Meet Dr. Brittany Link, an orthodontist, entrepreneur, and soon-to-be mom
Some mornings Brittany Link tours a daycare and then drives straight to the office to see patients. She is eight months pregnant. She is still working associate days at two practices. And she is one day a week into her own startup in Beverly Hills, where the entire staff, at the moment, is her.
Anyone would forgive her for waiting a year on that last part. She did not want to.
“There’s never going to be a perfect time,” she said, “so you may as well just go for it while you can.”
Brittany grew up in Cleveland and went east for college, to Brown, where she played four years of volleyball while majoring in biology and assumed for a while that she was headed to medical school. What changed her mind was not a class or a mentor. It was the question of what she wanted her actual days to look like, and how much control she wanted over them. Dentistry had a clearer path to running her own practice, so she took a one-year master’s in biotechnology and applied to dental school at the University of Pennsylvania, still figuring she would come out a general dentist.
Halfway through Penn, rotations put her in the orthodontic department alongside the residents, and the thing she had not thought about in years came back: her own time in braces, and how much it had mattered to her as a kid. “I really felt like it would be amazing to be a part of that transformation for people,” she said. She applied to residency that year. She matched at Case Western Reserve, and the welcome email opened with “Hi ladies.” Her entire entering class was women. Five of them. “That was just a shock. I was so taken aback,” she said. “But it was an amazing experience, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.” Those four classmates are still among her closest friends.
Residency ended and the class scattered. She and her husband, who is from Philadelphia, sat down and picked a city together. They wanted warmer weather and somewhere with enough going on to build a life around, and they landed on Los Angeles. Two and a half years in Santa Monica later, neither of them has any interest in moving.
Her first years out were deliberately broad. Three to four days a week at a private practice, one day a week at a DSO. She wanted to see both models from the inside before she committed to building her own version of one. “I got a good sense of different types of practice models,” she said, “and what I would want in my own, and what I liked and didn’t like.” At the two-year mark she had seen enough. Link Orthodontics opened this year in Beverly Hills, subleasing space from a periodontist, running one day a week with a handful of patients on the books. The location came down to where the sublease opportunities were, which is a practical reason rather than a strategic one, though it is not a bad place to plant a flag. Beverly Hills has some very established names in it and is considerably less saturated than plenty of other corners of Southern California.
The clinical side she is comfortable with. Everything else is the learning curve. “I’m so used to just doing the clinical,” she said. “The financial side has been a whole learning curve, figuring out the contracts and the autopay and insurance.”
The practice is not the only thing she has built this year, though, and the other one started with something she noticed in the chair.
Some patients wanted a bigger role in their own treatment. Not just showing up every eight weeks to be told how it was going, but something to do in between. Her husband works for a healthcare data company and writes code, so she brought him the idea and the feature list and he built it.
Braces Tracker is on the App Store now. Patients photograph their progress, log elastic wear hours, track expander turns, pick up tips, and earn small awards for staying consistent. It has done well enough that the two of them are already working on an aligner version. “I did see that some patients specifically are looking for something extra,” she said, “something more, to feel like they’re an active part of their journey.”
The patient she keeps coming back to was a phase-one. A young girl who was embarrassed to smile and getting bullied at school over the position of her front teeth, so shy on the first visit that she would not smile for the exam while her mom explained the situation.
“Seeing the patient’s personality blossom as their teeth were aligned, to see their true personality come forward, that was incredible,” she said. “To be able to make that kind of a difference in a young kiddo’s life. We really do have the ability to change people’s lives, especially with these young kids.”
That sense of what the career gives back is also, more or less directly, why she is a PCSO member.
Several faculty at Case Western were deeply involved at the regional and AAO levels, and they made a habit of telling residents how they got there. That did more than any recruitment pitch. “They made it seem accessible,” she said. “If you just reach out, if you try for a couple positions, eventually you’re going to get something and they’ll find a space for you. There’s not this huge barrier to entry.” She thinks that matters most for the residents who assume leadership is for other people, and who never apply because they are not sure they are the right person for the job.
She was in the GLAO during residency. When she moved west she reached out to the PCSO almost immediately, partly to meet other orthodontists in a brand new city and partly out of something closer to obligation. “This career has provided so much for me and so much fulfillment,” she said, “that I feel like I need to give back by becoming part of organized orthodontics, to help shape the future of our career.” She has been on the Membership and Communications Committee since.
Why does Brittany think every new orthodontist should become a member of the PCSO? She has heard the version where someone says they are skipping membership this year because they are not going to annual session, and her answer is short. It is so much more than that.
Everything else in her life is currently on hold or in motion. The beach volleyball is on hold, which is challenging, because the Santa Monica courts are right there and she played in a couple of leagues until the pregnancy put a stop to it. She fully intends to be back.
Ask what she is genuinely bad at and she does not reach for a humble-brag. “Prioritizing my time,” she said. “I want to do everything for everyone, and it’s hard for me to say no, and then I overschedule myself.” The other one is staying up late, convinced she can get one or two more things done, which means sleep is always what loses. She is working on both. As of early September there is a new and fairly non-negotiable reason to.
The baby is due the fourth, so WOCON is not happening this year for reasons everyone will understand. Vancouver is on the calendar. So is the March meeting in San Francisco.
Find her at link-orthodontics.com, and find Braces Tracker on the App Store or at bracestracker.com.