Hero Practice Services: Pediatric Medicaid DSO

Most families who walk into a Hero-supported clinic never see the word "Hero." They see Adventure Dental, Vision & Orthodontics — a kid-friendly storefront where a child can get teeth cleaned, eyes checked, and braces evaluated in a single visit, with Medicaid welcomed at the front desk. Behind that storefront sits one of the more distinctive platforms in American dentistry: a support organization built specifically around pediatric Medicaid care. For investors, operators, and vendors alike, Hero Practice Services is a useful case study in how far a focused, mission-aligned niche can scale.

Overview

Hero Practice Services (HPS) is a dental support organization (DSO) headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, that provides practice management services to a network of pediatric dental, vision, and orthodontic clinics concentrated on underserved and Medicaid-insured children.¹ Like most DSOs, Hero does not itself deliver clinical care; it supplies the administrative backbone — scheduling, billing, marketing, IT, compliance, and recruiting — while licensed clinicians treat patients through affiliated professional entities. That structure places Hero in the same broad category as platforms TMR profiles elsewhere, but its patient mix sets it apart. Where most large groups chase commercially insured adults, Hero built its model around a population many private practices avoid: low-income children covered by state Medicaid programs. The closest publicly comparable platform is Benevis, the support organization behind the Medicaid-focused Kool Smiles brand.

Hero's defining feature is integration. Its supported offices deliver dental care, vision exams and eyewear, and orthodontics under one roof, so a working parent can address multiple needs for one or more children in a single trip.¹ That co-location is unusual in dentistry and is the platform's primary differentiator. Patients encounter the clinics under the Adventure Dental, Vision & Orthodontics brand (and close naming variants) rather than the Hero corporate name — a deliberate separation between the consumer-facing brand and the management company behind it.¹ Hero reports that its supported offices have collectively helped more than one million children over the platform's history, a cumulative company-reported figure rather than a point-in-time patient count.¹

Company Snapshot

• Headquarters: Colorado Springs, Colorado.¹
• Founded: 2006 (the predecessor management company was formed that year; the founder opened his first clinical practice in 2004).¹
• Founder: Dr. Ronald Montano, DDS, a University of Colorado School of Dentistry graduate who built the platform from a single Colorado Springs office.¹
• Senior leadership: Industry reporting and the company's public materials indicate a professional management team has run day-to-day operations under private-equity ownership; specific executive titles change over time and should be confirmed against current company sources before relying on them.²
• Care model: Integrated pediatric dental, vision, and orthodontic services co-located under the Adventure Dental, Vision & Orthodontics brand, with Medicaid accepted across the network.¹
• Private-equity sponsor: Silver Oak Services Partners acquired the company in February 2015, with the founders retaining significant ownership stakes at the time.³
• Estimated footprint: Roughly 35 dental offices and about 25 co-located vision practices — on the order of 60 sites of care — based on secondary trade estimates rather than an audited disclosure.⁴
• Geography: Multi-state, weighted toward the central and western United States, with confirmed clinical presence in Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and the Mid-Atlantic.¹
• Growth model: A mix of de novo openings and selective acquisitions, the standard playbook for a private-equity-backed DSO.³

Footprint Analysis

Estimating Hero's footprint requires care, because the company does not publish an audited office count and the available figures come from different points in time. At the time of Silver Oak's 2015 investment, the platform was described as operating more than 20 locations nationwide and serving over 1,000 patients per day, focused on children under the age of 19.³ By the early 2020s, secondary M&A trade reporting placed the network at approximately 35 dental offices and 25 co-located vision practices — meaning the count depends heavily on whether you count dental offices, vision practices, or combined sites of care.⁴ These are reasonable working estimates, but they are not company-audited, and the true current number may differ.

The distinction between "offices," "practices," and "supported brands" matters here. Hero is one management company supporting one principal patient-facing brand family (Adventure), delivered across dozens of physical locations; it is not a holding company for many separate consumer brands. Counting a co-located dental-and-vision site as one location or two will swing any headcount materially, which is why ranges are more honest than a single number.

Geographically, the network is concentrated rather than evenly national. Hero's own materials and clinician profiles point to a "Western" operating region spanning Colorado (including Colorado Springs, Greeley, and the Denver metro) and Kansas (Wichita), with additional confirmed presence in New Mexico (Albuquerque and Santa Fe) and the Mid-Atlantic around Maryland and Washington, D.C.¹ The platform's early expansion also touched the Pacific Northwest.¹ That clustering is consistent with a Medicaid-focused strategy: the model works best where pediatric Medicaid enrollment is dense and where a given state's dental fee schedule supports sustainable, high-volume operations. Readers should treat any state-by-state list as directional, since the company does not publish a current location directory in full.

Growth History

Hero's roots trace to 2004, when Dr. Ronald Montano opened his first pediatric dental practice in Colorado Springs; the management company that became Hero was formed in 2006 with the explicit goal of expanding dental access for pediatric Medicaid patients.¹ The integration that defines the platform today was added in stages: vision care arrived in 2007 when an optometric partner joined, orthodontics was layered into several practices in 2008, an in-house vision lab opened in 2009 (and expanded in 2011), and surgical operatories for pediatric patients requiring general anesthesia were added in 2013.¹

Geographic growth followed the same incremental path. The first offices outside Colorado Springs opened in Greeley, Colorado, and Wichita, Kansas, in 2007, followed by expansion into the Spokane, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. markets in 2008.¹ Four additional East Coast locations were acquired in 2014, and a wave of de novo practices opened across Colorado and Kansas in 2016.¹

The pivotal financial milestone came in February 2015, when Silver Oak Services Partners — a lower-middle-market private equity firm focused on service businesses — led an investment in the platform in partnership with the founders and management, who retained significant ownership stakes.³ Silver Oak described the company at the time as a national provider of pediatric dental, orthodontic, and vision practice management services serving more than 1,000 patients per day across 20-plus locations.³ Industry trade press independently corroborates the February 2015 Silver Oak acquisition and the company's Colorado Springs base.²

Ownership beyond 2015 is where precision matters and public disclosure thins out. Private-equity directories and Silver Oak's own portfolio materials continued to associate the company with Silver Oak into the mid-2020s.⁵ Separately, M&A trade reporting and deal-watcher commentary indicated that a sale or recapitalization process was underway in the 2023–2024 window, reportedly advised by an investment bank.⁴ TMR has seen secondary references attributing current majority ownership to another firm, but those could not be corroborated against primary sources and are therefore not asserted here. The defensible statement is this: Silver Oak Services Partners has been the confirmed institutional sponsor since February 2015,³ and a subsequent ownership transition has been reported but not confirmed as completed by primary sources.⁴

Competitive Landscape

Hero occupies a narrow but well-defined niche, and its most direct peer is Benevis, the support organization behind Kool Smiles, which is similarly built around Medicaid-eligible pediatric dental care at scale. Both platforms live and die by Medicaid reimbursement, high patient throughput, and disciplined operations in markets that many private practices decline to serve. On the orthodontic side, Smile Doctors is the national reference point — a far larger, ortho-specialized DSO whose scale illustrates how a single specialty can be consolidated, though its commercial and self-pay mix differs from Hero's Medicaid orientation.

Against the broader DSO field, Hero is a specialist rather than a generalist. Diversified national platforms such as Aspen Dental and PDS Health operate at a different order of magnitude and serve predominantly adult, commercially insured and self-pay patients. Hero competes with those giants only indirectly; its real competition is the patchwork of regional pediatric-Medicaid dental groups, community health centers, and independent practices that serve the same families. The integrated dental-plus-vision-plus-orthodontics format is Hero's clearest point of differentiation — few competitors of any size combine all three under one roof for this population.

Market Position

Hero's position rests on a simple but durable thesis: pediatric Medicaid dentistry is high in demand, underserved by private practices, and federally underpinned. Medicaid's Early and Periodic Screening, Diagnostic and Treatment (EPSDT) mandate requires states to cover dental services for enrolled children, which creates steady, policy-backed demand. Yet many private dentists limit Medicaid participation because reimbursement rates trail commercial insurance and administrative requirements — prior authorizations for orthodontics, eligibility checks, documentation — are heavier. A platform that builds genuine operational competence around those requirements can serve a population others avoid and capture stable volume in the process.³

That same Medicaid concentration is the platform's principal risk, and any investor should weigh it directly rather than around it. Revenue is closely tied to state-level fee schedules and policy decisions, so reimbursement changes, budget pressures, or shifts in EPSDT and orthodontic medical-necessity criteria flow straight to the top line. The pediatric Medicaid dental segment has also historically drawn regulatory and payer scrutiny around utilization and medical necessity, which raises the importance of clinical governance, documentation, and compliance infrastructure. None of this is unique to Hero — it is structural to the niche — but it does mean diligence should focus on payer mix concentration by state, authorization and denial trends, and the strength of the compliance function. The flip side is a defensible position: scale, an integrated multi-specialty format, and built-up Medicaid operating expertise are not quickly replicated, which is precisely what has made the platform attractive to successive financial sponsors.³

TMR Take: Hero Practice Services is a focused bet on a niche most of the industry steps around: pediatric Medicaid care, delivered through an unusual dental-vision-orthodontics integration. For operators, the lesson is that a clearly defined population and a genuinely differentiated service format can build a durable, hard-to-copy platform — but only if the compliance and revenue-cycle machinery is strong enough to handle Medicaid's administrative load at volume. For vendors, Hero is a high-throughput, multi-specialty account whose priorities skew toward efficiency, eligibility and authorization workflows, and tools that make low-reimbursement visits economical; generic adult-practice positioning will not resonate. For investors, the platform offers policy-backed demand and a defensible specialty, balanced against real, concentrated exposure to state Medicaid reimbursement and the regulatory scrutiny that follows this segment. The single most important diligence item is ownership and reimbursement clarity: confirm the current owner of record directly, since a post-2015 transition has been reported but not verified here, and stress-test the platform against state-by-state Medicaid rate and policy risk before underwriting growth.

Sources

1. Hero Practice Services — company website.

2. Group Dentistry Now — dental industry trade press.

3. Silver Oak Services Partners — private equity sponsor announcement.

4. Mergermarket — healthcare M&A trade reporting.

5. PrivateEquityInfo — private equity ownership directory.