By TRACEY DRURY
tdrury@bizjournals.com | 716-541-1609

Patients who pre-paid for dental services at the shuttered Allcare Dental & Dentures filed a new class-action lawsuit.

The lawsuit was filed Feb. 7 in the Western District of New York by Cleveland-based law firm Spangenberg Shibley & Liber. The lawsuit - including patients in Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Wisconsin - will attempt to help aggrieved customers get pre-payments back.

More than a million patients in a dozen states were affected when the company shut down without notice in early January. In the weeks since, the company has slowly begun to finalize agreements with providers in multiple cities to take custody of dental records of the patients. In many cases, work was pre-paid or in progress at the time of the shutdown.

The company, owned by Dr. Robert Bates and David Pennington, opened in Erie, Pa., in 2001 and moved operations to Clarence in 2005. At the time of the shutdown, the company blamed a failed financing plan.

Paul Cambria, a partner in Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria LLP, is one of several attorneys working with the company. He is focusing on the investigations that have begun in multiple states by attorneys general, including the office of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

According to Cambria's office, a bankruptcy filing is being handled by William Savino, senior partner at Damon Morey LLP and chairman of its business litigation and insolvency department. Savino was unavailable for comment at press time.

This week, the company also finalized a transfer of Buffalo patient records to Amherst Dentistry. The practice, located on Transit Road in East Amherst, can be reached at 716-636-1399 or amherstdentistrypc.com.

The local patient-load includes 3,500 individuals, according to Dr. Pavel Tsur-Tsar, who runs Amherst Dentistry with Dr. Alex Podebryi. The two have begun going through all the local records and are preparing to send out letters offering free evaluations to Allcare patients.

Tsur-Tsar was quick to point out the practice stepped up as a courtesy to local patients, but in no way assumes any financial liability related to Allcare. That means patients who pre-paid Allcare but did not yet receive care will have to make additional payments if they choose to have it performed at Amherst Dentistry.

"We decided to accept the records and we're willing to do free evaluations on the patients that are in treatment or the patients who need treatment, but we don't assume any financial responsibility for the accounts they had with Allcare," he said. "They're starting out fresh with us."

Tsur-Tsar says he has no idea how many of those 3,500 patients might end up patients of Amherst Dentistry.

"It's been a month since somebody stepped up in Buffalo, and my guess is many of those patients may have located a provider already. There's no way of knowing how many will come see us," he said. "But we do have room and we can accommodate them. That's why we stepped up and decided to do something about it."

Patients were told via the website (allcareinfo.com) they could also pursue care at other dentists at their own cost. Access to existing dental records was extremely limited, as the company lost access to much of its customer contact information when its technology vendor refused to turn over the information until it was paid for services rendered.

Allcare also posted records-request instructions on the website Feb. 6, enabling patients nationwide to mail a request to a Clarence post office box to retrieve their records.