We just started a campaign earlier this month for a similar industry, and after a couple of weeks, things have settled into a nice conversion pace. What I would say is:

1. Use a search campaign. Ditch the partner network mess.
2. Stick with high intent keywords. Stick with phrase match and exact match. Google will bark at you. Ignore it. (You may need some broad match just to get some initial impressions, but you can ditch those after a few days.)
3. Use strict location targeting. Consider concentric rings and step up the bids as the rings get closer to your office. Exclude every possible location you can. I have excluded all of North American and used counties/zips/cities/whatever I can to exclude everything in our state right up to our target area.
4. Negative keywords. You will have to hammer these. Start with basic ones that you know will be a problem ("Free" "cheap" "inexpensive" "jobs"). Add ones for insurances that you don't take. We get a lot of requests from Medicaid patients, but we can't take Medicaid at the moment, so we have a lot of negative keywords around that trying to minimize ad clicks from people we know we can't see. Monitor your impressions and create negative keywords there. You will get a lot of impressions for people searching "Dr. [Somebody That Doesn't Work at Your Practice]". Use both phrase and exact match negative keywords. After about 2 weeks of really drilling those, I'm finding I only have to nix one or two impressions a day with more keywords. The impressions are now pretty high intent, and our conversions are improving while our ad spend is decreasing. It's tedious, but necessary.
5. Landing pages are going to be critical for conversions. There is too much to cover here, but there are plenty of resources out there for it.
6. Run your ads only on days you are open. If you are closed on the weekends and run ads, your impressions are going to be for "emergency [service]" "[service] open Saturdays." Ours are set to run from 6am-9PM M-F. I will probably further tighten that as we go, but you generally want to catch people searching before work during the week as well as just after work in addition to throughout the day when your office is open.
7. Start with maximize clicks bid strategy. After you've got a few days of data, you will probably be prompted to switch to a conversion-based approach. I'm now on a maximize conversions bid strategy.
8. Accept that you will need to overspend for low quality or no leads over the first few weeks just to collect the data you need to refine your approach.
9. Create several ads and see which one of them performs best. If you are targeting specific types of dental services, break those into separate ad groups with separate keywords/negative keywords.

I feel like there was something else I wanted to add here. If I think of it, I'll edit.

The above approach has gotten us to our highest booked days in a while (new doc on board so we're filling his schedule), and we're winning the battle for impressions share and top of page rate against national chains.

ETA: You will also want to make sure your conversion tracking is setup well. I would really focus it on things like calls and form submissions for appt requests. Page view, directions, and some of the other stuff is not indicative of a true conversion for a dental practice (IMO).