In the context of dentistry, most of the challenges were in the time period of the fall of 2003, before the legislation came fully into effect in the health care sector, when there were multiple interpretations and a great amount of confusion in the system. As was mentioned, our members were being inundated with seminars on how to prepare for the implementation of the legislation. Some of our colleges went to great lengths to inform their members about how to best deal with the legislation.
Through this time period, we worked on the PARTs initiatives, especially to get the interpretation of implied consent into action, which calmed down the burden on the membership.
Beyond that, I would say that there has been some increased burden on individual offices, with respect to creating a privacy code, and an increased day-to-day burden on the practice of dentistry, when in fact the dentist-patient relationship was always enshrined in this protection of privacy.
So there certainly have been some consequences, but the PARTs initiative helped to ease things early in 2004.