The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry

Ranked the #1 DSO Podcast!

Welcome to The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry!

Filling the Gaps: Leveraging AI to Optimize Dental Schedules and Patient Engagement.

Jeff Barsotti, CEO of MaxAssist returns to the show to discuss:

The importance of empowering front desk staff with the right tools and support
Market trends regarding patient scheduling and openings
Upcoming integrations, including a partnership with Mango Voice for enhanced telephony solutions & the new MaxAi

To learn more about MaxAssist or schedule a demo visit – https://getmaxassist.com/

Watch the MaxAi video – https://dso.pub/MaxAi

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MaxAssist DSO podcast transcript:

Welcome to the Group Dentistry Now Show, the voice of the DSO industry. Join us as we talk with industry leaders about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. With over 200 episodes and listeners in over 100 countries, we’re proud to be ranked the number one DSO podcast. For the latest DSO news, analysis and events, and to subscribe to our DSO Weekly e-newsletter, visit GroupDentistryNow.com. We hope you enjoyed today’s show.

Bill Neumann: Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now show. I am Bill Neumann, and thank you, everybody, for joining us, as always. I’m going to see an old friend that’s not very kind, a friend that I’ve known for a long time. How about that? Jeff Barsotti, CEO of Max Assist. Good to see you again, Jeff.

Jeff Barsotti: Likewise, Bill. Thank you. I think you meant to say an old-looking friend.

Bill Neumann: No, I did not. That is not what I meant at all. We both have gray hair and glasses, so we’ve known each other a while.

Jeff Barsotti: Now we have, yeah, you’re certainly correct there.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, and I think it’s probably good to maybe talk a little bit about your history in the industry and a little bit about Max Assist, because I’m sure some people know the relatively new name, but others may have known you from your days as Recall Max.

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, absolutely. So a little bit about me. I mean, I’ve been with MaxAssist now since the very, very beginning. So call it, geez, 14 years now. We started as a, you know, add on product for PM systems to really help their practices grow. Primarily in the very, very beginning, it was focused around hygiene schedules, making sure we could keep hygiene chairs full and unscheduled treatment. And we’ve since grown our feature sets over the years and evolved the brand as well, to your point. We were Recalmax previously, now Max Assist. It’s been a ride for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. 14 years, as I mentioned, with the company. I’ve been here since we earned our very first customer, and now we’re just over 4,000 clinics in North America. Um, yeah, I, I accept that humbly. I don’t take any of it for granted and it’s been a very, very fun ride. And I think, you know, part and parcel of what the name change and speaking into sort of how we’ve evolved the software over the years, what we were finding as of late, call it last fall, last summer was that the word recall was sort of narrowing. our ability to get our message out there, because even though we started as a recall optimization company, now that we’ve added more and more to the ecosystem, we wanted a name that sort of speaks to all the different things we can do to assist a dental practice to grow. And so hence, we shifted our company name to Max Assist last fall, so late 2024.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that’s great. That’s actually probably a really good lead in to, you make the name change, you were kind of pigeonholed to a degree, right? Everybody kind of thought recall and that’s all you do. Let’s talk about that ecosystem and everything that Max Assist does. That’s probably a great way to start things off.

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, sure. So I mean, up into call it this month, we’re just on the heels of a pretty significant release for our company or towards the end of this month, end of May. But I think now, you know, we touch a whole bunch of different areas of the practice. So we focus on unscheduled restorative treatment, filling doctors chairs, the hygiene program, as mentioned, cancellation, management and recovery. reputation management, we have an app for providers for communicating with patients from home, you know, so if they’re into post-op recovery needs or anything like that, we can accommodate that. We’ve got analytics for both the office manager and the DSO, so solo practice analytics as well as enterprise analytics that really help our clients drive performance no matter their size. And so, you know, over the years we’ve really expanded the different areas. We’ve got digital patient screening for patients, you know, if they’re into forms that would drop back into their PM system, save them time there. So yeah, it’s a little bit more than recall nowadays and that’s why we made the shift.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You’re doing a lot of things. And were a lot of those innovations driven by, you know, the customer’s needs? I mean, have you, did you start it out really focused on recall? And so why add all of these different solutions?

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, no, I think that’s a great question. Like we, we certainly listen to our, our customer base. I think we’ve had a lot of great ideas come from our existing clients. And, and I think that’s a wonderful thing. So as they have utilized the software over the years, you know, they’ve given us ideas related to the things that they feel take a little bit too much time away from them at the front desk or at the office management level. So that’s been a spark as well as like pre to post COVID. I mean, we saw the advent of, you know, a number of apps at the marketplace through that time period. And so you’ve got a little bit of competitive pressure on the one side and then you’ve got, you know, listening to our clients and the things that they’re interested in as well.

Bill Neumann: Sure. And you mentioned that this month you’ve got a pretty significant launch. Are we able to talk about that at all?

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, no, I’d be happy to. We’re super excited about it actually. So we, you know, this is the most significant release we’ve done as an organization since we started. So now coming up on 13 years in the marketplace and yeah, it’s coming with a brand new look. So, you know, anyone listening that’s used to sort of our current interface, our current ecosystem, the software, the desktop assistant is getting a complete facelift. And so we’re very much excited about that. The whole UI UX is changing significantly in a much more directive way. And then with that, we’re also launching a AI assistant that’s coming with the software itself. So that’s going to be a bit of a game changer for us. Not only will the software you know, find the opportunities that are available in your PM system, those that are outside of an automated messaging protocol. The AI itself is gonna look at your schedule, you know, today, next seven days, next 30 days, determine how many hygiene and restorative openings you have in your schedule, and then direct you to the patients that are most likely to book, because we have been tracking patient behavior of set practice as they work with us. So, you know, we’d like to think that the new Max Assistant and in part why we changed the name in anticipation of this particular launch is that you will truly have a personal assistant bolted to your front desk that will look at your schedule, plan your day, find you the best patients on top of all the automated messaging services we offer in the marketplace as well.

Bill Neumann: All right, let me see if I understand all this. So you’ve got a on-screen assistant. So that’s really, you’ve had that, but it’s redesigned. So the actual look and feel is going to be different. But then you also are using AI, which AI gets thrown around a lot. So it will diminish what it’s doing, but this is Max AI, right? Is that what you call it? Is it Max AI? Yeah, exactly. And so what it’s doing is it’s you’ve got holes in the schedule and it’s matching up patients that you currently have that would be the most likely to actually take that fill that hole.

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, I think so in two parts. Yeah. And I’m with you. AI is getting thrown around everywhere. I think a lot of the AI functionality that’s out there right now is focused on inbound communication with the use of bots, things like that. There’s a number of companies in the space that are doing things like that. We chose to focus our AI functionality more so on the information that we have. you know, being 10 years in the industry now and the rich data we have related to dental practices. So it does two things. The first thing that it does is it’s going to be reading the schedule of said practice. So one of the comments we used to get with the previous iteration is that even though we can provide all sorts of rich opportunities to the front desk. You know, it wasn’t directive in the sense that it was offering office managers and front desk folks a game plan for the day. Like so, for example, if I could bring you, you know, a thousand recall patients that are due today, how much of that do I actually need to work? How much of that is the messaging system going to offset for me and so forth? And so the first component of the AI is that by reading the schedule and determining how many openings you actually have, well, we will then direct that person at the front desk to how many contacts would be required just to fill those openings. So it’s not so open-ended anymore. And in fact, not only are we sort of looking at the behavior of said patient, which ones we could recommend to you, But we also understand how successful the person is at the front desk in terms of their outreach. How many contacts does it take to get a patient to book in their world? And so the software learns from the user and learns from the patient base and learns from the schedule to kind of perfect storm into, you know, what would be a daily planner, an AI assisted daily planner for folks. And so I guess in a way, our approach here has been that we’re using AI to empower people at the front desk, create connections between practice and patient, front desk and office management, and really provide as much insight as we can there with an AI sort of horsepower assistant at the front desk helping with that, if that makes sense.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it does. So I guess paint the picture of the way things typically would operate is you have these openings in the schedule and as somebody that’s doing the outreach, the person at the front desk or whoever it is, they really have to just know who to reach out to. Where do I start? Who do I reach out to first? Versus having this, you call it a proactive daily planner almost, right? Like this AI puts together these opportunities for you and kind of does a lot of that guesswork, I guess, or maybe AI work for that person so they don’t have to guess who to reach out to. They can just say, OK, based on what AI is telling me, this is where I start and I am going to have the most success with these people and go from there.

Jeff Barsotti: Exactly. So part of the sort of Max Assist job is that when we’re speaking specifically just about recommending patients to the front desk, we’re using our AI components to read patient files. So we know, for example, how many contacts it took to book them in. When were they last messaged? Do they have a history of canceling appointments? In a way, almost like a patient health score. So, I think you’re right, Bill. On one side, it’s a daily planner. You know, how do I take advantage of the opportunities in my practice? How much energy and effort do I need to put in to fill those openings? But then when you choose to do so, it’s gonna pull patients to you that have a much higher likelihood of booking with you. And I think, you know, for those that don’t know about us, we really offset the challenges that people find in their PM systems. you know, your Dendrix is your, you know, opens your Eaglesoft, things like that can be difficult for some users to use, right? They’re not guided in their day related to where to find the wins. And so, you know, I think we have a real advantage here of being able to tap into those systems with API partnerships and pull out all the potential wins for someone at the front desk and make it as easy as humanly possible to get them in. All on top of, you know, an automated messaging service, which is what 90% of our competition has out there. Like that stuff’s not new. Automated emails, automated text messages, things like that.

Bill Neumann: Right, right. So, you know, we’re on this topic, we’ve been talking a lot about, you know, the practices having openings and how to fill them and how Max AI and Max Assist can help with that. What are you seeing right now in the market with openings? Like, there’s a lot of questions about that. And so just so everybody knows, Max Assist is based in Canada, they have Canadian customers, they have customers here in the US. So you’re seeing, you know, maybe different things depending on geography, but what does it look like right now from a patient perspective? How are the practice, are there more holes in the schedule in general? What are you seeing?

Jeff Barsotti: Well, I would say not more holes, but what we tend to see in both countries actually. So we have offices in Canada as well as the United States. And when we link up to the servers of a dental practice, we tend to see on average, whether that practice is in Canada or the United States, about 35 percent of the patient base will be due or late for their hygiene needs. And that’s relatively consistent when we start with a dental practice. And it’s interesting. It can be rural. It can be metro. You know, oftentimes the size of the practice doesn’t even really influence that percentage. So, you know, if if you’re a solo owner, solo doctor out there and you’ve got a stable of call it 1500 active patients, 500 or so of those. are able to come back to your practice tomorrow related to their hygiene needs. So that is a very, very consistent number. And it’s interesting too, because I think a lot of our doctor owners out there think the best way to grow a practice is through the acquisition of new patients. When in fact, they’ve got an absolute goldmine of patients they’ve already earned in their charts. And so that tends to be our average on the hygiene side. And then from a restorative perspective, we tend to see in and around $400,000 or so of unscheduled restorative recommendations that haven’t been booked within the last 12 months. So when you put those two numbers together, Your average full-time doctor has about 600 grand worth of opportunity in their charts. Available chair time depends on the size of the practice, how many chairs they’re operating in. But I can tell you that the opportunity to grow practices is there in every single practice that we link up to.

Bill Neumann: That is interesting. And do you have thoughts on why organizations aren’t doing a better job at really tapping their existing patients? Is it the platform that they’re using? Is it the staff not necessarily being educated on how to actually do this? Are they too focused on new patient acquisition? Maybe it’s a little bit of everything.

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, kind of. I think it is a little bit of everything. I mean, to be fair to people who work front desk, we joke about it all the time, but most of the time they’re bringing a knife to a gunfight. I think PM systems, generally speaking, are well-designed to book patients, bill patients, work your imaging into there and so forth, but they are not well-designed to present opportunities to front desk in terms of where the winds are for hygiene and restorative. And so, yeah, part of it is not having the right tools for the job and not enough, potentially enough experience in said platform to actually make a dent in bringing that 35 percent downwards. And that’s why we exist. And so I think in order for people to succeed, they need to have the right tools for the job. And if you think about where most of the cool tech ends up in dentistry, it’s chair side. And so there’s very few apps built for office managers and front desk folks, the people that are running the show essentially and driving patients into the practice. There’s very few offerings for them. And I think that combined with an over-reliance on automated outreach. I think, you know, at least in the world I play in, the mantra is sort of set it and forget it. There’s this belief that patients don’t want to be interacted with anymore. And if you have, you know, automated text messages, emails, you have inbound AI, like that’s all you need to fill chairs. And, you know, we’ve been tracking the scheduling behavior of patients now for 13 years, including last year, 100 million messages sent out and how patients respond to those things. And while, you know, inbound AI and email and text can work really well for confirming appointments or scheduling new patients. Where it fails is in getting existing patients to book back. We only get about a 10% uptick industry-wide on patients receiving automated messages as a cue to come back to the practice, which means of that 35% we’re talking about, let’s say 500 patients per full-time provider, you know, you can count on 10% of those coming back because they were queued by an AI bot or an automated service. So that 90% of that opportunity is something that the front desk could participate in. And that’s kind of the origin story of Max Assist. It’s okay, how do we empower people to see that opportunity in connection and actually start bringing those patients back in the easiest way possible for them.

Bill Neumann: We’re gonna go a little off script here, which we talked about this before we got going. As we have this conversation, it just brings up some other thoughts. And you talked about bringing a knife to a gunfight, right? Either there’s just these front desk people just don’t, they probably are doing, first off, that’s not their only function, right? It’s not just to get patients to fill the schedule. They’re doing a lot of other things. but you may even have the right platform. But what about the onboarding process and the education? It’s not just, hey, here’s Max Assist and here’s your login and go for it. Talk a little bit about the onboarding process and the support that you provide there, because that’s super important. You can have the best software and best solutions, but if people don’t understand how to use it, it doesn’t really mean a whole heck of a lot.

Jeff Barsotti: No, you’re right. And I think our approach there is, well, it’s multifaceted. I think we still are a company that picks up the phone. And as CEO, this is something that’s been important to me since we started the thing. I think when software is failing, it can be a five alarm fire for dental practices. And so we’ve made the commitment to be readily available from a support and onboarding perspective. Our average call to pick up time is sub five minutes. 70% of our calls are picked up on first try. So we’re there for you. And we actually have a team of dental folks in-house. So we have close to 400 years worth of dental experience in our building. We hire dental assistants and admins and hygienists and so forth. So, I would argue that our knowledge of the dental space is really, really strong and our commitment to our clients, I think, is better than most. In terms of getting a client up to speed, we do do live training with that client where we host an educational session, pardon me, on how to get the basics of the software under wraps. And then we also provide each user with access to our, we call it the Max Assist Academy. And it’s an online learning environment where you can micro learn, take classes, you know, two, three minutes at a time and knowledge checks and learn different feature sets and things like that at your own pace. Once you go through the initial training, that usually takes anywhere between 45 minutes and an hour.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Yeah, that’s great. And that’s, it’s good to know. And I think that’s important. I hear from a lot of the groups out there that, you know, there’s some great solutions, but the support side of things can be really lacking. You know, there’s, and you’ve been, you’ve been working with groups of all sizes for a long time, because that’s one of the other challenges you have. companies that come in and are probably really well suited for a single practice. But when it comes to somebody that has multiple locations and especially from the analytics side of things, you talked about that at the beginning of the podcast, that it’s easy to get reporting on one location, but when you’re looking at it for 10 or 15 or 100, and then you want to look at that data in different ways or give access to that data at the practice level or at the region level or at the corporate level. Some platforms aren’t set up that way. Let’s talk a little bit about integrating phone systems. And I know that that’s something that you’re doing as well. Platforms like Mango Voice, for example.

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, so we’re super excited about that. We actually have an integration with Mango here coming in the next month. And that in part is just trying to streamline the services that a practice would require to succeed. And I kind of touched on it earlier in that sort of post COVID era where we’ve got, and let’s face it, it’s not just post COVID, like technology is evolving so quickly. And so what we’re starting to see is that there are so many apps out there for a dental office or a DSO to buy. And I feel like there’s a little bit of tech fatigue out there and tech sprawl happening where you know, they’re having to go and buy two and three and four solutions to end up with a holistic ecosystem that would work for their practice or their DSO. And so our approach here has been to sort of look at this from the perspective of because we map so much of a down office into our app and into our ecosystem, we can either build or start partnering with organizations where we can offer cost savings to our DSOs and our dental offices, rather than needing to go to said company directly. And so in this vein, our newest partnership and integration is with Mango Phone. So they’re a telephony organization, telecommunications. organization founded in the States, and they’ve got about 11,000 dental practices now. What they provide is, well, a number of things, but the one thing that we’re interested in partnering with early is their telephony Um, options, which would allow, um, you know, uh, a max assist user with some direct dial out options through the app itself versus having to go through a handset or something like that, which, which, you know, isn’t mind blowing in and of itself. But then I think where it becomes really compelling is on call in. So in call in, we can pop our app and actually provide. a ton of meaningful information to someone who’s receiving a call so that they’re better prepared for that interaction, including things like what’s going on with their family. You know, is there any outstanding collections? Are there things that they need to be aware of that they would have a very difficult time preparing for through their PM system? And so I think, you know, that’s kind of V1 with Mango. And then as we work our way down the track this coming calendar year, we can offer things like call sentiment. So whether or not the patient was happy, neutral, or sad during that conversation, we can summarize calls by way of transcription and actually keep those transcripts in MaxAssist and also sync them with the PM system. And there would be some AI functionality related to call answering and so forth that would come with that as well. And so Yeah, we’re just on the heels of that. We’re super excited. And, you know, I think the future is bright in partnering with a company like Mango, they have a great support team, very much there for their clients. And so we’re, we’re looking forward to what we can do together in terms of helping dental practices have more options under one umbrella.

Bill Neumann: So is that, I mean, you kind of talked a little bit about Mango and how that’s going to work with MaxAssist. If features like call pop and file pop, is that what you’re referring to or is that something different?

Jeff Barsotti: No, so that would be kind of like what we’re going to be going to market with is the ability for direct dial out, but also, you know, yeah, like when a call comes in, said user with the Mango integration would be able to pop MaxAssist. and see all sorts of information about that patient, which is a little bit more robust than some of the call pop options out there right now, because they’re not mapped to the PM system as deeply as we are. So we’re gonna be able to provide a lot of information that’s really helpful to somebody interacting with a patient in a matter of a second, so that they can get more done on said inbound call as well.

Bill Neumann: Right. That’s going to really personalize that patient experience. So that’s great. Let’s talk a little bit about, you know, as we kind of wrap things up here, how do you really see these tools evolving in the future? This is, I always try and say, take it, your crystal ball, because MaxAssist has really evolved over, since you and I have started, you know, our conversations, which have been, you know, gone, I think we have to go back to, first podcast we’ve done together. I think your father was on as well, right? So that was a little while back. So Recall Max has really evolved since then. But any thoughts on the future of the platform and just how it’s going to continue to evolve over time?

Jeff Barsotti: Yeah, no, thanks for that. I think one of the things that we’re aiming to do here is continue to invest in partners and in development of features that truly maximizes the connection, as I mentioned earlier, between you know, patient and practice. That to me is never going out of style. I think, you know, we need to be using technology in the forefront of what’s cool out there to forge connection more so than we ever have. And that includes also the connection between, you know, somebody working a front desk and their manager, managers to their regionals, regionals to their executives in a DSO capacity. I think, you know, that’s kind of the underlying current of what we’re doing because we know it works and we know that there’s a lot of opportunity that can be had when that’s the why behind, you know, why we’re approaching dentistry or why a practice would approach their patient base. I think I touched on it earlier, part and parcel with that would be, you know, Continuing to develop our app, provide functionality that would allow them to streamline the number of apps that said clinic would need to succeed. And so, you know, in this coming year, we’re looking at RCM capabilities. So that’s kind of your text to pay collection management, insurance verification, things like that. And so that’s of interest to us as well. And yeah, I mean, who knows where the future is going to go? You said it earlier, Bill, like this AI buzzword is everywhere. I think that it’ll be interesting to see sort of, you know, new entrants into the space and what their approach is. But I think we’re quite confident that You know, we’ve stood the test of time. We understand deeply, I think, what a DSO and what a dental office needs to succeed. And so we’re going to forge ahead in our lane and in an ROI. But, you know, I think we’re always optimistic to see how the market develops. I mean, software changes so, so fast. And I guess one last point would be that, you know, our commitment is to continue to evolve. I think that’s where software apps, software companies get stuck is that they’re not quick enough in terms of their evolution and what’s actually occurring in the marketplace and they become stagnant. So, you know, no rest for the wicked. We are, you know, definitely busy over here and pushing hard, but we have a great team of people behind us and we’re very optimistic for the future.

Bill Neumann: Well, thanks, Jeff. If people want to find out more, I mean, it’s pretty compelling what you’ve been doing there. I mean, it’s just amazing to see in a relatively short amount of time how Max Assist has really evolved and continues to. And I think to your point is really valid about, you know, not just providing, you know, recall one tiny solution. I mean, practices do not want to have 10 different software platforms they want, you know, as few as possible. They want one login, right? We hear that all the time. So people want to demo, haven’t used Max Assist or maybe they had, you know, new Recall Max three or four years ago. Want to check out what you’re doing now. What’s the best way to find out more about Max Assist?

Jeff Barsotti: I’d probably send them over to getmaxassist.com. And yeah, there’s all sorts of information there, whether you’re, I mean, I would imagine folks listening to us today are more on the DSO side of the fence. So that’s great. We have enterprise pages for you there to peruse. And then yeah, you can book demos directly through the site itself. And yeah, I think that’s probably the easiest way to get a little bit more information about what we do and then attempt to reach out. Anybody can reach out to me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn. If you want to ping me directly, I’m happy to meet with you as well. So whatever works best for folks.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. We’ll drop the GetMaxAssist URL. Is it GetMaxAssist.com? Is that the URL? Okay. Yeah. So we’ll put that in the show notes and we’ll also add in Jeff Barsotti’s LinkedIn profile. You can just click on that and you can message him and always be careful what you wish for, Jeff, but you’re going to get a lot of LinkedIn. Yeah. That’s great. Well, thanks. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you. And every time we talk, you’ve got so much new going on there. I’m excited to kind of find out a little bit more about MaxAI. I’m going to play around now with your demos and learn more about that. And also, I’m really interested to to see how Mango Voice and that integration, when that starts to happen, how that’s going to work out. Because I know there was a ton of talk about that. I know Mango is a really popular system, so it makes a lot of sense. But great. Thanks again, Jeff. And thank you, everybody, for watching us today. This is the Group Dentistry Now Show. Until next time, I am Bill Neumann.

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