The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry – Episode 217

Contact Information:

• Kyle Wallace: [email protected]
• Herb Ford: [email protected]
• Phone: 972-663-5190

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Risk Strategies Dental Insurance DSO podcast transcript:

Bill Neumann:
Welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann, and as always, we appreciate you listening. We are up to, gosh, I think about 210, 215 podcasts, so have quite a few under our belt now, and I’m really appreciative to the audience for downloading each episode and giving us your honest feedback. We just get a lot of great feedback from the audience on on the topics that we discuss, get a lot of suggestions as well. And one topic that we really haven’t focused on, and we probably should have, should have in the past, but we’re doing it now, something that I would say is overlooked a lot and probably, and Kyle Wallace, who’s on this podcast, may have even mentioned it to me, that’s something that a lot of people don’t necessarily like to talk about, but they know they need it, is insurance. So we’re going to really focus on optimizing insurance coverage for multi-location emerging dental groups and DSOs. So we have the team at Risk Strategies with us here. Kyle Wallace, who’s the Managing Director at Risk Strategies, and Herb Ford, who is the Vice President of Business Development at Risk Strategies. Herb and Kyle, thanks for being on.

Herb Ford: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Thank you, Bill, for having us on here.

Bill Neumann: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. No problem. Overdue to say the least just a little bit on Kyle’s background and then Kyle maybe you can add to this a little bit Kyle’s been in the insurance industry for over 35 years and The cool thing about Kyle and the team and risk strategies the last 25 years Kyle has spent working exclusively with Dennis of all specialties and all different sizes, from solo practices to emerging dental groups to large DSOs. Kyle and the team at Risk Strategies is really well-known in the industry and looked at as an authority in dental practice risk management and malpractice claims prevention. So hopefully I did you a little justice there, Kyle, but can you fill in some blanks? Sure. No, thank you, Bill.

Kyle Wallace: Yes, it’s been a long time that I’ve been in this business, and my focus on dentists and dentistry began with malpractice insurance primarily, and I think I did that almost exclusively for about the first 10 years that I started working with dentists on an exclusive basis. But, you know, over that time, I saw that the risks were evolving in other areas, not just malpractice. And there was a lot more to managing the risk in a dental practice than just the professional liability. So, we’ve expanded over the years to develop expertise in all areas of insurance for dental practices.

Bill Neumann: And also we have Herb Ford with us, Vice President of Business Development at Risk Strategies. And Herb and I saw each other not too long ago. I think it was in San Antonio at an event. But I see Herb and Kyle at a lot of the different DSO meetings. Herb specializes in advising dental practices and and larger organizations like DSOs on how to protect their practices and organizations. He does this by creating comprehensive, customized insurance programs that protect groups against known and unknown risks. And we’re going to talk a little bit about what some of those known and unknown risks are, maybe some of them, like You say are unknown and you’re not aware of them, but you should be so herb. Um, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about your background?

Herb Ford: Yeah, absolutely. So, um, about me personally. So I started with. I guess before Risk Strategies, we were part of a company called Wallace Specialty Insurance, and you can guess that it was Kyle’s name that’s the Wallace Specialty part. And for those who don’t know, Kyle’s my dad. So I started working specifically with dentists and insurance when they had their own insurance company back when I was in high school. So I’ve been working from doing a lot of the background paperwork for an insurance agency, to go all the way up to being the VP of business development now and that’s traversed over, gosh, maybe 12, 10 to 12 years now. So in between then I spent a little bit of time at Merrill Lynch as a financial advisor, but I always ended up coming back to the insurance side of things. And as part of Kyle, just always being a part of working with Dennis, that’s also how it worked out for me as well. Just focusing on the dental community and as Kyle mentioned, watching it grow and how the risks and the landscape of the dental community has changed as well.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Herb. You know, maybe this would be a good question to start things off with. It’s just, in your experience, maybe you both can contribute to this, the answer to this question. Are DSOs and groups well prepared when it comes to, you know, handling risks? Do they have the right insurance mix? I mean, I’m sure you probably have some that do and some that don’t, but in general, maybe talk a little bit about, you know, how the industry is prepared when it comes to having the right insurance coverage.

Kyle Wallace: If you don’t mind, I’ll start with this and let her kind of jump in. I know you’ve seen this too, Bill, being active in the dental community and especially the emerging group dental community. Things have been really crazy for the past 10 years. Growth has been exponential. We’ve seen groups grow exponentially. the group side of the dental community grow exponentially over the last 10 years. And that growth has come through, you know, I would say primarily through acquisition. You know, there are DeNovo practices, you know, groups that grow by DeNovo, but there’s been so much acquisition over the last 10 years that the focus within the dental community has been growth itself. And I think that that has been an all-consuming, full-time job for the people that run these large dental practices, and some things that we might consider important have kind of fallen by the wayside simply because the job of growth is just so demanding. And one of those things is insurance. I don’t think that’s just been, you know, a great deal of emphasis placed on creating, you know, a comprehensive insurance program for the groups. I don’t think there’s been a lot of thought at all put into, you know, what do we do about insurance? And as part of growing a large practice.

Bill Neumann: Jim Collison Yeah, I think that that is really, it’s a really valid point. I mean, when you think about the, the explosion and growth with the group practices, and focus is probably on acquisition, right? Finding really quality dental practices to roll up and not necessarily worried about, you know, the structure of the organization in a lot of cases, the insurances that they need, and a whole host of other things. So, yeah, really, really good point. So, I guess this leads into the next question, which is, you know, why should an emerging dental group or even an established DSO engage with a dental-specific insurance

Herb Ford: Yeah. So, Bill, I’ll go ahead and take that one. And kind of to Kyle’s point in the last question with, you know, seeing how dental practices have grown and, you know, DSOs have just grown so much in the last 10 years and, you know, they have to learn and understand what their structure is going to be. Part of working with uh, an insurance team that understands or that is a dental specific insurance team is that, you know, you want to make sure that you’re talking to somebody or working with somebody who understands what your DSO structure is, right? And if you’re an emerging DSO or an already established DSO, and you’ve had, you’ve created that structure, Odds are it’s quite complicated and it’s important to make sure that the person you’re working with from an insurance perspective understands the complexity to a DSO structure because it’s not something that’s, you know, the, you know, we all learn about as insurance agents. It’s something that we’ve grown over our expertise of working with dentist and dental specific companies for a long time. So I think understanding the dental structure of a, of a corporate. practice is important as well as, you know, by being a dental specific insurance group or an insurance team, you get access to being able to understand what is within the insurance market, right? So, there may be specific insurance products that are specialized for DSOs. There may be some insurance companies that prefer to work with large dental practices and DSOs compared to other practices. And there are some companies that, you know, they focus on working with dental companies specifically. So part of working with the dental specific insurance team is knowing who those companies are and what those different services are that they offer. And being able to take advantage of that, I think is really valuable to emerging DSOs and DSOs themselves.

Bill Neumann: What do you find out there when you’re having conversations with potential customers talking to these DSOs and emerging groups? What type of insurance partner do they currently have? Is it somebody that they have a relationship with, like a personal relationship? Because I don’t think there are a lot of dental-specific insurance teams out there that I know of. I mean, if there are some, it’s not a lot. So what’s the alternative?

Herb Ford: Yeah, I mean, oh, go ahead, Kyle.

Kyle Wallace: Okay. I was going to say, uh, uh, that, um, we find a couple of different scenarios. You know, one is if it’s a, you know, if it’s a kind of bootstrap DSO, that’s been, been started by a dentist or a couple of dentists who kind of grown location to location, a lot of times they’re going to work with the same insurance agent they kind of grew up with. let’s say it’s the insurance agent that they bought their insurance for their first dental practice. And they’ve just kind of stayed with that person through the development of the group. And they, you know, they might be at 10, 15, 20 locations and still working with that same person. And it gets to be a little bit of the blind leading the blind because it’s a very different animal and it requires a different level of expertise. Uh, the other thing that we see is that, uh, you know, sometimes the, uh, private equity backed DSOs will work with a specific broker that that private equity group has worked with in the past or currently with any number of different acquisitions that they’ve made or businesses that they, that they, that they control. And so they might, if it’s a private equity group that has their fingers in five, seven different businesses, they might use a broker that they’ve used for those other businesses. And just thinking that, Hey, insurance is insurance. And these guys are pretty good. Not really understanding that there’s a, uh, there is an expertise in this one specific area. And Herb, I’ll let you go from there.

Herb Ford: Well, I mean, you said most of what I was going to say is that those are the two of the main cases that we end up seeing when it comes to different people who are different insurance groups or different advisors than maybe some of the dental practices have. So I didn’t have too much else to add to that besides what you already mentioned.

Bill Neumann: Well, so you’ve got some DSOs that are managing their own insurance plans. Can you talk a little bit about maybe some of the common challenges or pitfalls that you see when an emerging group or a DSO is actually managing their own insurance plan? Herb, if you want to start with that one.

Herb Ford: Yeah, sure. So oftentimes what we will see is that different DSOs or emerging DSOs, maybe they’re working with multiple insurance advisors for multiple insurance products. And right, and that kind of goes back to, you know, the previous question of talking about, you know, what are the current setups of maybe some of the practices have currently. And sometimes we find that people are, you know, maybe they know one contact for property And general liability insurance, they know another contact for their malpractice insurance, and maybe they know another contact for a different type of insurance. And when you’ve got multiple insurance agents involved, and you’re trying to ensure multi-practices, that can make things really difficult in making sure that everything is cohesive. Because it’s easy to have duplicate and also gaps within coverage. And part of that is because when people are buying different products from different people, not everyone’s understanding what the full picture of what the risk potentially is. So when they’re working with those different people, they may not understand that the entire risk of what it is that they’re trying to ensure because they’re not looking at the full picture of what is going on. Right. So It can be really difficult for a lot of DSOs or multi-location practices that are managing their own insurance plans because they may not even understand or know what some of the risks that they have are. And part of that is just knowing or working with somebody who can potentially bring up those different risks or helping them identify what those are. And when you’re working with a number of different people and they don’t have the full picture of what’s going on, it’s hard for anybody to do the best job possible because they don’t see what the full picture is.

Kyle Wallace: It’s kind of like serving as your own general contractor, working with a bunch of subcontractors. And all these subcontractors are trying to maximize the importance of what they do and maximize the the profit that they can realize in the transaction. And, you know, that’s not a good position to be in. And one of the worst parts about this is that most group dental practices will Well, first of all, they don’t have an insurance expert on staff or really any type of in-house risk management. So they generally assign the task of insurance as a secondary function to someone who’s already got a primary function. They may assign it to an HR person. uh that you know since there’s a work comp aspect of it or they assign it to their general counsel who since insurance con insurance policies or contracts maybe our general counsel can understand and manage the insurance but often it’s assigned to somebody who has a primary job and the insurance is their part-time secondary job and that’s you know kind of a recipe for disaster especially if they’re trying to manage uh multiple insurance providers, uh, different, different agents or direct with different companies. And also sometimes, uh, you know, a far too large number of, of insurance policies, uh, in play as well. In fact, a lot of, uh, uh, the clients that come to us, they come to us because they’ve gotten to this point where they’ve grown rather large. They’ve had someone who is really not equipped handle their insurance program, handling their insurance program on a day-to-day basis. And they’ve reached a point where they might have, I don’t know, a hundred policies and different policies in play and not really even understand what they are or how they work or whether they’re all right or just anything about it. And they’ve got a gigantic mess on their hands. We can help them fix that mess, but we prefer to fix it from the start. You know, if it’s a, if it’s what we call a bootstrap practice, the thought process is that, hey, you know, how I ensured my, my first practice is how I need to ensure every location I add from there forward. And, you know, thinking that, hey, if it worked for, for one location, it’s going to work for a hundred and it just does it. Um, and again, also when someone’s not really an, has, really doesn’t have any expertise in insurance, it’s really easy to identify the common risks. You know, it’s, it’s easy to say, Hey, you know. Malpractice is a big risk in the dental practice, you know, property coverage, you know, based on a fire or a pipe breaking or a burglary. Those are risks we think of, but it’s less likely that they’re going to understand the necessity of addressing the other risks like EPLI and cyber and really just how likely those risks are to happen. So that’s what we see when we’re working with a new client.

Herb Ford: Yeah, no, absolutely, Kyle. And kind of just to add on a couple of thoughts there, you know, you mentioned, you know, EP aligned cyber. And there was, I was having a conversation with a with a client the past couple months. And we were talking about the concept or the idea of EP aligned. So just so those who you know, who are listening know, EPLI stands for Employment Practices Liability Insurance. And that’s the type of insurance that is there to protect a company in case there’s a lawsuit from an employee for, you know, wrongful termination or discrimination or potentially sexual harassment. So that’s just so everyone listening knows what it is. But one of the things that we were talking about with this client was that they, you know, I asked the question, it’s like, hey, are you guys providing or setting up a annual retreat for your partners, your members, maybe your doctors? And the answer is yes. And if you’re an organization that’s offering those types of benefits, where people are all getting together and they’re having a good time, You know, it’s important to make sure that you have insurance policies that are in place in case the unthinkable happens and something happens at an event like that. So, you know, that was something that we had talked about and they hadn’t even thought about, you know, they were just, you know, as they should be super excited that they got to the size that they were and that they were going to offer this, this new benefit, which absolutely it’s incredible. It’s really good for retention, but there’s a risk that comes with offering something like that. And we just want to make sure that they’re aware of it. So that’s one thing that we talked about. The other thing, Fowler, you had mentioned is that, you know, sometimes we work with clients who’ve got, you know, a hundred different policies, right? And so that is incredibly hard for anybody who’s handling, whether it’s the credentialing for the insurance or who’s managing those certificates or the, you know, making sure that all the properties are taken care of. That’s a really hard job when you’ve got a hundred different policies and all of them may cover different types of insurance. Because Bill, one of the things that not many people know with insurance policies is that you may get, you know, what’s called a business owner’s policy from one company and you can go to another company, insurance company B, and get the, you know, and ask for a business owner’s policy and you can have different coverage that’s included in those business owner’s policies. And there are slight differences, they may not be major differences, but with those key slight differences, that over 100 policies really adds up to either realizing that you don’t have enough coverage in certain areas, or maybe you have way more coverage in certain areas than you actually need. So one of the things that we like to do is look at the concept of creating master policies. And master policies is very much how it sounds, which is creating one main policy for a specific type of insurance. And it’s really easy for allowing the dental practices and the DSOs to continue to scale. So that’s one of the big things that we like to talk about as well as just educate to our current and potential clients. So that way they can understand that, hey, you know what, it’s really easy for you to be able to scale. You know, it’s really easy for your team to be able to manage and understand what has covered and what doesn’t have coverage. And then also when you need to add something or remove something, you’re able to do that. And then, of course, you know, the one of the biggest things that everybody likes to hear is that typically there’s a cost saving to when you have the master policy. So, those are, you know, some of the few things I just wanted to add on to what Kyle had mentioned previously.

Kyle Wallace: Well, and Herb, you’re right. Yeah, that’s a good point that you make. It’s the, you know, a lot of times the thought process might be, oh, we’ve got all these insurance policies. It’s great. We’ve got to be covered because we got 50, 60, 70 insurance policies. But when we sit down with a client and say, hey, you know, we can simplify this. We can make sure that your great dental practice is covered as well as it possibly can be. And we can do that with six policies, six insurance policies for us to manage together. That can kind of blow someone’s mind that it can actually be that simple.

Bill Neumann: You mentioned some of the risks. You talked about the retreat, which a lot of the DSOs have those. And I wonder how many that are listening actually have some type of insurance that prevents, you know, or protects the DSO if something happens during one of those retreats. They certainly are great, like you mentioned, Herb, from a retention perspective. Are there any other unknown risks or maybe risks that aren’t necessarily top of mind that you think the audience needs to know about? Sure. And sometimes it’s kind of

Kyle Wallace: It’s kind of partial risks. It’s kind of getting to the crux of making sure that the details have been understood and accounted for, because we all know the devil’s in the details. start off simply. You know, everybody knows about malpractice insurance. Everybody knows that they want to make sure all of their associate dentists have malpractice insurance in place. But they tend, you know, emerging group dental practices tend to miss or underestimate the exposure of the insurance covers for the entities, the practice entities themselves, the vicarious liability associated with owning and operating a group practice and overseeing a roster of practicing dentists. That entity exposure, making sure all practice entities are named on a malpractice policy, the vicarious liability exposure, making sure that all the entities have coverage for that that vicarious liability exposure for the exposure of just overseeing a practicing dentist and being drawn into a claim because of your relationship to that. You know, that’s a big thing and people either miss it or if they address it, a lot of times they address it inexactly and sometimes over-expensive. They err on, again, multiple policies to address this that raises their insurance costs two and three times. Cyber liability, data breach, cyber liability is another big area of misunderstanding. you know, oftentimes a group dental practice will only have what little cyber liability data breach coverage that’s on, uh, that’s associated with an office policy. And it may be 50,000, a hundred thousand dollars of coverage. Uh, and if they do buy a standalone data breach, cyber liability policy, it’s usually, you know, some round figure like, Oh, we’re going to buy one. We’re going to buy a million dollar policy without even really understanding what the sublimits of coverage are on that policy, how that policy is structured, or going through even a simple analysis of, hey, this is our size, this is how our systems are set up, this is what our true exposure is, which is something, you know, we do. We have a cyber liability department that can run an analysis of a client before we sit down and talk about what options they should be considering. Um, EPLI, as Herb alluded to earlier, Employment Practices Liability Insurance. Again, insurance can be complicated and a lot of times you’ll see EPLI as part of a property liability policy. Sometimes it’s even attached as a, an extra coverage on a malpractice policy and that’s Honestly, that’s on the insurance industry for making it more complicated than it should be because client sees that and says, oh, I’ve got EPLI coverage. That’s great. But it may be $10,000 of employment practices liability insurance coverage. And I’ll tell you, that’s not a lot. And the larger a practice grows, the more chance there is that they’re going to have a disgruntled employee that brings a lawsuit against the practice for discrimination or wrongful termination or sexual harassment. And these are things that are covered by an EPLI policy and only by an EPLI policy. You will not find that coverage anywhere else. And so It’s another important consideration, and it’s an important consideration in the right coverage level. Flood is a big one in some cases. You know, Herb and I are here in Texas, and obviously, you know, we’ve just had one of the worst flood tragedies in our country’s history just this last week. Flood is not covered by a standard property policy. And, you know, if you have a practice location that’s in a floodplain and you have a property policy, you might think you’re fine, but that’s something that needs to be analyzed and considered. You know, does the group dental practice have a board of directors or And if they do, you know, they consider directors and officers liability. Do they have a 401k? Do they have fiduciary coverage? These are things that all have to be purchased separately. They’re not just part of your run of the mill insurance policy that you might’ve bought for your first practice location. And there are things that could have serious consequences if they’re not addressed. So in my opinion, those are, those are some of the big ones. There’s others as well, but those are just some that come

Herb Ford: Yeah, no, and kind of to mention some of the, or to add on, Kyle, to some of the things that you mentioned about being in a floodplain or worrying about EPLI, part of that is just knowing like, hey, what state are you practicing in, right? I mean, if you’ve been in one state and you’ve grown in that state for a number of years, and maybe you’ve got five, six, 10, 15 locations in one state, and you decide, hey, I’m gonna go to a different state, I’m gonna start opening a practice there. different states have different laws, right? They may have different potential, well, I guess what I’m trying to get to is that the insurance coverage is different or what’s recommended is different from state to state. For instance, California, very different type of state to get property or EPLI or workers’ compensation coverage in compared to a state like Texas, right? So it’s important to know that even if you’re moving across state boundaries, that your insurance profile or what the potential risks are just by going to a different state, that changes also. And that’s just something I wanted to throw in there before we moved on or missed anything else.

Kyle Wallace: Well, no, you’re right. It’s the same thing with malpractice insurance. Let’s say you’ve got a group and you’re in Ohio and Illinois, and you’ve decided to expand into Indiana. Wow. That’s a big difference of malpractice. Or if you’re in, you know, Mississippi and Arkansas and you decide to expand into Louisiana, you know, there’s, there are things that you might not really know that you should. And we do.

Bill Neumann: So outside of your insurance expertise, what other benefits do you think DSOs can really get from an organization like Risk Strategies or a dental-specific broker? I mean, are there other things that you can really offer, any kind of guidance that you may be offering up these group practices?

Herb Ford: Yeah, absolutely. I think part of it is just working with somebody who’s engaged in the dental community. You know, Bill, you mentioned earlier, we saw each other in San Antonio at a different event. I think it’s important that to work or at least to work with somebody who goes to the events and knows what’s going on within the dental community. Right. So because of that, we know a lot of the different companies that are big players within the industry, whether it’s for Whether it’s for attorneys, maybe it’s HR companies, maybe it’s people who are looking for CFO or accounting services. Part of it is just knowing who else is within the community and being able to help people find other services when maybe they need them. There are a number of people that have reached out to me asking for, hey, do you know anybody that’s good with accounting services? Do you know anybody who can help me with an HR handbook? You know, and being able to provide those resources I think is really valuable. So, that’s one thing that I think is important. In addition to that, part of the, one of the things that we, I think that, We really made a name for ourselves when we first started was, you know, providing expertise and just risk management. And part of that, of what we can do is we can help review consent forms that practices are using and making sure that those are adequate between all practices. We want to make sure that, you know, helping people align or maybe able to, you know, structure their emerging DSO is a huge factor as well, or a huge benefit, I think, to maybe some of the emerging DSOs. I would imagine, you know, the corporate DSOs or the established DSOs, they probably already have their structure, but if it’s somebody who’s you know, five to 15 practices, and they’re figuring out how to really be a part of an emergency, they’re trying to be an emerging DSO and make the next step, they need to make sure that they’re creating the structure for themselves to be able to do that. And fortunately, with our expertise, we’ve been able to help some people find the right way. And then also, you know, if they’re, you know, obviously, there are some things that are out of our hands, and it’s you know, an attorney needs to be involved, but we’re able to help make those introductions to those groups and that way they have the resources that are available to them when they need them. So I think those are huge benefits that an emerging DSO can have as well as an established DSO when it comes to You know, working with somebody who understands the dental community, working with an emerging group, just besides the insurance perspective or the insurance expertise is really getting it to know, you know, or being able to talk to somebody and ask those questions and, you know, and be able to know or get answers that you trust, um, and to, to look out for. So Kyle, is there anything else that you wanted to add to that?

Kyle Wallace: No, no, I think you kind of hit the nail on the head. I think maybe the only thing is just kind of bring it around is that, you know, The dental community is a village, and we’re part of that village. We’re active in the community. We go to the meetings. We listen to the lectures. We talk with people. We have a sense of what’s going on, and that allows us to be, I believe, more helpful to our clients.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it’s a point that’s really valid and goes beyond, you know, insurance. It’s, I think if you are, you know, there are people that certainly can provide insurance but don’t necessarily understand the dental industry 100 percent. So they wouldn’t even necessarily know what some of the challenges are or some of the risks if they don’t even, you know, really understand how maybe a dental practice operates and then how, you know, a group of dental practices or a DSO operates. Is there a risk at the corporate level? There are risks at the practice level. There’s risks in between the two. So I think, you know, it’s a great point. And then to Herb’s point, I mean, you can just be a resource, you know, beyond anything having to do with insurance, Now, you know attorneys and accounting firms, and you may have been at a meeting where somebody was talking about a cool technology or some new AI that’s come out. So I think that is certainly valid. And being part of the community, just like we are, we don’t consider we’re a publisher, but we’re dental people first. That’s kind of the way we look at it. And I would say the same thing about you. Yes, you provide insurance, but you’re part of the dental industry. So I think that’s something that’s kind of overlooked sometimes, and there’s just a ton of value and insight that you can provide. Moving on to another question here, and I think you answered this earlier on, but let’s just make sure we focus in on this. It does kind of make sense that if you’re looking at this from my perspective, which is an outsider’s perspective, we don’t own practices, we’re not a DSO, it would seem like just adding more policies as you acquire a location, right? So adding another policy for each location would be the logical way to go as you scale up, but this doesn’t sound like it’s necessarily the right approach. Can you talk a little bit about why that might not be the right approach?

Herb Ford: Yeah, sure thing. So I agree that the concept of, hey, you know what, I’ve got one practice, so I’ve got one set of policies. Maybe I’ve got a business owner’s policy, I’ve got a worker’s comp policy, I’ve got my malpractice for me. And then when I have my second practice, I’m gonna rinse and repeat. I’m gonna do the exact same thing over again. That seems like it would make the most sense, but, The difficulty with that is that you don’t actually get any of the benefits of scaling. And part of that is that, or part of the reason for that is because each of those policies, they come with some universal coverage for the practice and some specific, like location specific coverage. And if you’re having multiple policies, you know, over and over for multiple locations, then you’re paying for that universal coverage over and over and over again with these different policies. So it can be more beneficial to have that master policy. We referred to the idea of a master policy previously, because in that way, there is individual coverage, or the coverage that is location specific, that’s included in a master policy. but you’re not overpaying for those universal type coverages when it comes to the master policy because everything’s under on one policy. The other detail or thing to know about that is if people are in acquisition mode or you know they’re ready to add a de novo or you know maybe they are doing it, you know, they’re doing a de novo, they’re doing a build out, and they need builders risk coverage. It’s really easy to forget about a location or adding a location when you’ve got so many different policies, and you got to make sure that, you know, all those different policies are covering every, you know, those specific locations they’re meant to, versus having one main policy that you’ve got that has everything listed underneath it. So you get the convenience of having everything on one policy versus having the multiple policies. That alone saves so much heartache for a lot of the people that we work with. And, and I know that oftentimes it’s typically not the owner who’s the one who’s working on it, but the people that are working for the, the practice or the, you know, the group itself, um, This saves a ton of time and allows them to work on so many other things because you may have. Well, let’s say if you’ve got three different policies per location and you’ve got 10 locations, that’s 30 different policies. And I bet all of those have different renewal dates. If you’re, if, and then if, if you’ve got different renewal dates for 30 different policies, you know, odds are you’ve got your, you’re working on a different. policy renewal every other week. That takes a lot of time versus, Oh, Hey, you know what? I’ve got one specific time of the year. Maybe it’s July 1st, maybe it’s December 1st, whatever the date is that everything gets renewed. You know, your insurance policy gets renewed on one day. for that type of insurance. And you don’t have to, those individuals don’t have to worry about the constant turn of, do we have updated certificates of insurance? Is this sent over to the credentialing company? Has the premium been paid for all of these different policies? That’s a lot of headache and it’s unnecessary. So having that one master policy really allows people to be able to focus on what’s really important, which is making sure that they have the adequate coverage for all of the locations. and then also making sure that it’s efficient for everybody who’s involved in the process. You know, kind of going back to one of the points that I had mentioned where it’s easy to forget about location. When you have the master policy, you know, as I mentioned previously, you know, there are insurance policies that have that universal coverage and then some of the specific location coverage. Well, if you end up acquiring a new location, odds are at least some coverage is set up underneath that master policy for that new location, even though you forgot to sign up a new policy report. So those are some of the, the big reasons, um, for not necessarily just, Hey, you know what? I’ve got a new location. I’m going to get all brand new policies for this one new location. Um, and just compile, continue to compile that over and over and over again. It just, you know, it just bogs down the people that are working on those things year in and year out.

Kyle Wallace: Well, and it can be really costly too. We met with a prospective client, uh, really just a couple of weeks ago. And, uh, one of the problems, one of the things they experienced was a situation where they had, uh, 30 locations and 30 different, uh, workers’ compensation policies and one got missed. And it, uh, It got canceled. It wasn’t paid for. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but they ended up having an employee hurt and it cost them out of their pocket $150,000 to cover the injury of that employee. And that’s not something you really plan for or want to plan for in your business. And that’s what can happen just because of a simple mistake.

Bill Neumann: Start to wrap things up here. I’ve got a couple of final questions. Can you explain the difference, again, coming from an outsider here? If a DSO or an emerging group has a comprehensive insurance program, it seems to me they’d be all set, right? Comprehensive means everything, or does it? And what other ways, if that’s not the case, should they be addressing their risk? Well, insurance is not the

Kyle Wallace: the answer to everything. Insurance is, I, I kind of look at insurance as a last resort. It’s, it’s the last resort of, uh, in situations where you’ve hopefully planned for every potential problem, but something happened either out of your control or that you’ve missed. And that’s what insurance is for. So really under, when, when I think about uh, a group dental practice, you know, I think a lot about it from the, uh, risk management perspective because my background is, is professional liability and risk management protocol. So, uh, things like, you know, comprehensive consent, you know, comprehensive and consistent consent in medical history forms, you know, uh, consistency of patient protocol through all locations, you know, in-house peer review and support among the doctors, you know, morning huddles for every location. Those are just some of the, the professional liability or malpractice things that you can do to control risk and, and things that we, you know, that we promote to our clients. But there’s also things like water sensors in a practice. One of the biggest One of the biggest losses we see in dental practices are broken pipes, and they can take a practice out for months. And the best insurance in the world isn’t going to be as good as if the loss never happened. And that’s the thing, insurance claims are a hassle and the insurance policy is designed to make the client as whole as possible, but it’s never as good as if it didn’t happen. So water sensors in a practice are great. Cybersecurity consultants, you know, nobody wants to have a data breach or some other kind of, or experience some other cyber crime. The insurance is there and the insurance is going to do the job. If you’ve got the right policy and it’s in place, it’s going to pay the expenses associated with it. But again, not as good as if it didn’t happen. So, you know, engaging in, in the services of some kind of cybersecurity consultant. We have friends in the business. We’re happy to, to recommend them and we do. Um, you know, those types of things as well. Uh, you know, solid HR rules with comprehensive employee handbook. EPLI insurance is, is wonderful. And if you have it, that’s great. If you have the right coverage limits, it’s awesome. But again, better if it doesn’t happen. So, so having, uh, having solid HR protocol is, is, is important. So there’s, there’s a million things like that, but insurance doesn’t, uh, doesn’t release us of the responsibility to be careful and follow guidelines and rules that make sense, if that makes sense.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it sure does, Kyle. And I really appreciate that. I think that’s a great way to kind of finish off the podcast is to remind people that insurance is not the answer to everyone’s issues. It goes a lot deeper than that when it comes to addressing risk. Kyle and Herb, if somebody in our audience is interested in learning more about risk strategies having a conversation about the insurance that they need, or just kind of talking to you about, you know, as they scale up, what should be a strategy, a risk strategy. How do they do so? What’s the best way? Can you give us your website information and then also the best way to contact you both?

Herb Ford: Yeah, so our website is risk-strategies.com forward slash dental. Also, if you just ended up going to the risk strategies website underneath industries, there’s a dental and you click on the dental and that takes us right to our team’s homepage. Within the homepage, you’ve got some nice little pictures of me, Kyle, another one of our teammates, Ann on the right hand side, and those will all take you to ways to email us. Also, emails in general are always good. My email address is hford. F-O-R-D, like the car, at risk, R-I-S-K dash strategies, S-T-R-A-T-E-G-I-E-S dot com. Kyle’s is very similar. It’s Kay Wallace at risk dash strategies dot com. And then phone number wise, they can give us a call at 972-663-5190. That is our main line. If they prefer to talk to any of us directly, it would be 972-663-5195. Only thing that I would ask is that you let us know that you heard about contacting us through the Group Dentistry Now podcast. So then that way we know, we can let Bill know as well. So those are the best ways to contact us.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Yeah, that’s perfect. And we’ll make sure that we put those phone numbers, the email addresses, and risk-strategies.com, the URL in the show notes. We also have, I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a recent article you did with us called Optimizing Insurance Coverage for Multi-Location Dental Practices. If anybody wants to read that, it’s pretty comprehensive, so some really good information in there. But again, thank you, Kyle Wallace, Herb Ford at Risk Strategies, for this great conversation, great topic. We hope we’ll have you back and hope to see you at an upcoming DSO or dental meeting. And thank you, everybody, for listening to the Group Dentistry Now show. Until next time, I am Bill Neumann. We appreciate you.

Kyle Wallace: Perfect. Thank you, Bill. Thanks, Bill.