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As dental groups scale, they try to create operating capacity for new locations. But finding talent is not easy. Going into 2026, 59.3% of DSO dentists identified staffing challenges as a concern. Across dentistry more broadly, 20.7% of dentists reported that they did not have adequate administrative staffing.
Global teams are one of the biggest solutions to this problem. At SupportDDS, we are seeing remote/virtual team members increasingly being embedded into DSOs. They take charge of workflows such as patient reactivation, insurance verification, and claims follow-up.
The “call center” label is now too small
When a DSO is scaling, its capacity requirements stretch far beyond the need for people to answer phones, which is traditionally what global teams were used for. Dozens of small processes begin to compete for the same people at the same time. The same front-office employee who is checking in patients may also be verifying benefits, chasing a claim, and trying to work an overdue recall list before the end of the day.
At one practice, that may be manageable. Across 20, 50, or 100 locations, it becomes a capacity problem. The hiring market makes solving this problem through traditional staffing alone increasingly difficult. More than 58% of dentists who have recently tried to recruit administrative staff describe the process as “very” or “extremely challenging.”
Taking the global teams approach makes expanding capacity easier. Rather than sending miscellaneous tasks into an overflow queue, DSOs can assign defined workflows to dedicated remote/virtual team members, establish ownership, and measure performance against the same expectations used across the organization.
SupportDDS is built around this dedicated-team approach. The team member becomes part of the DSO, working inside defined workflows with clear responsibilities and measurable outcomes.
Revenue Cycle Management is where the operating model gets tested
Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) exposes every weak handoff in the organization. A claim that is not submitted cleanly or an aging balance that never receives the next follow-up can all begin as small operational misses.
Nearly 20% of claims are denied and as many as 60% of returned claims are never resubmitted. But some lost revenue is not truly lost. It is simply sitting behind work that has not been completed. And that makes RCM as much an operating-capacity issue as a financial one.
A stronger model starts by breaking RCM into clear lanes. For example, insurance verification should have an owner and a turnaround expectation, and claims submission should have a clean handoff from clinical documentation.
According to the 2025 State of Claims report, twenty-six percent of respondents said that at least 10% of denials resulted from inaccurate or incomplete data collected during patient intake. In other words, RCM begins before the claim is even denied. This is one reason SupportDDS has expanded far beyond administrative call support. Dedicated RCM team members can be assigned to specific parts of the revenue cycle, so those workflows do not compete continuously with front-office demands.
A 90-day reactivation program shows what dedicated capacity can do
SupportDDS recently ran a 90-day patient reactivation program for a 100+ location DSO. The SupportDDS team worked every recall list provided by the client using an established outreach and follow-up cadence.
Over the 90 days, the program generated:
- 9,906 patient outreach attempts
- 2,514 live patient conversations
- 701 scheduled appointments
- 649 hygiene appointments
- 52 treatment appointments
Every assigned recall opportunity was worked. No list remained partially completed because the front desk became busy. Of the 701 appointments generated, 501 were scheduled during live conversations, while another 200 appointments came through follow-up outreach. Almost three out of every ten appointments, therefore, came after the initial scheduling opportunity. That is what disciplined follow-up can look like when it has an owner.
The same discipline matters even more in Revenue Cycle Management (RCM)
Now apply that operating logic to the revenue cycle. Aging A/R is, in many ways, a queue of unresolved next actions. Some balances need payer follow-up, some need corrected claims, and some need documentation. The difference between a healthy queue and an unhealthy one is often consistency.
A dedicated RCM team can be structured around that consistency. For example, one group may centralize eligibility and benefit verification so practices receive completed information before the patient arrives. Another may assign a claims team to scrub, submit, and track claims against payer-specific rules. A third may build a denial pod that works defined categories every day, while a separate insurance A/R team attacks aging buckets based on balance and collectability.
The point is not that every DSO should move every RCM function to a global team. The point is that RCM work should be placed where it can receive the concentration, training, access, and accountability it requires. That can be especially valuable in multi-location groups where local teams have uneven staffing. A centralized global team creates a common operating standard across offices. The process no longer depends entirely on whether a particular practice has an experienced insurance coordinator, whether the front desk has time after lunch, or whether one strong employee is carrying the workflow for several locations.
It also makes management easier. Leaders can build one scorecard, one escalation path, and one set of definitions across the organization. Instead of asking each location to solve the same RCM problem differently, the DSO can create an enterprise process.
Global teams are becoming an operating-model decision
The shift towards global teams is not unique to dentistry. Deloitte’s 2024 Global Outsourcing Survey found that 80% of surveyed executives planned to maintain or increase investment in third-party outsourcing. The reasons go well beyond cost. Among the drivers identified were improved access to talent at 42%, increasing customer demands at 35%, spend optimization at 34%, adoption of global delivery models at 33%, and better alignment with business strategy and operating-model shifts at 27%.
That final point is worth paying attention to. Organizations are not only looking outside their local market because they want lower-cost labor. They are changing how work gets done.
For DSOs, that creates a much more strategic conversation around global teams. Where should centralized work live? Which tasks genuinely need to happen inside the practice? And where is revenue being delayed because somebody simply does not have enough time? Those questions are far more useful than asking whether a particular task can technically be performed remotely.
What good integration actually looks like
The model works only when global team members are integrated deeply enough to own the work. Treating them as an overflow resource usually produces overflow-level results.
Good integration starts with role clarity. A global RCM specialist should know exactly which accounts or processes they own, what “done” means, when an issue must be escalated, and which KPI reflects success. If five people can touch a task but no one is responsible for closing it, the DSO has created another handoff instead of more capacity.
System access matters too. The closer the team can work inside the DSO’s normal practice-management, clearinghouse, payer, communication, and reporting systems, the less translation and duplicate work the organization creates. Global teams should not operate from a parallel universe of spreadsheets unless the process genuinely requires it.
Then comes cadence. RCM is repetitive by nature, which is precisely why it benefits from disciplined operating rhythms. Daily queues, weekly aging reviews, and monthly performance reviews turn a remote role into a managed process.
Finally, quality has to be built in. Accuracy in verification, documentation, payment posting, or patient communication cannot be treated as secondary to volume. The strongest global operating models pair productivity measures with QA, compliance, audit trails, and clear supervisory ownership.
From global staffing to global operations
The pressures driving the switch to global teams are unlikely to disappear. DSOs are still dealing with difficult administrative recruitment, and revenue cycles are becoming more complex. At the same time, global operating models are becoming increasingly normal across industries. DSO leaders have to be more deliberate about where work belongs.
Clinical teams should remain focused on clinical care. Practice teams should be able to concentrate on the patient in front of them. And repetitive, measurable administrative and revenue-cycle workflows should have enough dedicated capacity to move consistently.
That is the role SupportDDS is increasingly playing inside dental organizations. Rather than functioning as a traditional call center or a pool of disconnected outsourced labor, SupportDDS provides dedicated remote/virtual team members who become integrated into DSO and practice workflows.
The 100+ location DSO reactivation program illustrates what that model can produce when responsibility is clearly defined. The opportunity inside RCM may be even larger.
Explore what a dedicated supportDDS team could look like inside your DSO
SupportDDS helps dental groups build dedicated remote/virtual teams across RCM and administrative operations, giving existing teams more capacity while creating greater consistency across locations. To explore where a dedicated SupportDDS team could fit within your operating model, schedule a discovery call. You can learn more about the patient reactivation case study here.
Written by J.W. Oliver. J.W. is a global leader transforming the way the world views and sees work. As the visionary of SupportDDS and Zimworx — an Inc. 5000 company — he oversees six operational centers with over 1,800 team members across four continents.
J.W. blends high-performance business instincts with faith-driven philanthropy, donating 51% of all profits to ministries and charities around the globe.
Beyond the boardroom, JW is an adventurer and endurance enthusiast who has trekked to Everest Base Camp and Machu Picchu. He is a pilot, a podcast host, and a serial entrepreneur. An ordained minister and devoted husband of 30+ years, JW is laser-focused on a massive mission: empowering 20,000 team members by 2032.
