Dr. Kim's Story

The Beginning

I wasn't born and raised in the US, but I started studying there in high school. My dental career also began in New York. My first patients were American, and my first residency was at Brookdale Hospital in Brooklyn.

The patients I saw at both NYU and Brookdale had something in common: they were looking for affordable dentistry.

Because both Brookdale and NYU were largely insurance-based environments, I was able to see up close how difficult it can be for many patients to actually receive dental care. I saw how often people delayed treatment. I saw how long they had to wait, and how fragile continuity of care could be. Sometimes a case would even fall apart simply because the student or resident graduated before treatment was completed.

The Idea

Those experiences made me feel strongly that dental care needs to be more affordable.

At the same time, residency also taught me something equally important: dentistry is still a business, and making it affordable at any cost is not sustainable in the long run.

That is the idea behind lofi dental.

My goal is to use the advantages of Korea's lower cost structure to create a model where patients from the U.S. who struggle to find high-quality, reasonably priced care can come to Korea for treatment. Korea's overall cost of living is lower than that of the U.S., which makes it possible to meet the expectations of American patients while also keeping the practice profitable enough to allow for reinvestment and long-term growth.