually does not.
Who decides: the ED medical director owns the pathway, and the director of patient experience owns the score that a long wait with no resolution damages. Care management owns what happens at discharge, which is where a dental referral either exists or does not.
Who signs it off: the value analysis committee at a system hospital, with IT and legal review. At a critical access or independent hospital the administrator can often decide alone, which makes that sub-group the faster half of this row.
About 4,500
hospitals reporting emergency services in the current federal listing of 5,419 Medicare-participating hospitals. Hospitals outside that program are not in the figure.
Urgent care
The other front door for the same patient, and a shorter decision than a hospital. This row splits in two. Independent and small-group sites decide in one conversation with an owner. The large chains decide once, centrally, and then roll a service out across hundreds of locations, so one yes is worth a very different amount depending on which half you are in.
Who decides: at an independent site, the owner or the medical director, often the same person. At a chain, the chief medical officer or the VP of clinical services owns the care model, and the VP of operations owns whether it can actually run in the room.
About 11,400
urgent care center registrations, July 2026 federal provider file. One operator registers many sites, so the company count is far below this.
Retail
Retail is not a market of stores, it is a market of a few head offices. About 62,000 community and retail pharmacy locations are registered nationally, but the decision to add a clinical service sits centrally, and no public register lists the chains themselves. So this row is built by name from a short list, not counted, and the store number is only there to show what a single yes reaches.
Who decides: the head of health or clinical services at the chain, with the merchandising or category lead who owns the service line commercially. Their pharmacy operations lead decides whether it works at the counter.
About 62,000
community and retail pharmacy locations registered, July 2026. Locations, not chains. The buying unit is the chain and there is no public count of those.
Healthcare payors and dental carriers
The group with the largest single contracts and the longest path to one. No federal register enumerates commercial health and dental carriers, so nobody can give you an honest national number for this row, and this page will not invent one. What is countable is the demand behind it, which is the next row.
Who decides: the product owner for dental, usually a VP or director of dental products, with network strategy alongside. On the Medicare Advantage side the supplemental benefits lead owns whether a dental service is added to next year's filing, which fixes the timing of that conversation to the annual bid cycle rather than to your pipeline.
No public count
no federal register counts commercial health and dental carriers, so this row is built by name rather than counted.
Employers and the plans they already file
This is the countable version of the payer market. US employers report their benefit plans annually, and the filings are public. In the most recent complete year, about 58,000 employers filed a plan that includes a dental benefit and about 61,000 filed a health plan. Roughly 8,300 of the dental filers have a thousand or more people on the plan. That is not a market, it is a list, and it is a list you can work by name.
Who decides: the VP of total rewards or the director of benefits. In practice the shortlist is curated earlier by the benefits consultant or broker, so the broker is often the real first call. Procurement joins late and only on the large ones.
About 58,000
employers filing a dental benefit plan, 2024 filings, deduplicated by employer. Plans of roughly 100 people and up file this return, so this is the large-employer universe and not every US employer.
Telehealth companies
The shortest route to volume, because they already own the patient relationship and the technology, and dental is usually the gap in their specialty list. There is no register of telehealth companies, so this row cannot be counted honestly and is built by name instead. It is also the row where the conversation is about a catalog gap rather than a budget, which is a different pitch from every other row on this page.
Who decides: the head of partnerships or the head of product, whoever owns the specialty catalog. The chief medical officer signs off the clinical side and usually cannot start the conversation.
No public count
no register of telehealth companies exists, so this row is built by name rather than counted.
Places holding a population with no dentist on site
The group your own page files under other, and the one a public register can actually name for you. Federally qualified health centers, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities and campus health services all hold a population that cannot easily get to a dental chair, and each has a named clinical owner rather than a committee. They buy on access and on risk, not on price, and they are the fastest of these rows to reach by name. Assisted living is the largest part of this group and the one nobody can size nationally, because it is licensed state by state with no federal register.
Who decides: at a health center, the chief dental officer where one exists, otherwise the chief medical officer or the CEO. In senior living, the VP of clinical services or the regional director of health services. On campus, the director of student health.
About 26,000
federally certified sites: about 14,400 skilled nursing, 11,200 health center sites, 1,100 campus health. Assisted living sits on top of this and has no federal count. Certified counts, deliberately conservative: a registration-based count of skilled nursing runs more than double this.
The same map by state
The ten states with the most hospitals reporting emergency services, with the two other front-door rows cut the same way. The columns are different registers and do not sum across. The certified rows are left out of this table because they are counted nationally, not by site.
State Hospitals with an ED Urgent care registrations Retail pharmacy locations
Texas3901,2025,542
California2841,2135,655
Florida1841,1594,756
Illinois1752861,695
New York1604835,753
Pennsylvania1484062,773
Ohio1393251,991
Wisconsin12557846
Oklahoma121138898
Michigan1196692,905

Where the openings are

1
The payer row has no count, but the demand behind it is a named list. Nobody can count the carriers. Everybody can count the employers, because they file. About 8,300 employers with a thousand or more people on a dental plan is small enough to work by name inside a year, and an employer asking its carrier for a service is a shorter route into that carrier than a cold approach to the carrier itself.
2
Hospitals and urgent care are one motion, not two. About 16,000 sites between them, all facing the same moment: a patient in front of them with a dental complaint and no dentist to hand them to. The words that work are the same in both. The difference is who signs, and the independent half of each row signs far faster than the system half, which is the split worth building the sequence around.
3
The last row is the one a register can name for you today. Health centers, skilled nursing and campus health are federally listed by name and address, and each has a single clinical owner rather than a value analysis committee. Assisted living has to be built state by state, which is slower but not hard. It is a different sale from the payer sale, and it is the one that can start this month. The practical question is which of these rows you want a repeatable engine for first, because the motions do not transfer.
Built from public federal registries, pulled 19 September 2026 (hospitals, health centers and skilled nursing) and July 2026 (clinic and pharmacy registrations), with employer benefit plan filings for the most recent complete year. Counts are banded deliberately. Two kinds of number appear here and they are not the same thing: a certified count comes from a federal program that inspects and lists the facility, and a registration count comes from a provider register where one operator can hold many records, so it runs high. Where both existed, the certified number was used. The employer rows count sponsors of plans large enough to file a return, not every US employer. The map is US only. A segment with no credible public number says so rather than showing one.
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