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!

The Growing Importance of Dental Membership Plans.

Jane Levy, Co-founder & CEO of Plan Forward & Myles McAllister, Chief Operations Officer of SGA Dental Partners share their insights on:

Implementing, consolidating & optimizing plans
Top metrics you should be tracking
Operational insights & strategies
Much more

To learn more about Plan Forward visit https://www.planforward.io/ or to book a demo visit – https://www.planforward.io/book-a-demo/

You can also reach Jane Levy at [email protected]

To learn more about SGA Dental Partners visit https://sgadental.com/

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Plan Forward DSO membership 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 as always, we appreciate you joining us. Always have a lot of great guests on the show. And first off, thanks everybody. If you’re watching us on YouTube or if you happen to be listening to us on Apple Spotify or Google, without you, we wouldn’t be able to get great guests. We’re going to talk about membership plans today, and we have with us Jane Levy. She is the co-founder and CEO of PlanForward. It’s great to see you, Jane. Likewise. Thanks, Bill. Yeah, thanks. Thanks for being here today. And Miles McAllister, he is the COO of SGA Dental Partners. Miles, thank you very much for joining us.

Myles McAllister: Yeah, my pleasure. Excited to be here.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, this is going to be a fun conversation and we’ll start things off. So I met Jane, I think it was probably 2017, 2018, when she joined. She was at Henry Schein at that time, but prior to that, she worked for Wall Street for a little bit, VC fund. Let her tell us all about that. And then she was at Jarvis for a while, Jarvis Analytics, which was acquired by Henry Scheinwan, and then started. It’s amazing, Jane. It’s already been quite a while. You’ve been at PlanForward since October of 2021, CEO role and co-founder there as well. So you’ve been in the industry a while. A little bit more about your background and maybe you can introduce everybody to PlanForward.

Jane Levy: Great, thanks, Bill. Yeah, so you’re right. I originally joined Henry Schein in 2017. I had noticed at the time that I think it was Align Technologies had attracted a large amount of investment, but relative to medical as a category, dental was still attracting very small investment dollars and thought that was intriguing. So joy and shine, thinking that there was a great opportunity in dental. Over the past, what is it now, eight years operating in this industry, I’ve seen a lot of changes. Never seen so much innovation as now, and that’s possibly fueled by many more investment dollars coming into dental, but also we’re attracting much more talent and lots of folks are doing some really interesting things in the dental space, not only on the vendor side, but also some of these DSOs are doing some really interesting work on trying to professionalize and commercialize the practice of dentistry. And that’s really been a very interesting trend to watch unfold. So you’re right, I’ve been a plan forward since 2021, so it’s been more than three years, which is my usual tenure and it’s been a fantastic ride. I think it’s a product whose time has really come. So originally I had always seen the opportunity in membership because of the friction between dental practices and groups and payers just on the reimbursement side and how that was trending not in the right direction, let’s put it that way. And so reimbursements continue to decrease and it’s been very hard for even DSOs to reverse that trend. So membership is a product which really lends itself to offering an alternative, optimizing those uninsured patients and ensuring that they deliver both on the production and the visits for general practices. And so membership is really a fantastic tool. It’s something that’s relevant to both small practice groups, small groups, large groups, individual practices, et cetera.

Bill Neumann: Before we go over to Miles real quick, Jane, I’m kind of curious, do you have a feel for how many dental practices or groups in the industry are using some type of membership plan right now, just from a percentage perspective?

Jane Levy: Yeah, it’s very anecdotal. So if I just add up where our competitors are, as well as, you know, the traction that we’ve had, I would say we’re probably in the, you know, 20 to 25% of the market probably already has membership, both run in-house and using a software vendor like PlanForward.

Bill Neumann: Very interesting. Okay. Thanks. Thanks, Jane. Miles McAllister. So Miles has been in the dental industry almost as long or maybe a little bit longer than you’ve been at PlanForward. So with three and a half years at SGA Dental Partners. Miles has a really interesting background. So he, well, Start things off, he was in the U.S. Navy for 10 years, a pilot, and you still fly in the reserves, it looks like, which I’d love to learn a little bit more about that. And then had some experience in medical. You were the CEO of Physicians House Calls, and also worked with Davida as well on the dialysis side of things. So it sounds like you’ve got a really interesting background. So tell us a little bit more about that. And then how the heck did you get into Danil?

Myles McAllister: Yeah, it is a little bit of a, I guess, unconventional path. So I did start out flying planes. So I went to Naval Academy, chose what I thought was the best path forward, which was becoming a pilot. I served 10 years. active so about 2004-2014. So right in the height of the sort of surge in Iraq and Afghanistan. So it was over there for three plus years, three plus years on and off. Then came home and was doing flight instructing at home and then ultimately decided to pivot and shift away from that. So, Side note, I am officially retired from the Navy as of yesterday. So I did 10 years active, 11 years in the reserve. My last day in the Navy was actually June 30th. So January, July 1st, I’m officially retired from the Navy. So 21 years. So yeah, so it’s been a good run with that. I transitioned then into dialysis, which is Dabita. The insight there is my dad was a nephrologist. So, I grew up in dialysis clinics. I grew up around a father getting dragged around in the hospitals in the 80s and 90s when no one knew any better about infection control and everything else. All those were coming out. I’ve always been inspired by my father and the revere that people had for him. He was really taking care of sick people and that’s what drew me to Davida. Plus, I think Davida just has a great track record of building leaders and owning and managing a P&L and really being a people-focused business. And that really is what healthcare is in any setting. It’s really a people management business. Then I transitioned into becoming a CEO of Homebase Primary Care, so Physicians House Calls, which was just luck or timing. It just so happened to be that’s when COVID hit. Primary Cares were shutting down. Hospitals were shutting down. Homebase Primary Care was sort of… It was in high demand and it just happened to be the right time, right place, did really well there. And then ultimately, I got recruited to come over and work for SGA. One, because our CEO, Jordan DeNola, I had worked with at DaVita, plus I had gone to school with his two brothers. He’s a Naval Academy graduate. myself. So, I kind of knew the pedigree. I knew who he was. There was a very high level of trust with us and healthy feedback, if you will, back and forth for us. He trusted me. I trusted him. And that creates a great working environment where we’re able to really push and pull on one another to get the best out of the business, to get the best out of one another. So that’s one aspect that drew me was Jordan and the team at SJ. When I interviewed, I really admired the founders, which was Zach Bentley and Jay Williams and Lake Gardner and sort of the merging of those three and coming together. And then also just Thurston group is our PE back sponsored, you know, are largely ex military Naval Academy grads again kind of a known quantity, you kind of know what you’re getting into. And that was a little bit assuring for me so. But the truth of dental to me is still, one, it’s patient focused, it’s still providing great service. Two, the thing that I really gravitated towards dentistry was the ability to drive revenue in different streams. So if you look at dialysis or you look at primary care, you know, dialysis, there’s a certain volume, certain number of patients that are in common, it’s really sort of dictated by the growth of the overall ESRD population, which is somewhere between, you know, two to 4% in a given year. So it’s not incrementally growing, it’s sort of very mature market. And in primary care, it’s the same thing. It’s essentially just, you know, kind of getting the patients and it’s very hard to grow the revenue streams in both those, right? And dentistry, it’s kind of wide open. There’s multiple revenue streams from marketing to different mixes to procedures. And I do think dentistry is a little bit more consumer-focused, consumer-driven. And that really excited me. I hadn’t really played in sort of the consumer healthcare setting. If you will, I was more sort of your bread and butter, like chronic disease management. And I fall in love with it. I think it’s great. I think it’s just such a… a strong business. And the other thing I would say is the insurance mix that Jane alluded to a little bit. It’s completely 180 from your typical healthcare setting. And that creates a very sort of rich environment, if you will. Meaning there’s just a lot of ability to grow and scale and have financial upside and be capitalistic, which is something I enjoy.

Bill Neumann: Can you tell, maybe for some people in the audience that don’t know who SGA is a little bit about, what is the profile of the group? What states do you operate in? What type of dentistry do you do?

Myles McAllister: Yeah, so SGA, the formation of SGA was, it really came together in about 21 with sort of three large entities come together, which is sort of South Georgia Dental Management. Then it was sort of Dental Partners of Southwest Georgia, think of like West Georgia. And then it was the Garner Group in Mississippi there. And those three sort of found the foundation. So we went from roughly about six or seven offices there overnight to about 40 plus offices. And then we’ve been growing ever since. So, we’re currently in nine states, about 144 offices, and it’s about a 70-30 split. So, we’re 70% general dentistry and 30% periopraxis. We have one endo, two oral surgeries, and maybe a few other specialties mixed in, but primarily that 70-30 split, if you will, from perio to general dentistry there.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. So you’ve been there for about three and a half years. What’s really been your focus as far as, you know, operationally, you know, what changes have you made since you’ve gone in there and just maybe a little bit about your strategy?

Myles McAllister: Yeah, so I think the first and foremost is we have a formulaic and pragmatic approach to organic growth. And that’s something that when I came in, I really was focused on. And what we’ve done is we’ve created sort of this S-curve, if you will, of growth levers. And so every single one of our practices is plotted on this S-curve and they’re on various phases, right? Depending on maturity and friction abilities and everything else. And it’s knowing the correct growth lever to pull at the correct time. And so that is like our sort of our secret sauce, if you will, is this S-curve. Now on the left, I’ll just sort of be very high level here. On the left is sort of very visit volume driven. And on the right is sort of your payer reimbursement maximization and sort of your payer strategy, if you will. We start to always come in and start on the left, right, which is really trying to grow the volume, which is I think the lower hanging fruit, which is making sure you’re answering calls, making sure you’re converting patients, making sure that you are staffed up, you’re writing, you’re efficient. All these little things that sort of add up, which really allow your visits and your growth to take off. And then as a practice gets mature, which usually takes between 18 to 36 months, if you will, you start getting into, okay, they’re doing everything right operationally. Now we need to go and try to maximize the reimbursement. And so that gets into more of the payer strategy and the reimbursement and a few other key levers. But that’s sort of the high level S curve, if you will. There’s a bunch of other things involved in that, but that’s just quickly sort of a brief synopsis of it. And then lastly, I think the biggest thing that I came in to do was was sort of get a process on how we measured capacity. Not just measured it, but actually took action on relieving capacity. And so there’s multiple avenues that we attack from capacity, which is, you know, days of schedule, which truly I believe is a competitive advantage. When I came into the industry, that didn’t exist, or I should say it existed, but it was through the secret shopper, which is, hey, you call up a practice, You say, hey, I’m Jane Smith. I’m looking for a practice. And essentially the office would give you their next possible day. And you would sort of be able to write that down and say, hey, it was 16 days. What’s your next available spot? Well, you can’t scale. with that, right? You needed a product that did that. So we actually went to Patient Prism. This did not exist at that time. We love Patient Prism product, but we said, hey, rubber meets the road. We need days to schedule. You guys have the ability to do that, which is from when the patient calls and when they’re actually scheduled, the AI can pick that up. That’s the metric we need. And with that, boom, came days to schedule, which I think has sort of become industry benchmark, if you will. So days to schedule. and then just how we measure our capacity. And then capacity is tricky in the fact that, you know, there’s a backside of the curve, which you don’t want to be on because ultimately, you just don’t have the capacity to accept new patients. You don’t have the capacity to serve your existing patients. And you start getting that decline and sort of net patient gain and active hygiene, if you will. And so we know roughly it’s between 75 and 80 percent. Once you get past those, you’re on the backside of the curve where you have a declining practice. So we’re constantly trying to measure our capacity, making sure that we’re staying ahead of it, making sure that we’re relieving that capacity, whether that’s through expansions or hiring or different levers, you know, even DeNovo’s. But that’s sort of been our secret sauce is both the S-curve and I think the way we manage capacity.

Jane Levy: I’ll just jump in here, Bill, but I’ll just add to what Miles said. One of our groups was talking about this notion of scheduling and how they can optimize around that and using membership on a phone call with a an inbound call, say of an uninsured patient who’s looking to schedule, talking about the membership program at that point, improved the schedule rate dramatically. So I don’t recall the numbers off the top of my head, but something like a two or three times greater schedule, you know, completion than if you did not, if the person answering the phone did not mention membership.

Myles McAllister: It actually was us. And so, Jane- And now there’s two, Miles. Yeah. Teed it up well for us to mention, which is we started looking at the call performance for uninsured patients. And what we found was roughly there’s about 42 to 45% conversion rate for an uninsured patient coming in and getting scheduling. And then what we realized very quickly was that Once we embedded the membership plan plan forward in that quickly went from about 43% to 65%. So we’re converting almost 20% higher for uninsured patients by just offering the membership plan when we’re converting into the schedule. So it’s been. been a game changer for us as far as getting that. Very few tools are going to grow your conversion rate by 20% by just saying, hey, we offer this. And that’s been a nice pickup.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, really interesting point. And back to, you know, Jane had mentioned only 20 to 25% of the, of the dental practices right now are using a membership plan. So great, great opportunity really there. Miles, what was your initial strategy when you started to work with PlanForward? What was the reason behind the partnership?

Myles McAllister: So, the reason was pretty simple. And the fact that quite honestly, we were a little reluctant about membership plans. And we said, okay, we have about 17 or 18 offices that sort of have these legacy membership plans. We need to, one, get them on a single one. And then two, we need to have the data. at the senior leadership level to be able to get the insight to see like, hey, what’s the return on this? Is this working? And just simple things as, why are we giving patients discounts who are no longer members? Something like that. And so we kind of went to the vendors and we looked around and we met with Jane and Megan and we said, hey, we really like the team. We really like them. We think they can deliver on this. And it’s exceeded our expectations as far as as far as the team and the implementation and just everything about it. The So it really sort of started with just, hey, we need to consolidate and we need insight, right? We need the data to do that. And then it’s sort of taken off into, wow, there’s a lot more to the membership plans than we thought as far as metrics and being able to drive operations. And it’s been a nice tailwind for us.

Bill Neumann: So you started off, you had practices that were either not using membership plans or using different membership plans. And so you were able to move everybody over to plan forward. Probably talk a little bit about that process too, because I know change in some of these practices at the practice level can be challenging to say the least. Yeah.

Myles McAllister: Yeah, change management is is always again, it’s a people management business. Change management is it’s always hard. No one likes change, they like their routine, they like their comfort. But the trick to the trick to all of this is explaining the why and. The why is really has to be driven in data and the doctors in particular, they respond to data. And I think if you’re able to sit down, walk them through, explain to them that, hey, you have a high percentage of limited patients, right? So like triage patients, emergency patients coming in. You have a high percentage of uninsured patients. Your call conversion rate on your uninsured patients is pretty low and you’re worried about your production. Well, the membership plan is able to do that. Why? Because it converts, it’s going to be able to convert at a higher rate those limited patients to reoccurring patients. It’s going to be able to convert those insurance patients into long-term, durable, reliable patients. It’s going to be able to convert those phone calls that were not getting scheduled to the schedule. And so when the data, so when we launched it, right, we launched it at a certain, we piloted it. And the pilot just exceeded our expectations as far as results. So, when we were able to sit down now with Offsys and show them the results of the pilot Offsys and say, hey, we think this is a winning formula for you. Here’s why. And you explain all this and you show them their current state and you show them their future state sort of with the membership. The light bulb goes off, you explain the why. Next thing you know, they’re bought in. They’re like, when can we get this started and rolled out as quickly as possible? And so, you know, we’ve went from sort of just thinking, hey, originally it was the 17 or 19 offices to now, hey, we kind of want to scale this in particular in areas where we see high limited percentage of patients, high uninsured patients. And just at a broader level, I think, right, there’s just tremendous opportunity throughout SGA to offer membership. The key is visits, is growing visits, right? That is the golden brick road in any healthcare sitting. Yes, I know dentistry, not every visit is the same. You could theoretically say that one visit is not the same, so therefore it’s not visit growth, but I do think visit growth is the key. It’s durable, it’s reliable, it’s consistent. And to me, that’s what I’m looking for. I’m looking for a platform that is consistent, reliable, and durable. And again, the membership program is gonna help that. And what we’ve already seen is that On average, our hygiene patients come in about 1.45 times per year, which, you know, again, that’s something we measure with the planned membership. It’s higher. It’s somewhere around 1.6 plus times coming in per year. And then again, right when they’re coming in, there’s usually a higher production associated with them. And so that’s, again, it’s just saying, hey, there’s something to this. Let’s look at it. Let’s really look at scaling it and making sure that we implement it correctly. So hopefully that kind of answers your question.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it sure does. So the strategy initially was, hey, let’s just try and get everybody on the same membership plan. But now that you’ve got that figured out, what are some of the things you look at now? What’s that strategy like going forward with PlanForward’s membership plan?

Myles McAllister: I think the strategy for us is to really implement it where we see those opportunities that I defined. There’s four levers that you talked about, which is the high limited, the high uninsured, the low conversion rate, and just the opportunity, meaning the case acceptance or some other factors that are going in. And you start looking at it and you’re like, hey, this is a great opportunity to scale it and grow it. And then ultimately what we see it as, we see it as a tailwind for Visigroup. We think that you’re going to get your patients coming more often, that they’re bought in and that they see the benefits of it. It’s really turning them into those sort of those loyal lifetime value patient versus there’s transactional patients. And to us, that’s the key to dentistry is you got to create the consistency and those lifelong patients versus the sort of transactional patient, if you will.

Bill Neumann: Jay, Miles talked a little bit about some of the metrics and KPIs that they look at at SGA. Are there any others that you would say are pretty important when it comes to, you know, the data that you see, you know, through your membership plan platform?

Jane Levy: Yeah, so the platform does integrate to the practice management system, which is crucial for bringing all that data into our analytics dashboard. And so what we try to quantify is not only the financial impact of these member patients, but really also kind of a behavioral value, if you will. So how often do they visit? How much treatment do they accept? How often do they cancel? How often do they actually show up for their appointments, et cetera? And so, you know, some of this is, you know, our platform syncs daily with the practice management system. And so it provides an almost real-time view into the business impact of the membership program. So we track, you know, kind of three broad buckets of metrics. The first is what’s the value of that membership patient? And so this can be broken down into some of the things that Myles spoke about, the visits, the net and gross production per member, the treatment acceptance, the show rate. Then we look at things like the missed opportunity, for example. So if a typical membership plan is five or $600 and your conversion is let’s say five or 15 or 50% of your uninsured patient base, what does that mean in terms of business impact on the collection side? And then finally on the operational side, what value is your plan actually delivering to that patient? And we track things like hygiene reappointment, membership renewal or treatment acceptance in order to try and calibrate whether their plan is really adding value to the patient. So SGA has also been a great partner on this front. They’ve given us a lot of feedback in terms of how they think about the business. And so we’ve been able to build that into the analytics dashboard.

Myles McAllister: Bill, I will say this, what Jane is saying is essentially it’s an operational tool, right? So rather than being something that is just a product that we’re using, this is built into literally our daily habits. Every morning our senior vice president looks at it, right? I get a report on it. We talk about it. In fact, I just had our director’s call today where we were talking about the growth of it in June and even yesterday, right, where we got 41 patients in one day signed up. This is an operational tool for us. And the trick to any vendor is once it becomes an operational tool, meaning it’s embedded in operations, it’s very hard to pull that out. So there’s vendors that just provide software, but it’s not embedded into the true operations. This is something that’s embedded truly into the operations driving production. That’s a high ROI and there’s very few platforms out there that are driving ROI from a production basis. Yes, there’s a lot that provide data, But again, this drives production, this drives ROI, but it also provides the data, which I think is a huge differentiator.

Bill Neumann: I have a couple of questions wrapped around. You talked a little bit about maybe moving one practice from either a membership program, or maybe they didn’t have anything, and so you were bringing this. And speak to what that onboarding process looks like, and then who are the stakeholders? Are we, we’ve got somebody who’s answering the phone, so they have it, does the script change, so they’re asking the questions, the right questions, and then is there somebody that’s actually, you know, so when you do get a new membership plan customer, patient, you know, is there somebody that inputs that data? How does that all work?

Myles McAllister: Which person do you want to answer?

Bill Neumann: Maybe different, I don’t know. Go ahead, Gene.

Jane Levy: So I’d say, you know, SGA really teed it up for us. So for starters, we did do a pilot in about 17, 18 locations that already had experience with membership. And so those were, you know, a relatively easy switch over because as you mentioned, the different stakeholders within the practice from the provider to the front office, to the hygienist, everybody had some familiarity with membership. So it was just a case of moving the existing members over to the plan for platform. And then going forward, where it’s more green fields, practices that haven’t had experience with membership, Plan 4 does take a very custom approach. So we offer everything from a one-on-one meeting with every single practice individually, where we can address their specific concerns. And then as we roll out, there are group sessions for training and future education where the practices together can strategize, share best practices, et cetera. And so the plans, SGA has chosen to roll out a couple of plans, but with the same pricing across most of the locations. And so the plan forward can manage any kind of rollout, whether it’s custom by practice or one plan for the entire group. But we do have one team that’s involved in the onboarding, training, education, et cetera. That team is 100% accountable for the growth of the membership program, for keeping the practices engaged. So we have a 30-, 60-, and 90-day check-in with each practice. And we also have a quarterly business review with the management team. One of the things that I do want to stress again is that we fold around the existing practices within the group. So in the case of SGA, for example, where the RCM process is extremely well defined, Provider compensation is well-defined. We will wrap around that and work with the teams to make sure that, you know, all the membership production that needs to be recorded in the practice management system and all the accounting that goes on behind the scenes with membership is aligned, streamlined, and we provide a lot of reporting on that front. So the platform itself enables the teams to pull reports, to track provider compensation and just to track everything that they need to ensure that the practice management system reflects the reality of the production. So it is a very custom approach, but obviously we rely on the groups to get the practices kind of bought in before we walk in so that change management is far easier and quicker.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that’s great. I always try and focus on that because you mentioned it earlier when we first started the podcast, Jane, that there’s a lot of technology in the industry. I mean, it’s coming at you, you know, Miles as a COO, I’m sure you look at all these great technological solutions out there and go, this sounds great, but You can have a great platform and a great solution, but if you don’t have a company to back it up and give you that training and support and education that inevitably you’re going to need, it’s not really going to be helpful. So it’s great to hear that you’ve got something so structured and that you can customize it because, as we know, every DSO seems to operate just a little bit differently. So you just can’t have a cookie cutter approach.

Myles McAllister: No, absolutely. I will say this, it’s been seamless for us as far as the integrations and scaling it even beyond the 17 original pilot practices now. And usually at my level, very rarely does good news sort of bubble up to me. It’s usually something that needs attention or sort of something that needs to be addressed. But it’s been overwhelmingly positive about plan forward. And usually, right, no news is good news, which in this case, good news actually got to me. Usually it’s, you know, no news is good news, meaning everything’s going well, but people actually had really good things to say about it, both from the doctors and the teams, the office managers, and from the regional directors that it was a really seamless rollout for us.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. So the 80% of you or the 75% of you that aren’t using a membership plan in the audience need to really take a listen here. As we wrap up the podcast, I always ask a crystal ball question. So we can start with you, Miles, a little bit about what the future for SGA looks like, and then just your thoughts on the industry as a whole.

Myles McAllister: So the future of They’re a little linked to some degree, but I think the future for SGA is we really like the regional density. We think there’s a ton of synergies that we get operationally from it. And we’re just going to continue to sort of look at the Southeast as sort of the area where we want to continue to grow and partner and really sort of lead the way. I think for SGA, for us, I think it’s really the patient experience is becoming paramount, which is you’ve got to provide a top-notch patient experience for them. It’s got to differentiate from others so that you can retain those patients. And then again, I think it’s just the organic growth for us that’s really become well-known in the sort of the, the industry, if you will, it was well known when I, you know, for me personally, that’s what I sort of pride myself on was the organic growth in my other healthcare settings. So easy transition for me was really focused on organic growth, continue to drive that and really try to exceed. As far as the industry goes, you know, it’s, You could say the next five, you could say the next 10 years. I think I sort of look at the next 10 years and where it’s going. And I do think that dentistry is making a really big push and it’s starting to get some traction into the overall healthcare ecosystem. And I think people are realizing that there’s a connection from the body and the mouth and the oral systemic health, if you will, of a patient. And I do think that dentistry is going to be brought into that, eventually into the fold. and be viewed as sort of a place where you can get dentistry, but potentially a place where you can also get your hands-on care, whether it’s blood pressure testing or screenings or flu shots. I mean, you name it. The fact is your dental patients go to the dentist more than they go to their primary care. And you know, that’s access to care. So I think dentistry has found that. In fact, if you start, what is the most common healthcare trait currently? It’s brushing your teeth twice a day. That’s a well-known fact that people, you know, are kind of dismissive of, or they don’t think it’s a big deal, but somehow the dental industry has been able to go into every single home, every single patient, and everyone knows that they should brush their teeth twice a day. You know, that’s not necessarily… There’s nothing like that maybe in healthcare, except maybe like a colonoscopy screening, right, at age 40, right? If you’re high risk, 45 traditionally, right? Maybe that’s well known. But other than that, there’s very few things that the dental sort of isn’t… It’s just well known. So I do think that the future is going to be brought into the fold more. It’s going to be looked at. I think ultimately technology is going to play an aspect of this. You’re really talking about the patient experience from getting picked up in an Uber, which we all know transportation is a leading cause of broken appointments in any health care setting, including dentistry. to walking into a self-check-in, to a diagnostic AI, to potentially a robotic sort of controlled procedure with oversight from the dentist, then into, you’re talking 3D printing, to check out of RCM, to boom, taking the Uber back home. And that’s beyond, that’s many, many years away, right? I’m not saying that that’s happening anytime soon. The technology that is taking off, it’s really started leading the path of like this futuristic sort of patient experience. But the key to it is not losing the human touch, to not losing, you know, the feel. What I always say about health care or good health care or good care, you know it when you see it. But it’s very hard to quantify, but you know it when you see it. It could be the touch from a doctor. It could be the words of affirmation. It could be the little things that give you that sort of comfort. But we can’t lose that, even with all the technology and the futuristic state and the way everything is moving. It’s still a people-oriented business, right? And you can’t lose that aspect of it. And I’ll turn it over to Gene.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, well said. Last question for you, Myles, sorry, and then we’ll turn it over to Gene. If anybody in the audience wants to learn more about SGA partners, what’s the best way to do that?

Myles McAllister: So the best way to do it would obviously you can go to our website, just Google SGA Dental Partners. That’s probably the best way. We have a form on there. You can reach out. You can also reach out to myself. There’s contact information there, but my email is on there as well as Myles McAllister, CEO of SGA. We can get you in touch. For anyone looking to learn more, please try to go to our website and try to Google us as best you can.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Yeah, and I will drop the URL in the show notes and then also your contact information. Thank you, Miles. Jane, how about the future membership plans? And then, you know, what’s planned forward have in store for us?

Jane Levy: Gee, well, it wouldn’t be a group dentistry now conversation without the mention of AI. So I have to mention that, but that’s definitely something that’s on our near term roadmap. And that is really infusing our analytics dashboard with AI, enabling really us to identify the criteria by which a patient can be evaluated for membership. So it’s not enough to just say this person’s uninsured, they’re a great candidate for membership. What else? We can look at things like how many times they visited. Do they have treatment presented, not accepted? So there’s a whole series of metrics that we’re now trying to identify to identify the perfect candidate. for conversion to membership. And then we can build that into the tech in terms of alerts in the practice management system for when that patient walks in, as well as other intelligence to drop out of that analytics, including if you had gaps in your schedule, who should you schedule based on the revenue potential? of that patient. We could also ultimately perhaps have some impact on how practices think about optimizing the supply, so how capacity essentially, because obviously members generally visit at least twice a year. So how do you think about optimizing the number of laboratories or the capacity that the practice or throughput of the practice? So there’s lots of different ways to build intelligence through the AI tools that are available currently. And so that’s what’s on our near term roadmap. Longer term, obviously we want membership, we want all the uninsured patients in a practice, usually about 20 to 25% of the average practice to be members. At least 50% is our near term goal. And that’s what we’re on the road to do.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. And Jane, how do people learn more about PlanForward, or how do they get in touch with you?

Jane Levy: So it’s planforward.io is the website, and my email address is jlevy at planforward.io. Actually, one other thing I’ll mention, because we have this incredible analytics dashboard, what we are talking to practices about is if you do have an in-house membership program that you’re running and you don’t really understand or have a good grasp of the impact of these members, we will do a membership assessment for you. So we’ll literally plug into your practice management system and pull all the data into the dashboard. And within a day or two, you’ll be able to see what your members are doing, what the impact on the business is, and especially compared to the uninsured patient cohort. So, if that’s of interest, go to the website, book a meeting with us and we can tell you more.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Great. Thank you, Jane and Myles. Great conversation today. And thanks everybody for watching us or listening in. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.

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