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!

Streamlining Payments in Dentistry: Insights from Rectangle Health and Great Lakes Dental.

Donna Ramadan, VP of Revenue Cycle Management at Great Lakes Dental Partners & Ryan Merriman, Senior Enterprise Account Manager at Rectangle Health discuss:

The impact of technology on patient collections & payer interactions
Reducing AR from $8 million to $2 million
The importance of compliance in healthcare
Much More

To learn more about Rectangle Health you can visit https://www.rectanglehealth.com/ or visit the DSO Resource Guide – https://dso.pub/Rectangle

To learn more about Great Lakes Dental Partners visit – https://www.greatlakesdentalpartners.com/

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Streamlining payments DSO podcast transcript: Rectangle Health

Welcome to the Group Dentistry Now show, the voice of the DSO industry. Kim Larson and Bill Neumann talk to industry leaders about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. Visit groupdentistrynow.com for more DSO analysis, news, and events. Looking for a job or have a job to fill? Visit joindso.com. We hope you enjoy today’s show.

Bill Neumann: I’d like to welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I am Bill Neumann, and as always, we appreciate you tuning in. We are well over 200 podcasts and just going strong. So without great listeners like you, we couldn’t do it. And it’s a lot of fun always have. Great topics, and actually have two new guests. We have a lot of returning guests to the podcast. We have two new guests to our podcast here, and we’re going to focus on automating patient and payer payments to reduce AR. We talk a lot about RCM. And really like to introduce to you first Donna Ramadan. She is the Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management and Compliance for Great Lakes Dental Partners. Donna, thanks for being on the show.

Donna Ramadan: Hi, Bill. Thanks for having me.

Bill Neumann: This is going to be a really fun conversation here. Donna has a really curious background that we’re going to have to dig deeper on. She is a registered nurse. She has ICU and trauma clinical experience. And she decided to get her master’s in business administration. and spent a lot of time in revenue cycle management in a medical and hospital system. So we’re going to find out all about that and how that might differ compared to the dental industry. And we also have with us Ryan Merriman, he is a senior enterprise account manager at Rectangle Health. He’s been with Rectangle for six years. And it’s funny, I was reading the bio he sent over, and he says, from boots on the ground, knocking on doors, and climbing under desks to plug-in devices, to working with our top strategic accounts like Great Lakes. So, Ryan, great to have you here as well.

Ryan Merriman: Thanks for having me, Bill. Excited to be here.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, this is, this is, this is great. Donna, why don’t we start off with you? Would you mind kind of giving us a little bit of your background, maybe starting at that, you know, as an RN and then the switch over to getting your master’s and maybe your journey in revenue cycle management and to the dental industry?

Donna Ramadan: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Yes. As you mentioned, I’m a registered nurse. I think I was genetically required to be my great grandmother and my mother were both nurses. I really enjoyed being a bedside nurse. And as you had mentioned, I worked in the ICU and the trauma unit. Sorry to tell people nothing. Nothing scares me. So I was at the bedside for many years and then was invited to move into a leadership role. where I ran a 38-bed inpatient unit. From there, I moved to the outpatient side and ran an occupational health unit or department. And that was my first kind of exposure to what we now know as revenue cycle. It was like my own business. And so I had from the beginning through the end of billing, coding, all of that. And that really intrigued me. you know, beyond the clinical component of nursing. So it was at that point I went back to school and got a master’s degree in business and then explored other opportunities. And I first started off as a patient access director at a hospital. And then that quickly grew into me being the leader over the entire revenue cycle. I’ve been on the hospital side my entire career, from small community hospitals to large academic medical centers. I was at the Cleveland Clinic for a number of years. And so I transitioned into the dental space about three years ago.

Bill Neumann: And for some in the audience that may not know about Great Lakes, a little bit about the group that you work with.

Donna Ramadan: For sure. We are a 28-office DSO. We are headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Most of our practices are in the Chicagoland area, and we have five in Northwest Indiana. Mostly general practitioners, but we also have every specialist from orthodontics to oral surgery to periodontics and prostodontics.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Thank you, Donna, for that. Ryan, how about you? A little bit about your background and can you also tell us about Rectangle Health?

Ryan Merriman: Well, thank you, Bill. So my name is Ryan Merriman and I am a Senior Enterprise Account Manager here at Rectangle Health. And that’s kind of the beauty about our company is we have different divisions depending on the scope and the size of the accounts and the organizations we’re working with. So I strictly work with clients like Donna, like Great Lakes Dental Partners, you know, mainly your, your DSOs anywhere from, you know, 10, 15 locations to 300 locations. Um, so that, that’s kind of how, where I’m at today, how I started. I know we talked about in the bio is, um, I’ve been with the company for about six years. Um, you know, prior to my current role, uh, I was driving 3,000 miles a month, you know, and in my state, which I grew up in, it’s Oklahoma. Um, very proud of that. I’m a Oklahoma country boy. And, um, you know, as, as our, our software has grown, as our company has grown. That’s kind of the beauty about our company is within the company there’s growth for different levels of the clients we work with. So today, Enterprise Account Manager, I actually started off working for Rectangle for a pretty cool, I like to say organic reason. My wife, my father-in-law, owned his own dental practice for 25 years. And my mother-in-law was his office manager. And one of my really good friends worked with Rectangle Health in California. And I told him I was moving back home. I kind of said, you know, what I was interested in, obviously wanted to be, you know, kind of more at home with my family and still be able to do something amazing. And once I really learned what Rectangle Health does, you know, everything that we do as an organization, as a company is to, is to simplify the business side of healthcare, right, is make life easier for our end users. You know, Everything we do is focused on, you know, the end, the end user, the office manager, whether that’s, you know, organizations like, like Donna, right. If, if you’re talking about dealing with a lot of locations at scale, um, that’s kind of why I love Rectangle Health is every software update that we implement is specifically designed because we’ve heard a need or a want or a pain point from our clients. And we either go, you know, partner with a company to make that happen, or we go build it. But that’s why I’m here and in my current role.

Bill Neumann: And Ryan, a little bit about what Rectangle Health does. I mean, is it focused on payer and patient payments? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Ryan Merriman: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, that’s kind of the great thing about Rectangle Health is we started off, you know, we’ve been on the payment side, let’s call it, of health care. for 30 years, right? So there’s just so many things that we’ve. just been built from the ground up, that are built for healthcare, whether that’s, you know, being able to interface, integrate to any EMR out there. You know, our software’s HIPAA PCI encrypted. So that’s a huge relief for our clients as well. But the other nice thing is, you know, especially in Donna’s case, right, with organizations with that many locations, that many employees, you know, nine times out of 10, There’s a completely different software for engagement, right? Appointment reminders. There’s a completely different software for financing. Sometimes there’s another vendor for virtual payments, right? Text to pay or online pay. And then, you know, kind of another thing that we added to our software tech stack is compliance. Not just what we do on the payment side, right? The PCI compliance side. of health care, but when it comes to actual, you know, HIPAA, OSHA, right, binders, training, we now encompass or kind of put that all together on one platform or what we call the unified navigation. So now when we deliver, you know, our clients can have, you know, everything from precare to getting that appointment, to card on file, to post adjudication payments with payer sync, and compliance all in one solution. So that’s been one of the, I think one of the greatest things about Rectangle Health’s evolution is, you know, most of the time we’re taking what most people are doing with three or four different vendors, and we’re able to deliver that with one solution, with Practice Management Bridge.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that is a great point. And there’s a, Tremendous amount of solutions out there, and the problem is you’re working with so many different vendors, and sometimes the solutions don’t talk to each other really well, which can be an issue. Donna, you spend a lot of time on the hospital side of things. What are some of the main differences that you see here when it comes to RCM in the dental space?

Donna Ramadan: I think the difference between a hospital and dental is that hospital is probably about 30 years ahead of the dental industry in terms of not only market consolidation, but interactions with payers and patients. In my view, RCM in the dental space has a lot more friction and hurdles with, you know, patient collections, payer, payment receipt. It’s more streamlined in the hospital space, whereas dental, it’s a little bit more of a struggle and it feels like the goalpost keeps moving and nothing is standard and every payer has their own rules and requirements about how to submit a claim, how payments are issued. So, you know, definitely is challenging, but, you know, therein lies the opportunity and what was exciting for me moving from the medical space into dental.

Bill Neumann: And were you able to kind of bring some of the things I’ve, first of all, I think you said 30 years ahead. I was like, I’ve heard we’re behind like 20 years. I never heard 30. So we’re pretty far behind. But that is a pretty common theme that you hear that from the consolidation side of things, but then also just from, you know, some of the solutions that are out there as well. Were you able to take anything that you learned or in the medical space, on the hospital side of things, and apply that over at Great Lakes?

Donna Ramadan: Yeah, I think there’s certainly emerging technologies in the dental space, as Ryan was speaking about. And we’re an adopter of what is called PayerSync, that we had similar functionality in medical, and that is now coming to dental, where we can route electronic payer payments which is normally or many of them would come in as a virtual credit card, which just slows things down, costs money, of course, that we don’t really have that in medical. So in the dental space, interacting with those virtual credit cards and having the hassles there to streamline that has really been beneficial for us. I think also one of the things that we have done with the support of Rectangle that has been transformational to our DSO is paper statements, which I know a lot of practices are getting away from paper statements, and maybe it’s just a function of Our patient population, we get better response from patients when we mail them a statement. We use QR codes for those that want to scan that and pay their bill in that way, but implementing paper statements, tax to pay, and then having credit card on file has really been transformative for Great Lakes in terms of a patient AR reduction. When I joined Great Lakes, our patient AR was about $8 million. And with all of the technology that we have implemented and ways to reach patients create a frictionless payment experience. We’ve brought that down to just about $2 million, and that we’ve done over the course of about two years.

Bill Neumann: Wow, that’s huge. So from $8 million to $2 million in AR reduction. Wow. OK, so how, maybe, Don, if you want to start this off, and then Ryan can tag in. How did the partnership really begin, and what were you looking to achieve? It sounds like you were looking to achieve, at least in large part, to reduce that AR, right?

Donna Ramadan: Yes. So that was kind of item number one for me when I joined Great Lakes, being kind of struck a little bit by the $8 million AR level. And I was questioning, how are we even communicating balances to patients? And we really did not have a good mechanism in place to do that. We were challenged with collections even at the office level as well. And then once the patient leaves, either has their braces removed or that cavity filled and crowned place and they go out into the world, our opportunity of collecting that really diminishes. So our first step and the first thing we did with Rectangle was creating a patient statement that we mail out. The statement is it’s very it’s beautiful. It’s color-coded based on the aging bucket that the balance is in. It has clear language on there of what code, the date of service, the patient’s balance, where it’s coming from, including any insurance payments and adjustments. So it was really transparent for the patient to see and understand in a very patient-friendly format. why they owe that balance. Not to deride any prior company that we worked with before, but our statements before or the information we were giving to patients before was not as easy to understand. So I think it just caused patients to shut down and ignore anything that we were communicating to them in terms of balance. So now that we can present them with a very easy-to-understand, patient-friendly statement that has really driven a better response. Along with the QR code, which, you know, depending on the technology comfort level of the patient, we do get quite a few payments coming in that way as well. Tax-to-pay is something that we implemented around the same time. And we see, depending on which office and where they’re located, varying levels of response. Some of our more suburban or borderline rural practices, we don’t get as much response with the tax-to-pay, whereas our practices that are in the city and very close suburbs, really, we get a much better response with tax-to-pay.

Bill Neumann: Huh, that’s interesting. Ryan, talk about it from your perspective coming in, working for the first time with Great Lakes. What did the situation look like from your perspective, and what were some of the things that Rectangle recommended to reduce that AR, and any insights from you?

Ryan Merriman: Yeah, I, I, uh, I was excited to work with, with great lakes. Um, you know, Donna has done amazing things with the software and that’s kind of one of the nice things about working with people like Donna and groups like great lakes is, you know, when you see an opportunity to use software to your advantage and, you know, work smarter, not harder, it’s, it’s really nice to meet people and work with people like that. Because I think there’s so many mindsets out there, treat them and bill them later. What’s the ROI if I implement the software? There’s just a lot of people who They kind of almost, they’re scared to take a step in technology to make life easier and makes things more efficient. And that’s the opposite with Donna, you know. They work with us, you know, vaulting cards, right, putting cards on file for a threshold. You know, the text to pay, bulk text features. payers sync for the post adjudicated payments. And they also utilize us for compliance as well, right, in all their organizations. So I think that was kind of the most exciting thing is being able to work with a partner who truly understands that, you know, these tools lead to faster payments, more efficiency, and, you know, a direct impact on EBITDA, right, which is what most of our organizations are really focusing on. Um, and, and that’s really kind of our mindset of rectangle health is how can we make it better? How can we make it faster and more efficient and, and how can we make it user friendly? Right. That’s another thing that I think. I hear across my portfolio is, you know, all the things we built were, were kind of coming from, Hey, we, what if this was like this, or what if, can you guys do this? A lot of our updates are built from, you know, clients telling us. Can you build this? So that’s kind of the beauty is just, uh, getting to work with organizations like, like great lakes and people really, you know, taking technology and, and. and next steps, I think, has been the best part.

Bill Neumann: And I’d love to focus a little bit more on the use of paper statements. So you transitioned, Donna, just so I understand and the audience understands, you had a system in place prior, probably included paper statements weren’t quite as easy to read. You have QR codes on there now. So if somebody wants to actually pay by QR code, they could do that. You also mentioned that It seems like suburban and rural respond better to the paper than the text-to-pay. But you still feel that there is a need for paper statements because you hear people moving away from paper. I don’t know how much of that is actually true, but you do hear that.

Donna Ramadan: Yes. We have, we feel that, or we have had better response from our patients with the paper statement. I know that while the industry maybe is going away from that, because there is cost associated with it. It has worked for us. It has worked well. We are going to look into, you know, kind of automating some of that and using primarily only email and text. But from my experience with at least our patient population, the paper statement just resonates better, and maybe because they can see the detail, maybe because it’s something that they can hold in their hand. We intend to continue to use paper statements for the majority of our patient balance collection.

Bill Neumann: Ryan, what do you see from some of the other clients? Is paper still pretty much used?

Ryan Merriman: Yeah. I mean, I think the main call out I will say is, you know, what Donna, you know, obviously what works for their patient group, but the QR codes on those statements is, is kind of a, I think the unsung hero here. Right. If, if I can, you know, look at that, scan that QR code with my phone and pay at 10 o’clock at night or nine o’clock after a busy day, then that is just giving me, you know, it’s kind of time technology and right. That, that. that paper feel that, that they’re all used to. But I do, I do think it’s, that’s kind of the beauty of Rectangle Health. And what we do is, is, you know, all of our softwares, right, everybody that we work with, it comes with a text-to-pay, it comes with a QR code that’s, you know, white-labeled back to the practice. Um, and then we have options like paper statements. And I think that’s the nice thing is it’s not a take it or leave it environment, right? It’s really what works best for that particular organization. Um, but I do see, you know, a 50 50 probably more leaning towards a digital workflow and, you know, digital, um, they are collection, but. you know, there’s always going to be a certain percentage of your population. That’s going to want that, that physical copy as well. So we like to just kind of, you know, leave that up to the decision makers at the practices and at, at the organizational level and deliver on whatever they need.

Bill Neumann: Sure. And obviously, it’s working. You go from 8 million in AR to 2 million. So that’s a huge accomplishment. So Donna, where do you go from here? You’ve reduced your AR quite a bit as an understatement, a lot. So what is the strategy now going forward with Rectangle Health?

Donna Ramadan: Yeah, so we’ve really, I think, kind of solved a lot of our patient AR challenges. And while our insurance AR is very clean and not really any issues there, we are now working with Rectangle Health with PayorSync, which allows us to be paid more quickly. because those payments route through and then it’s direct posted from the rectangle system and then we can bring that into the PMS. So that we’ve been using PayorSync for about six months now with very good results and it has reduced payment lag time from, gosh, depending on the payer, two weeks to a couple days. And so that has worked very well for us.

Bill Neumann: Ryan, could you go into some detail on exactly what PayorSync is and how it works?

Ryan Merriman: Absolutely. Yeah. So, you know, like Donna so kindly mentioned is, Our software was built for that in-clinic, pre-treatment, post-treatment environment, but there was a whole other efficiency on the back end with payers, right? And once a claim is settled, that post-adjudication process, and that’s where we saw a problem that just didn’t have really a good solution, right? You know, there’s a lot of organizations, whether it’s, you know, virtual credit cards that are being faxed, right, printed. You know, sometimes you get a check, right, which takes FTE hours. There’s a lot of human intervention. There’s ACH+, right? There’s a lot of different ways. And, you know, if you’re a one or two location practice, you’re normally wearing five to 10 different hats, right? So parking yourself in a chair for three hours on a Friday to go ahead and take an hour or two to input all that data is a huge pain point that we can solve. But then furthermore with organizations like Donna’s is when you’re at scale and you’re talking about 30 locations, we’re talking, anywhere from $80,000 to $200,000 in revenue a month that is funneling this way. And there was really nothing that was making it faster and more efficient. So we actually created the software, which is known as PayerSync. And the best way to explain it is we have direct API connections to the main payers. Think of Zealous or Echo or Optum, especially in the dental world. And now once that claim is settled, The funding, you know, historically we’re seeing 10 to 15 days faster funding. So Donna pretty much hit that right on the head. If we think of, you know, actual business days and then, you know, two to three hours a week per location in FTE hours in actual remit, right? So kind of removing that manual entry of a VCC, removing the need to drive to the bank or, you know, grab that check, input that data. And the other big efficiency is PayerSync has its own action tab within our software. So I can be running a payment in person over the phone, vaulting a card, and then I get notified that I got a claim that came in. And the nice thing is that claim is it tells you everything about it. It tells you the payer, The full amount, once you click into those claims, you know, some claims will have multiple claims inside of it, right? Each pair sync claim that comes in. It breaks out who paid, right? Whether it’s Echo, Zealous, or Optum. It tells you the remit codes. And I think another big kind of efficiency that people have loved is the actual EOP, right, for that claim is actually digitized and stored in Bridge, which you can download and print. I think that’s an unspoken thing that people love is, you know, that was another frustration is all of these payers, their EOPs look completely different. So, you know, data over here looks this way, data over there looks this way. And I’m logging into multiple portal portals to pull that information. And this kind of puts it all into one place. And, um, it’s just been a game changer for, for clients because it’s a necessary evil, right? There’s always going to be post adjudication. There’s always going to be insurance payments, especially in the dental world. And, and, you know, the, the bigger you grow as an organization, the bigger that number gets. So I think, especially in today’s world with EBITDA and, you know, cashflow getting that, you know, insert X, right. Like I said, 80 to 200 grand a month. Getting that in two days is, is a lot more important than, you know, wanting to wait three weeks because we’re going to go be a check. Right.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, absolutely. Donna, can you, um, maybe cover some of the results that you’re seeing, uh, with the use of PayorSync?

Donna Ramadan: Well, just to build on what Ryan was saying, definitely shorter payment timelines. We’re getting paid much faster, and I always feel good that when the providers notice that, that we’re doing something right. I’ve had several of our providers say to me, I don’t know what you’re doing, but keep doing it because we’re getting paid so much faster. Because most of our providers are paid on collections. So they’re getting paid more and getting paid faster. So they feel great about that. So I feel that that’s a victory. And one other thing that I wanted to touch on that Ryan had already mentioned that, you know, we often receive, you know, many, many patient payments on one remit. And it was a little bit challenging at the beginning to identify where they go. We use Zentist. They are our hosting team. And they were a little bit challenged. And based on feedback that they gave, Rectangle was able to add the claim ID into the Rectangle portal so then our posters could see and able to post very, very quickly. And that really dropped the time that it took for them to post the payment. So, you know, the point there that I’m trying to make is that, you know, the Rectangle works with you based on what your needs are and what you request, you know, specifically to ease posting. And adding that claim ID was transformational for our posting team at Zentypist. They spend literally seconds on to post an insurance payment on a particular claim. So it’s really been a great experience for us. I know that the VCC fees that go along with it is a challenge, kind of a bitter pill to swallow almost, and that nobody likes to pay those, but you often can’t get around that. There are some payers that that is the only way they will pay you. So if you’re going to pay the fee, at least have built-in efficiency to get those payments to come in in a faster and more productive way. So it’s been a great experience for us using Payersync.

Bill Neumann: So do you think that’s why a lot of health care providers are hesitant to accept virtual credit cards? Is it really that fee? Is that the big hesitancy?

null: 100%.

Donna Ramadan: Yes. And as much as we can, we try to get to ERAs or electronic remit. But not all payers do that. Many of the payers use virtual credit cards. I wish I knew why. I don’t have an answer for that. So there’s just some cases that you are not able to get around that virtual credit card. So we figured if we are having to accept those anyway, at least we can gain efficiency.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. So what else is on the radar for Great Lakes and Rectangle Health? You want to start off, Ryan?

Ryan Merriman: Well, I was actually going to chime in one more, just a little bit on kind of just what Donna was saying, just kind of piggyback off of that. That’s also kind of the that’s the beauty with Rectangle Health is there’s no additional SAS or, you know, transactional fees with our payer sync upgrade due to the fact that we have partnerships with these payers now. So that’s another nice thing that current clients are seeing is just basically automating that workflow. Um, another big thing I wanted to point out is I think a lot of people when they’re, when they’re shying away from that, you know, post adjudication virtual credit card or, you know, automating that process, they don’t really factor in the time, right? The FT hours involved in, in the, the checks, right? The paper checks and, and, you know, the manual entry and, and the time that the staff has relieved from them by turning on pay or sync. Um, another thing is, you know, checks get left in, you know, drawers and so do virtual credit cards, right? If we get a fax or an email, we print it. I, I hate, I won’t name names, but, um, we actually just had another client, very similar to Donna, that’s very, very happy with PayerSync. And one of the things that, um, led them to us was. a missed payment of close to $70,000 that went missing for about three months until they found it in the office. And you can kind of imagine that amount of money sitting wondering where it’s at. Never having to worry about a headache like that because it instantly transaction funds once the claim is approved. can, can be a game changer. That’s obviously a unique scenario, but that’s just one story, you know, uh, that I, I like to tell at least. Yeah.

Bill Neumann: Yeah. I’m sure that happens more often than, uh, probably most don’t share that, but I bet you that was very, very transparent.

Ryan Merriman: You know, you gotta, gotta appreciate that.

Bill Neumann: So that is a great point you made there, Ryan, that there aren’t any SAS fees when you use pay or sync. So you might have to deal with the fees with the virtual credit cards, which you’re not going to be able to, at least at this point, get around with some payers, but no fee with pay or sync. Yeah, so just going forward, talk a little bit about what the partnership looks like with Rectangle Health and Great Lakes.

Ryan Merriman: Yeah, we are always growing with our technology, growing with Great Lakes as well. I think the biggest thing or the biggest focus for Rectangle Health as a company currently is just really trying to Beef up pair sync, our integrations with our payment vendors and software companies. Always trying to be ahead of the curve on upgrades that we can do for equipment and whether that’s contactless. Automation is a big thing for us. Automation of those bulk text-to-pay reports. And then of course, you know, getting more payers into the PayerSync portal. We really want to make sure at some point that every, you know, every claim possible is ingested and sitting there waiting for our clients.

Bill Neumann: And Donna, as far as Great Lakes, are you focusing still on organic growth there? First off, Donna, you’re in the most popular position in the DSO space now. Nobody knew what RCM was three years ago, and then interest rates started to climb, and now everybody’s focused on RCM and organic growth. Can you talk a little bit about strategy for Great Lakes in 2025?

Donna Ramadan: Yeah, just same story, organic growth. We do not have any acquisitions in the pipeline that we’re targeting at this time. We are considering reopening one of the practices that we had closed at one point. Reopening that is like a de novo, so we’re excited about that. you know, to answer your other question a few minutes ago about other things that we’re working on with rectangle. I can’t be, I can’t help but mention the compliance tool that we have with Rectangle. I’m also the compliance officer for Great Lakes, and that has really been transformative to us. We really didn’t have anything in place prior to manage and monitor and oversee compliance, you know, from HIPAA, OSHA, CDC-required training. So, that’s something that we’ve rolled out now about a year ago with Rectangle. So, it houses everything from a compliance standpoint in one place. So, required annual training, should there be an OSHA-related incident or a work-related incident for an employee, you can house all that there and report. on that as well. We have annual state reporting on OSHA that we have to submit, and so it’s been a much easier to have that all housed in one place.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Okay. Ryan, anything you want to talk about with that compliance solution?

Ryan Merriman: Yeah. Thank you for bringing that up, Donna. I do think that you know, unfortunately compliance is never, you know, something that people want to talk about. Right. It’s, it’s also something that is non-negotiable when it comes to HIPAA and OSHA. Right. So these, these trainings are required, um, you know, new, new employees, especially in the dental world. I think that’s one of the biggest problems that our compliance software solves is, is, you know, the turnover. Um, you know, with us, with our software, we don’t care if you have 50, 50 employees in one location or five. If you, if you get a new hire, they, you assign them, uh, into the portal and they go do their training. Um, it’s, it’s really cool because it’s built directly into practice management bridge. So I could, once again, you know, kind of our. our mantra here, right, a unified platform, I could be taking a payment, running a card on file, you know, taking a phone payment and then go do my training, right, all within one portal. And I think historically, you know, if we’ve kind of rewound a couple years, most of our locations, you know, they were bringing someone in once a year. Obviously that’s not free. They were shutting down the practice for two or three hours, which depending on the volume that practice produces, that could be two or three thousand dollars in revenue that one day. And then if I get a new hire four months later, now what do I do? So that’s kind of where You know, the compliance software, once again, it’s built for scale. There’s an enterprise dashboard that we actually build with all of your users, all of your locations. Someone like Donna can log in as her user, and that would be considered an admin user. And she can look at her whole organization and drill down per location on, you know, who’s completed what, what users have done their trainings. And the same thing goes with OSHA, right? you know, all of your kind of self-checklists are in there, your sharps reports, right, incident reports, the OSHA 301 forms are built in. So it kind of, we basically reverse engineered an audit, to be honest, and we built it to give, to kind of have all the information you need to be compliant and to make it quick and efficient, but removed all the you know, the junk that, that isn’t sometimes necessary. And then of course, I think the other big thing I always like to point out is not only does our software give you training HIPAA OSHA requirements, you know, at a state level, but there’s also 1300 hours of CE credits. So that’s the other great thing is each training comes with CEs. There’s also a CE credit portal that people can go into type in whatever they want. And then last but certainly not least, your digital binders. So I know it sounds silly, but unfortunately, if you walk into a practice and you say, hey, show me your binder, you’re probably going to get a 50-50 answer. Someone might say, I think it’s in the closet. Two, they might know exactly where it is, but maybe it hasn’t been updated in a year or two. And unfortunately, that is one of the first things that they would ask for, you know, God forbid, there was a breach or an audit is they would ask for a binder to make sure your policies and procedures were up to date. So I think that’s another kind of efficiency that people love, as simple as it sounds, is we actually digitize your binders for you, all of your policies and procedures. And if there’s ever an update, right, within the year, whether it’s HIPAA or OSHA, we actually update that on the back end for you and email you a copy of that new policy to add to your binders as well.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. That is something that’s certainly needed. Like you said, it’s probably not talked a lot about, but it’s certainly important. And I think if you do get called out and see how many people really are prepared and have the supporting materials when it comes to compliance.

Ryan Merriman: Yeah. It’s important to take a preemptive strike, for sure. Because taking one after something’s happened can be very, very expensive, unfortunately. and detrimental. So that’s where, you know, it’s one of those necessary evils. We like to make it easy. Right?

Bill Neumann: Absolutely. Ryan, if, uh, as we kind of wind things up here, if, if anybody in the audience, whether they have a single practice or they’ve got a merging group or a larger DSO, somebody like a Great Lakes, um, if they want to find out more about rectangle health, what’s the best way to, to do that?

Ryan Merriman: Going directly to our website, all of our features and functionalities, rectanglehealth.com, they’re all broken out. There’s great information on there. You can request a demo. I would say definitely best next steps. If there’s any interest in anything we talked about today, right, whether that’s PayorSync on its own, compliance on its own, payments on its own, or a bundled version of that, you know, very similar to how Great Lakes is built. Happy to help set that up and go into the website. They’ll be able to request a demo.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Thank you, Ryan. And we’ll make sure we put the Rectangle Health contact information. In the show notes, you can go to RectangleHealth.com and certainly a great, easily navigated website. You can find everything you need there. Rectangle Health is also listed in our Group Dentistry Now DSO Resource Guide, so you can find more information there as well. And I’ll put that In the show notes as well. How about you, Donna? If anybody wants to find out more about Great Lakes or needs to talk to somebody else in RCM in the DSO space, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Donna Ramadan: I can be found at greatlakesdental.com. My contact information is there, but certainly I can provide my email separately as well.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Okay. Well, thanks. Thanks, everybody. Thank you, Donna, and thank you, Ryan. Great conversation today, and you got a lot of great things going on. Kudos to you, Donna, and the team at Great Lakes for bringing that AR down. I mean, it’s just $6 million reduction in couch receivables, a huge number. So it should really be, you know, it should be celebrated for that. You want to get it down even more, of course, that’s awesome. And thank you, Ryan, for being on the show, and congratulations to everything that Rectangle Health is doing. and thank you everybody in the audience for listening to this podcast. Again, without your support, we couldn’t do this. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show, and I’m Bill Neumann.

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