How Dr. Gunjan Dhir Made Dental Implants Affordable in Rural Texas

A prosthodontist who rebuilt the cost of tooth replacement not by cutting corners, but by rethinking how specialist implant care reaches the people who need it.

For most of dentistry's history, a dental implant has been the treatment patients wanted and couldn't have. The tooth replacement that looks, bites, and lasts like the real thing has also been the one with the highest price tag and the longest drive usually to a specialist in a big city. Dr. Gunjan Dhir, a prosthodontist and co-founder of Altius Dental, spent years watching that gap play out chairside: patients who needed implants, understood why they mattered, and simply could not reach them. Her response was to build a way for them to. This is how she did it and why "affordable" in her hands doesn't mean "lesser."

Meet Dr. Gunjan Dhir

Dr. Gunjan Dhir is a prosthodontist the dental specialist trained specifically in replacing and restoring teeth. With her co-founder Dr. Gaurav Puri, she created Smile Savers Dental Solutions, a program that brings implant and full-mouth restoration within financial reach of rural and underserved Texas communities. It runs through the texas practices, and it lowers cost through bundled treatment, built-in financing, and local delivery without handing the planning to anyone less than a specialist.

Learn more about Dr. Gunjan Dhir through her Altius Dental Leadership Profile, LinkedIn Profile

Why Dr. Gunjan Dhir Believes Dental Implants Should Be Affordable

Three things put implants beyond most rural patients, and they compound each other. The first is the sticker price implants involve surgery, custom restorations, and often preliminary work like extractions or grafting, each usually billed as its own line item. The second is distance: specialist-level implant care has historically clustered in metro areas, so a patient in a small Texas town faced a two-hour drive on top of the bill. The third is the hidden cost of getting it wrong an implant placed without proper planning can fail or need redoing, turning one expense into two.

Dr. Gunjan Dhir's insight was that all three are fixable at once, and that a prosthodontist is exactly the person to fix them.

How Dr. Gunjan Dhir's Prosthodontic Expertise Makes Implants More Affordable

Prosthodontics is the specialty devoted to rebuilding and replacing teeth, and its defining habit is planning backward from the finished result deciding how the final teeth should look, meet, and bite, then placing the implants to support that outcome. It's called restoration  first planning, and it's normally the hallmark of high-end reconstructive work.

That approach turns out to be a cost strategy as much as a clinical one. When the end result is planned before the first implant goes in, the case is far more likely to be right the first time which is the single biggest way to keep implant treatment from becoming a repeat expense. Dr. Dhir's conviction was that this specialist-grade planning shouldn't be reserved for patients who can afford a downtown prosthodontist. Building it into an affordable, accessible program was the whole point.

Working day by day with patients, understanding their needs, and realizing that we didn't always have an affordable solution for their restoration made me feel that we needed to create a program that could help patients regain their confidence through their smiles.

How Dr. Gunjan Dhir Reduced the Cost of Dental Implants

Smile Savers lowers the real number a patient pays in a few concrete ways, and each one traces back to a decision Dr. Dhir and Dr. Puri made deliberately.

Steps are bundled instead of billed piecemeal. Treatment plans frequently fold in work patients pay for separately elsewhere necessary extractions, for instance so there are fewer surprise line items and a clearer total from the start.

Financing is built in, not an afterthought. Flexible payment options are part of how the program is structured, so the cost can be spread out rather than demanded up front. For a family choosing between a mortgage payment and a mouth they can chew with, that structure is often the deciding factor.

The care comes to the community. Because the program runs through Altius practices already embedded in local towns, patients get specialist-planned implant care close to home. Removing the drive to a metro specialist removes a real cost in gas, in lost work hours, in the appointments people skip because the trip is too far.

Same-day teeth, where it's genuinely safe. For qualified patients, the program offers same-day teeth but only when bone and gum health support it, confirmed at the exam. That honesty is part of the value: a specialist-run program won't sell a same-day result it can't safely deliver, which protects patients from paying twice for a shortcut that fails.

Dr. Gunjan Dhir's Philosophy: Affordable Does not Mean Lower Quality

The distinction that matters most is the one patients can not see from a price list. Plenty of low-cost implant offers come from what the trade calls implant mills high volume, marketing led, planned for throughput rather than outcome. Smile Savers was built the opposite way: designed by prosthodontists, planned restoration first, and held to a standard Dr. Dhir sets and audits across the network.

Day-to-day treatment is delivered by the dentists at each local practice, but to the specialist-defined standard the founders built and Dr. Dhir personally oversees the clinical benchmarks and hand-picks the dentists who join. Affordability and specialist-level quality were designed to travel together into every town the program reaches, rather than one being traded for the other.

Dr. Gunjan Dhir's Journey Across Texas Dentistry

The credibility behind the program is not theoretical. Dr. Gunjan Dhir earned her Bachelor of Dental Surgery in 2002, completed U.S. prosthodontics training in 2005, and by 2009 had opened her first Texas practice. In the years since, she's had a hand in starting or acquiring more than 45+ practices across the state an unusually wide view of what dependable care looks like from one community to the next. When she and Dr. Gaurav Puri co-founded Altius Dental in 2016, and later built Smile Savers on top of it, they were scaling something they'd already proven one patient at a time.

Today, Dr. Gunjan Dhir serves as Chief Dental Officer of Altius Dental, where she oversees clinical quality, treatment standards, dentist recruitment, and continuing education across the organization's growing network of practices. Her leadership helps ensure that every Smile Savers patient receives treatment guided by the same restoration-first philosophy on which the program was founded.

If you're weighing dental implants

If cost or distance has kept you from replacing a missing or failing tooth, the practical next step is an exam because a real recommendation depends on your bone, your gums, and your goals, not a template. Ask about the Smile Savers program at your nearest Altius Dental practice, and you'll get a plan built the way Dr. Dhir intended: specialist-planned, honestly scoped, and structured so the price is something you can actually work with.