A podcast for dental practice owners should not feel like a marketing campaign. It should feel like a real conversation with someone who has sat where you sit. That is the thing we kept looking for in the existing podcast landscape, and the thing we could not find. So we built Between Patients to fill that gap.
Between Patients is an invitation-only interview series for private dental practice owners. The format is short. The selection is small. The agenda is honest. Across one season we record around 12 conversations, and not one of them is a sales pitch. The host is Moiz Khurram, fourth generation in a family of dental practice owners. The producer is SelenicAI. The voice of the show is editorial, not commercial.
This piece explains why the show exists, who it is for, and how a practice owner becomes a guest.
The show that started because nobody asks practice owners how they actually do it
Most podcasts in dentistry talk to vendors, consultants, and academics. They are not bad podcasts. They are just not aimed at the person who signs the lease, makes the rota, and chases the diary. Practice owners are the most underserved voice in the industry because they are also the busiest one. They get interviewed by trade press when something newsworthy happens at their practice, and that is usually about it.
The questions practice owners actually want to compare notes on are the ones that do not show up in headlines. How do you decide when to put a new chair in. How do you handle a long-serving associate who has stopped pulling their weight. How do you stop the front desk from booking the wrong patient into the wrong gap. How do you keep yourself from burning out in year seven. None of those questions have a clean answer in a thirty-second clip. All of them get a better one when a practice owner has thirty minutes with someone who is not selling to them.
So we built a show that asks those questions. The premise is that practice owners learn the most from other practice owners, and that the conversations they would benefit from hearing are not the ones that are easy to record. We are trying to record them.
Where Between Patients came from
The lineage matters because it shapes the lens. The host did not arrive at this show as a marketer or a media operator. He arrived at it from inside the practice.
Moiz Khurram is the fourth generation of dental practice owners in his family. His great-grandfather, Dr. Khizar Hayat, ran two practices. His grandfather, Dr. Muhammad Saleem Akhter, built Makkah Dental Clinic and ran it from 1993 to 2018 before selling. Moiz grew up around the chair, the appointment book, and the conversations practice owners have when nobody else is in the room. The questions that came up at the dinner table were not about technique. They were about people, money, time, and trust. The same questions every owner-operator runs into in their first year, and never stops running into.
Between Patients exists because those questions deserve a real record. We are interested in the way practice owners actually run their practices, not the way the industry says they should. We covered the fuller story of how four generations of dentistry shaped this show in this companion piece.
What invitation-only actually means
Most podcasts grow by booking anyone with a microphone and a topic. Between Patients does not. We hand-select a small circle of practice owners each season, and we are clear about it on the show page.
That word, invitation-only, carries some weight. So let us be specific about what it does and does not mean.
It does mean we read every application personally. We respond to every application. We respond within 48 hours. If we think your story fits an upcoming episode, we get on a quick call to confirm a few details, and we book a recording slot straight after. If we do not think the fit is right, we say so, briefly and honestly, and we tell you why. We do not leave applications unanswered.
It does not mean a guest pays to be on. There is no fee. There is no upsell. There is no obligation to become a SelenicAI customer afterwards. Some guests will end up working with us. Most will not. The show is editorially independent of SelenicAI, and the editorial decision about whether a story belongs in a season is separate from any commercial relationship.
What we look for in a guest is covered in detail in our guest criteria post. The short version is that we look for owners with a story worth telling, who are willing to be honest on tape, and whose practice has built something specific that other owners can learn from. We are not interested in PR voices. We are interested in operational reality.
The thirty minutes
The format is deliberate. We record between 35 and 45 minutes. We publish around 30. That window is long enough to land a real story and short enough that you can finish an episode on the drive home.
There are no scripted questions sent ahead. We read about your practice before the call, and we let the conversation go where it goes. If you do not want to talk about something on tape, we do not push. If a part of the conversation lands as a moment we want to surface, we surface it. You get editorial control on anything that goes out. You see the edit before it publishes. Anything you do not want in the final cut gets cut. No negotiation.
After the recording, you get a full set of assets within a 10 day turnaround. That set includes the full-length video episode, three to five short-form clips, branded quote graphics, the audio episode for distribution, and a written feature page on the podcast site. Full commercial use, no watermarks, no revocation. We pulled apart what each of those assets actually becomes for your practice in this deliverables breakdown.
The point of the format is to make saying yes easy. Thirty minutes recorded is a smaller commitment than most CPD events. You walk away with a year of usable content from a single sitting. The thirty minutes is yours.
How a practice owner becomes a guest
If you have read this far, you are probably wondering what the application looks like. It is three short steps. It takes about three minutes. We ask for the practice name, the city or region, how long you have owned the practice, how many treatment rooms you run, what you would change about how your practice runs today, and how you heard about the show. That is roughly it.
Once the application lands, three things happen. Within 48 hours we read it and reply. If the fit looks right for an upcoming episode, we confirm a few details and book a recording slot. After the recording, the 10 day asset turnaround begins, and you walk away with the full pack.
You can listen to the show trailer on the Between Patients landing page. It is 43 seconds. Season One is launching soon and the working title is The Foundation. We are taking applications for the next set of episodes now.
If your practice has a story worth telling, the door is open. By invitation, no fee, no agenda. The application is on the landing page, and the form is three short steps. We will respond within 48 hours either way.
The conversations practice owners need to hear are the ones that do not normally get recorded. We are trying to record them. If yours is one of them, we would like to know.
A short note on why the format is the way it is
A few practice owners who have looked at the apply page have written back to ask why the show is structured this way. Why is the format only 30 minutes. Why is the selection invitation-only rather than open. Why is the production budget covered entirely by the show. Those questions deserve direct answers, so here they are.
The 30-minute format is shorter than most dental podcasts because we wanted a podcast a practice owner would actually finish. The average listener completion rate on a 90-minute podcast episode is around 40%. The average completion rate on a 30-minute episode is closer to 75%. Cutting the length in half roughly doubles the chance that the part of your story that matters most actually gets heard.
The invitation-only structure is not about exclusivity for its own sake. It is about editorial standards. A show that books any guest with a topic ends up with a back catalogue that drifts toward sales pitches and surface-level interviews. A show that hand-selects a small circle each season can hold the editorial bar through the whole season. The trade-off is that we say no to more applications than we say yes to, and we are honest about that.
The production budget being covered by the show, not the guest, is a deliberate choice that flips the usual pay-to-play model in dental media. Pay-to-play tends to surface guests who can afford to be on the show, not necessarily guests whose stories most need recording. Inverting the model surfaces a different set of stories. That is the set we are interested in.
If any of the above lands as familiar, the application is here. It takes about three minutes and we will reply within 48 hours, either way.
