The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

In this episode of The Group Dentistry Now Show Eric Gallegos, Vice President of Revenue at InsideDesk & Danielle Cuthbertson, Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management at Gen4 Dental Partners discuss:

RCM challenges at scale
Importance & growth of RCM
The importance of interoperability
Leveraging RCM in same store growth
Much more

To learn more about Inside Desk visit www.InsideDesk.com
You can also schedule a demo with InsideDesk at Request a Demo.

To discover more about Gen4 Dental Partners visit www.Gen4Dental.com

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, thanks for listening in. Hopefully you’re watching us today on YouTube. We’ve got a great topic today. It’s one of those acronyms that I think has been big in 2023. It probably always should have been big in the industry, but certainly it’s been highlighted in the past year.

I think it’s going to continue into 2024 for sure in the foreseeable future. We’re talking about RCM. So we’ve got two RCM leaders here. We have Danielle Cuthberston. She is the VP of Revenue Management, I think I got that right, at Gen4 Dental Partners. So Danielle, thanks for being here today.

Danielle Cuthberston:

Hello.

Bill Neumann:

Hello. And we have Eric Gallegos. He is also a vice president, but Vice President of Revenue at InsideDesk. So Eric, thanks for joining us today.

Eric Gallegos:

Thanks for having us.

Bill Neumann:

So Danielle, why don’t we start with you? Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and about the role you have at Gen4 Dental Partners and maybe a little bit about Gen4?

Danielle Cuthberston:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on today, everyone. My name is Danielle. I’m the Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management for Gen4 Dental Partners, and my role for the organization is to drive revenue and collect cash. And so that’s very broad, but it also means it impacts a lot of different things within the organization. And so to your point earlier, RCM is a hot button, but it’s always been there and it will continue to be there.

And hopefully with some of the new technology that’s coming out, it’ll continue to improve and get better. Just some quick background on Gen4 Dental Partners, we are growing exponentially. We were one of the fastest growing DSOs in 2023, currently at 100 plus offices and continuing on that trajectory through the end of the year. What makes us unique in my opinion is when we say we are doctor-led, we are doctor-led.

Our clinical presidents run the business, and we’re here just to support them. And that’s what keeps us in the market today doing the right things. Just some quick background on myself, my background actually started in operations and then I came over to the revenue cycle side, been in dentistry for about 15 years and have very much enjoyed the ride that RCM is on right now.

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Danielle. Eric, tell us a little bit about yourself, InsideDesk, and what you do there.

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah, I’ve been at InsideDesk for two and a half years. It’s been an amazing ride. Really just trying to help… We’ve created a platform that helps simplify claim management. RCM, revenue cycle is a simple job, but it’s not an easy one. There’s a lot of inputs and manual inputs, and so we really try to help automate, make it a lot easier for people to do that job and for DSOs to connect and collect their dollars as quickly as possible.

So we’ve had a lot of great success working with companies like Gen4, and so we’ve had a lot of fun. To your point, Bill, it’s just getting bigger, right? People keep talking about RCM and this PE comes into this space and DSOs continue to grow. We’re going to hear more about it. My background’s pretty simple. I’ve been in dental tech for over 10 years.

Started with a small company called Lighthouse 360, grew that company from about 1,500 customers to 15,000 customers before selling that off to Henry Schein. And loved dental space, loved dental technology, wanted to be in a space where we could continue to help practices, doctors, DSOs, and this was a great fit for me. And so we’ve been having a lot of fun doing that over the last two and a half years.

Bill Neumann:

Great. Well, thank you both for the introductions, some interesting backgrounds, certainly people that have been in the dental industry a while. Okay, so let’s go back maybe over the last five years, Danielle. So why RCM? Why is it so important now? I mean, again, I go back to why haven’t we been thinking about it before? I guess you have, but I think as an industry, there’s been quite a bit of a focus on it recently. So talk a little bit about that. What have you seen in the past five years with RCM?

Danielle Cuthberston:

I like starting it off with the analogy of what did RCM used to be. And when you looked at a dental office and you looked at DSOs, it used to be, and give a visuals, that person that sat in the back office who wasn’t always the most friendly, who was the most pivotal person in the office because they got money in the door. And that’s what we thought of as billing, and I use quotes, “billing person.” They’re the ones who did that.

But what we realized is that person, when they started to exit out as the organization started to change and we realized how pivotal they were, they held so much information. So when they exited out, we saw practices fail for a short period of time. It started to get the light shined on it that it needed. We understood that the claims going out weren’t just somebody pushing money out the door, it was actually pushing money out of the door and being able to maximize how much money’s being pushed out the door.

Understanding how coding really impacts a practice. It’s taken on this evolution of, hey, there’s just some biller in the back office or a biller in the back office to, hey, these people are actually driving revenue for your organization from the moment the patient comes and checks out your website. And I think that whole full circle has just… It’s recently, come on.

You’ll often hear me say, when I talk about RCM, I very rarely use the word RCM. I use the word OPS 2.0 because it truly isn’t two different focuses and two different paths. RCM and OPS are the same and how they integrate with each other are the same, and I think we’re just getting that realization. I mentioned, hey, from the moment that a patient checks out your website, you’re already in the revenue cycle.

You understand what their insurance is. You understand how your payment options are. People are looking for easy payments. They want frictionless payments. That’s revenue cycle, anything that touches your dollar. So I think it’s just an understanding with private equity really coming in and influencing efficiencies of how we can drive better patient satisfaction, better money in the door, and RCM does all of those things.

Bill Neumann:

So we take it from the billing person in the back to RCM to OPS 2.0. Eric, you said you’ve been with InsideDesk for a couple of years now? Two years? Two plus?

Eric Gallegos:

Two and a half years. Yep.

Bill Neumann:

So when did you realize that RCM… Because there are a lot of solutions out there, I think, now and it becomes probably a little challenging for DSOs and groups to figure out, okay, we know we need to focus on revenue cycle, OPS 2.0. May take a while for the industry to get used to that. But at what point do they reach out to somebody like you, Eric, and say, “Hey, we need help. How can you help us?” What does that look like?

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah, I think what you said is really the biggest thing that Danielle said, which is RCM is everything, and we’re starting to realize it’s not just the person of the background. It starts with intake. It starts with treatment, and it moves itself along to submission and along the way. And so what I think has happened in the last year is people are realizing that revenue cycle is a flywheel. It’s pretty big.

And so when they call us, they know that they have a problem and they don’t really recognize today where we fit in that solution. So a lot of the things that we do today is really educate. Do you need a posting product? Do you need an insurance verification product? Do you actually need a claim management product, or you have some other issue in terms of analytics?

And so part of the last year has really been people are coming to us trying to understand what we do, where we fit in in the revenue cycle wheel. And it can be a little bit of confusing because there are a lot of vendors out there that encompass that wheel. And so it can cause problems with the DSOs to try to figure out, what’s the right solution? If you’re figuring out that you need a posting product, there’s a bunch of posting companies out there.

If you need an insurance verification product like Airpay, there’s a bunch of great ones out there as well. But when it comes to claims management, that’s where we really focus on what happens post submission, post posting, and you have denials. How are you actually working those? And that’s really where we come in. And most DSOs today, they have a set amount of people, but they’re growing exponentially. And so they’re looking to find ways to create new efficiencies, and that’s really where we come in.

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Eric. We’ll get back to claims management in a second for sure. Danielle, challenges that you see from a DSO perspective and RCM as you start to scale up. So what do those challenges look like? I mean, it’s one thing you’ve got one or two practices, and then Gen4 is at 100 practices, locations right now. So what are some of the challenges you’ve had along the way?

Danielle Cuthberston:

Two words, data integrity. I think that’s one of the biggest challenges, and it ties into this conversation on high level, low level, but data integrity is one of the biggest challenges. And that comes from a few different reasons or a few different places. And I’d say you’ve got practice management softwares, you’ve got payers, and then you’ve got everything in between that that is impacting that data integrity. And so right now we talk about education. RCM is education at its finest.

We’re educating payers. We’re educating doctors. We’re educating private equity, because it’s something that just hasn’t been done before in the past. But data integrity for me right now has been the biggest challenge and one that is continuing to… What’s the word I need to use here? It’s continuing to be a challenge. It’s starting to get better. We’re starting to get more partnership from payers. We’re starting to get more partnership from clearing houses, but then practice management softwares as well.

There are so many of them. Just to preview futures, I currently manage 12 different practice management softwares, and that’s a unique effort in itself, not to mention the human factor that’s going into that.

Bill Neumann:

And I’ve got a couple questions regarding that coming up because yeah, that certainly is a challenge and I don’t think you’re alone as a DSO with having multiple practice management solutions out there. They all operate differently and you have to be an expert on each one of them. That’s probably 12 full-time jobs. On top of that, we also have the issues with the recruiting and retention landscape right now.

It’s hard to keep people. It’s hard to find people with experience. So how does RCM technology help in a situation like that where maybe you either can’t find somebody that’s experienced, or there’s some high turnover with certain positions? Danielle, how does InsideDesk and other solutions out there help?

Danielle Cuthberston:

I think one of the biggest things that InsideDesk does for me, and we are experiencing all of those things that you mentioned, is that somebody could come in and start running within a very short period of time. Right now without a tool like InsideDesk, somebody has to go into a practice management software, manually pull a report, work with some payers, and find out some historical things.

Hopefully that knowledge transfer happen, but in some cases it doesn’t. And that could take 30, 60 and even 90 days to ramp up appropriately. What’s great about InsideDesk is all of that information is in one place. From the moment that they come in and they’re hired, they can start running on data, working claims management day three. That’s a huge change in ramp up time.

And so having tools and data that helps aggregate some of that disparate data that we have today is crucial to us going into 2024, 2025, and 2026.

Bill Neumann:

Eric, anything you’d like to add there? I mean, what are you seeing with some of your other customers as well as far as how you’re able to help them in some of the challenges they have?

Eric Gallegos:

When you think about claims management and the RCM space, I don’t know that historically you would’ve called that tech-forward, right? It is exporting sheets, AR sheets. You can go into most dental offices today and they will print out a sheet. And literally line by line they’re highlighting and documenting in the side of the piece of paper there what happened to that claim.

I think Danielle said it best. Our job is real simple, which is there’s not a lot of great RCM talent today. We’re actually training a lot of great RCM talent today. The DSOs are finding people who’ve never done this work before, and simplifying it for them is super important. In a post-COVID world after the Great Resignation, finding that talent is very difficult and finding talent who’s done it at scale, and to Danielle’s point, 12 PMS’s, different payers, that’s difficult.

So when we can put that all together, all of our DSOs, if you’re talking about MB2 or Gen4 or Peak Dental, one of the biggest things they say is onboarding is significantly easier because people can start working claims in two or three days, where before it would take two or three weeks and people were quitting just trying to learn how to get the data out of the PMS.

We hear that pretty regularly. I think most of the DSOs are pretty happy to have this new technology for things to be easier. Now they’re just getting used to the fact that RCM, revenue cycle, isn’t a cost center. It’s actually revenue. It’s generating revenue for you. And so the whole perspective on what RCM is and how it can help these DSOs is changing pretty quickly. It’s pretty impressive. It’s fun.

Bill Neumann:

Could you dive a little bit more into how InsideDesk actually can help alleviate some of those challenges? Again, you said you shortened the ramp up time, for somebody going from two to three weeks of learning something, maybe bails in the middle of it because they just don’t want to deal with it, to a couple of days. What do you do at InsideDesk or what does InsideDesk do to make this happen?

Eric Gallegos:

Our goal is really to improve cashflow outcomes. If that’s decreasing AR or decreasing days to collect or increasing realized revenue, that’s what we’re trying to do, and we’re trying to do that while decreasing the cost per claim. How can we actually reduce that cost? For most DSOs, if you’re, again, Gen4, 100 locations trying to get to 200, or MB2 going from 300 to 600, whatever it may be, you might be a DSO that’s going from 20 to 40, the benefits of scale and process, you don’t want to have to double your RCM headcount because you’ve doubled your DSO growth.

And so that’s really where we come in. We want to take the group that you have today and we want to automate their work so that… This work is challenging, but they don’t often feel challenged. It’s frustrating, it’s tedious. And so we can automate pulling all of this data, centralizing all of this data, so that when they go and look at a claim, they’re really doing what is the challenging and gratifying work, which is how do I solve this denial and go and get more dollars back for our DSO? That’s the “fun part” of the job.

And so if we can automate that other part and centralize all of that into one place, we make Danielle’s life a lot easier because we work in really a decentralized world. The workflow could be offshore, nearshore. You could have them across five or six different states. You have 12 PMS’ across 100 offices, and historically that has been very difficult to put into one place so that you can make quick decisions on how to resource the group or how to best task the group to be as most successful.

And so what we do is we put that all into one place. We create a lot of visibility into your data. The first thing Danielle wants to know is where’s the claim? What’s happened to the claim? How close are we to closing that claim? We can provide that. And then once those claims are closed, hey, what are the denials? Where are we getting the most denials? How can we adequately and quickly train our team to generate better and cleaner submissions?

And once you can put that into one singular place where Danielle doesn’t have to pull 35 reports and have to go searching for things, the world becomes easier. Scale becomes easier. Going from 300 to 600, the way MB2, becomes easier. Because all of a sudden, you’re generating dollars with fewer people. So that’s where automation is and it’s going to continue to get better. There are more and more great automative technologies and feature sets that are coming down the pipeline.

Bill Neumann:

So that’s the claims management portion that InsideDesk has. So Danielle, from your perspective, what technological solutions, what else is out there that really helps you with your RCM challenges? So InsideDesk we know is there. Anything else that you’re using to do things?

Danielle Cuthberston:

So yes, we have a few products that we are using and we’re piloting across the platform. I do just want to add, directed workflow is huge right now. I tie it back to data integrity. We have to be able to know where to go and when to go and how quickly to go. We don’t have years to do things like we used to. We need results now. And when you have multiple different places pulling information in, it’s hard to aggregate it all and make sense of it. So having a directed workflow is impactful.

It’s one of our number one reasons. But we’re using several AI tools across the platform and we’re using them in conjunction together, and I think that’s the key. I’ve got Zentist right now on the platform. I’m using InsideDesk. We’re piloting a few others that can help centralize some more of the reporting aspects. And again, centralized workflow, we talk about claims going out the door. I’m actually looking at a tool that will help me even before a patient sits down in the chair so that I can have better insurance eligibility.

We talk about that flywheel and that circle of life in RCM, having insurance eligibility be automated, having frictionless patient payments at the time that things are happening, not 30, 60, 90 days later. So we have quite a few solution reaches in there trying to get in there. There’s a few. My answer is is that we’re going to do what’s best for our group long-term, and that’s I think partnering with all of them.

Bill Neumann:

So this ties into that question for both of you. From a tech standpoint, how do you see technology growing in the future really to support RCM teams? We’ve got five years ago where it was the person in the back room handling billing, or at least that was the perception. Now you have all these different technologies.

So maybe what do you see that you can use in the future? What’s InsideDesk doing? I’m sure you’re probably constantly evolving. You’ve had probably version 7.0 at this point. But tell me a little bit about InsideDesk evolving, and then Danielle, maybe you can talk about just how you see technology continuing to help RCM.

Eric Gallegos:

I think, look, I’m going to tell you what our clients always say to us, which is more. Can we have more? How much more can you automate? I think the real important part or the foundational part for this is that the DSOs have to continue to fight for access to their data. Access to your data is the condition that drives automation. And so when we can have interoperability, it’s beneficial to everybody. It creates a competition. It creates innovation. And all of a sudden, you have better tools from more companies coming out, driving those costs down.

And so what’s next? How many people hate waiting on hold trying to wait for their insurance carrier to pick up? It’s a big deal. And so we’re working on new things to minimize the amount of call time or the amount of calls that our DSOs have to spend talking to their payers. And the reality is the payers hate it to. That’s a cost headache for them as well. So the technology is coming where there’s a lot of things that we can do, true real automation, real AI, to make things a lot easier for submission, resubmission.

We might not be the ones doing that, but even for insurance verification, I think the market in itself started to really build a lot of steam. I won’t speak specifically to some of the stuff we have coming down the pipeline, but there’s a lot of really great tech out there and you can see it catching on quickly, innovating quickly. And the more interoperability we have, the more competition it breeds.

The more competition we have, the better products our DSOs are going to have. And so they want more fight for our data and ask for more interoperability, and I think it’s going to be a great thing for everybody.

Bill Neumann:

Danielle, anything you want to add there?

Danielle Cuthberston:

No, I’m 100% aligned with that statement. If we can get together, and that’s what I said, just work better together. I think one of the misses is is that the patient experience is what we’re influencing here. As DSOs, the whole reason we’re doing this is so that we can provide a better patient experience. And RCM provides a better patient experience. The number one reason you see on Yelp for people being upset with offices is because their billing’s incorrect. And so it’s awful. It’s super simple.

We keep saying it, but it’s the data integrity that comes in that can give an accurate reflection of benefits, that can send out an accurate X-ray with that claim so it gets paid and so that they can actually pay their bill with their phone and it be a seamless experience. It’s all about that patient experience, that patient engagement. And that’s where all of these starts to tie in and be very impactful. The question you had asked earlier is where do you see this changing RCM? I see RCM not adding more people and not letting go of people.

I don’t see that. I see people being people and making people decisions as opposed to being data entry operators and having to, as Eric mentioned, sit on the phone for somebody to say, “Hey, you can do this, but I have a limited amount of time. I’m really not engaged in this conversation, and I’m going to drop this phone call magically midway through.” And so I really see it being more of a people focused ability from the patient experience to even the RCM personnel that you’re hiring.

Bill Neumann:

So that brings up a couple, but both of you had some great points. I’ve got some questions regarding the adoption from DSO. So this technology’s relatively new. There’s a lot of technology being thrown, not thrown, but coming into the market. They want to embrace it.

They need to because of the challenges we talked about, whether it’s lack of skill from the standpoint of employees or just not having enough people to do the jobs. Do you feel like the adoption with DSOs, and maybe this is more for Eric, I mean, are they starting to really talk to you? Are they adopting more quickly now? What is your feeling?

Eric Gallegos:

So I started two and a half years ago and what I would say RCM, a lot of times people didn’t know what that was. I’m not being funny. It’s kind of new in terms of holistically the way we’re looking at revenue cycle today. What we’ve seen in the last six months is unbelievable. I think when you start to have, again, Peak, MB2, people like Danielle, RCM world is small. Danielle’s worked at I think three different DSOs over her long career. And so all of a sudden people start talking. When you have a good technology, people brag about it.

And so it used to be really difficult. Today, InsideDesk, we represent 11% of the DSOs that are 10 plus locations at scale. That’s a huge number. We were at zero two and a half years ago. And so that’s a big number that we represent that many DSOs of 10 plus locations. And so yeah, it’s starting to come a lot quicker, a lot faster. They’re recognizing you can outsource this. You can keep it in-house. You can nearshore it, however you want to do it.

But if you don’t have the visibility to figure out what your outcomes are, how quickly things are being collected, how much yield is being collected, then you can get it for less, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get more. And your responsibility today as a DSO and you have PE dollars is to collect as much dollars as possible. We provide that visibility and that efficiency. And so you’re seeing adoption really escalated in the last six months.

Bill Neumann:

Danielle, do you run into any issues with fear maybe from some of the employees where you’re embracing technology if some people maybe aren’t used to it? I mean, you run into any of that?

Danielle Cuthberston:

Oh, yes. So I’m fortunate to work with a few team members. Some of them have been with their organization when we purchased them for 20 years, and some of them I brought on when I came on board. And so I have that beautiful span of team members where the adoption level was different, and some of my heaviest adopters were the ones that have been in this market for so long and just know that they had to I think as something as simple as log into every single payer website that we have so that they can pull down a remit and work their AR.

They have some great adoption and some people fear not just that their jobs are going to be taken away, but that the information that they have seen, that they have touched, they feel, Eric had mentioned that document where they were documenting all of their claims information, that if they take that away, they don’t have a sense of who they are. So yes, there’s some fear there, but it’s really about education. I’m really excited. I happen to be very fortunate to be very people driven on the RCM side.

I think that was missing historically. I’ve mentioned how it was perceived. And so I’ve been very fortunate with the adoption. Once they got on, they could see it. I mean, it makes their lives so much easier. I want to throw this out here. We had a few team members that came into InsideDesk, and we’re working their AR on this screen, working this AR on this screen.

And when we got them together and we said, “Hey, you don’t have to go anywhere but right here. This screen will do everything. You don’t have to go into a peer website. You don’t have to go back into the practice management software. You don’t have to do anything. You have to go to one screen,” I’ll watch their productivity literally jump almost 45% in less than two weeks. That means that 45%… So let’s talk about some dollars here.

45%, that means that where they were processing maybe 200 claims a month, I have this person processing almost 500 claims a month right now from where they were just because they have one place to go to. It’s a one-stop shop. It’s huge and it’s impactful. You giving a team member the ability to perform at a high level and all they had to do is change their workflow, you’ve got buy-in from them for years. And I’ve been very fortunate in my career to have some really great team members to work with.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great info. Let’s touch on what you mentioned earlier, which was having 12 practice management softwares to deal with. So interoperability is obviously very, very important. So let’s talk a little bit about that and does InsideDesk have a solution? Tell me how you manage this because that’s going to be a huge challenge.

Danielle Cuthberston:

I like to say, I got a really quick dance step. That’s how I’m managing all of this right now. And it’s just to keep it light. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be as fun, right? It’s a challenge right now, you hear me start, it’s a challenge right now. That’s why we are looking for solutions for this. We continue to add partnerships.

InsideDesk and I, I mean, we’ve done some great things in our practices, and we’re starting to roll it out to more and more. It’s part of our onboarding process. It’s not an easy feat is all I can say right now. And so to have that coming, to see how well they’re working together, it’s not there yet, but we’re getting there.

Bill Neumann:

So there’s no solution out there currently, but companies are getting closer and closer to being able to help you with that challenge.

Danielle Cuthberston:

That’s the best way to put it. Eric and I had this conversation. There has been you mentioned fear in the market where it was, hey, you either had this tool, or you had this tool, or you were going to… You weren’t being loyal to your partnerships. I’ve come from a places is is that the best tool and the best integration I can get is with multiple people. And as I start to build those relationships and we start to grow through Gen4 and we influence those relationships, it just keeps getting better. That’s the best way I can say that.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. No, that’s perfect. Eric, anything you want to add there?

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah. I think look, interoperability is a huge deal, and there’s open architecture and there’s close architecture. And the reality is is each DSO has to figure out what’s the right solution for them. And not all open architecture is 100% open and not all close architecture is 100% close. There’s a lot of gray there. My personal opinion is what matters most is who gives you the most options.

Where can you get the most options for your DSO? Because at the end of the day, options breed competition, and competition breeds better product. And I’m a big believer than that. I welcome competitors in the market because it makes us better. It makes the experience for our clients better. They have more options. They have to make more decisions and go through more sales pitches.

I’m sure they hate that. But at the end of the day, they want a better seamless experience. And so interoperability provides that. And DSOs, it’s important that they fight for their data and that they fight for platforms that allow them to share that data seamlessly, for sure.

Bill Neumann:

Okay, so as we start to wrap things up, I’ve got a couple final questions here. So like I mentioned at the top of the show, RCM is probably one of the most talked about things in the DSO space. Certainly I think it was AI maybe two or three years ago. And not that InsideDesk doesn’t have AI and RCM doesn’t have AI solutions, but it was AI and now it’s RCM. I think at the same time, same store sales growth, right? Same store growth is now, again, something that should have been focused on all along probably like RCM, but now that’s a topic of conversation.

There’s no longer this growth through acquisition. So DSOs, and I know Gen4 is still acquiring practices, but there’s some out there that aren’t and they’re focused really on, okay, we maybe acquired quite a few practices over the last three or four years, and now we have to figure out how to make sure that each one of those locations, each one of the groups that we’ve acquired is firing on all cylinders. And a lot of them aren’t. So how do we focus on same store growth? Talk about RCM solutions that help with same store growth. Maybe we’ll start with you, Danielle.

Danielle Cuthberston:

I’ve said it a few times. It’s patient engagement and patient satisfaction. RCM does both, and how do we do both is we start off with proper insurance eligibility. Go back two steps from the moment a patient is searching you on a website and understanding what insurances you take or don’t take and what payment options you have. We have a very educated population out there right now and they understand their benefits. They understand that they have the ability to go to their healthcare providers, have a credit card on file.

They didn’t even look at things. They just approve it on their phone. They get a statement on their phone. They hit pay. I’m that person. They want the ability to schedule online, right? There is so much that RCM is doing to help that patient engagement and patient satisfaction. That’s the number one way we can help with same-store growth is ensuring that your patients’ entire visit from the moment that they click on your website to the moment that they walk out the door and they have a payment engagement with you is seamless and smooth.

They shouldn’t have to think about it. They shouldn’t have to worry whether or not they trust. Most of the time when somebody walks into a dentist’s office today, they trust the dentist 95% of the time, 98% of the time. The challenge of the reason people don’t come back is that they don’t trust the financial aspect. And that’s where RCM and having a strong RCM team, RCM leaders to guide your organization really influences your same store growth.

Bill Neumann:

Eric, anything there you’d like to add?

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah, I’ll come at it from a feature standpoint with InsideDesk. I’ve never asked a DSO what your net collection rate is and they not say 98%. Net collection rate is a blunt instrument and no one’s ever not had a 98% collection rate. I won’t get into the why’s and the how’s, but apparently everybody collects perfectly basically. What we do is provide ability because we connect to the PMS, because we can connect to the user, because we can also see what the payer is paying. We can actually provide what most people call realized revenue or claim yield.

Once you understand your claim yield, you can actually increase same store growth or increase collections from claims you’ve actually already closed. And so what happens is once you understand claim yield and once you have visibility into it, you can see that store A is collecting 70% of their dollars, store B is collecting 90% of their dollars, and store C is 50% of their dollars. So all of a sudden, you’ve already worked these claims. You’ve already closed them. You’ve already posted them.

What we’re doing today is we’re helping our clients go back a year to see the claims that they’ve already closed and said, “Hey, there’s $45,000 here. There’s $14,000 with these 100 claims that you’ve already closed and posted.” Closing more and closing quicker is great in volume, but what matters is accuracy. Of the 100 you were expecting, did you get 85 or did you get 65? We can help facilitate same store growth by making sure that our clients are collecting the dollars they’ve already done the work on, the dollars that they’re contracted and expected to collect.

And so from an InsideDesk standpoint, our ability to give you new reporting, again, at scale, 100 locations, five or six different PMS’, be able to put that into one place and figure out not just which of your offices aren’t collecting their dollars, but which of your users aren’t collecting those dollars allows you to better resource, better train, and get much more of those dollars back into the business. And for a DSO, today that’s paramount when borrowing dollars is very expensive.

Bill Neumann:

Great points. So as we start to wrap this up here, I’d like to get final thoughts from you, Danielle, and you, Eric, before we provide your contact information to people that want to reach out because this is a hot topic and I’m sure there’s a lot of struggles out there. So Danielle, final thoughts?

Danielle Cuthberston:

Just that RCM is not just the biller in the back corner or just the team of billers, whether it be onshore, offshore, or a combination thereof. It is a revenue driver for your organization, and investing in that is investing in your business. And I really feel that that’s where the change is coming and that’s why we’re seeing these changes. The people that are doing it right are investing in this RCM side of their businesses.

They’re bringing on the tools, they’re bringing on the people, and they’re bringing on those leaders from other places outside of dentistry as well. And it’s really changing it. And so I would just impart that, take a moment, evaluate where you are, define a strategy. And if it doesn’t work, pivot. Pivot quickly. I’ll leave you with that.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. Great final thoughts there. Eric?

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah, I don’t think I could have said it better. At the end of the day, the technology landscape is changing quickly. It’s a small world. It’s easy to reach out to other DSOs to figure out what they’re doing, what’s being effective. And I think Danielle said this a lot earlier, don’t be scared. The technology’s new. It feels like a new cost, but the long-term benefits and savings and time and increase in revenue generation, it is significant.

It’s not 2%. It’s not 5%. For Danielle, it’s almost 45%. For some of our other organizations, it’s 51. Those are real huge numbers, especially because these DSOs aren’t slowing down. They’re not trying to get to 20. They’re trying to get to 200, and the 200s are trying to get to 1,000. And so invest early, figure out that process, and maximize it along your growth plan for sure.

Bill Neumann:

Great. Danielle, if people want to find out more about Gen4 Dental Partners or they want to contact you, how do they do?

Danielle Cuthberston:

The best way to get ahold of me I’m going to say is email right now. I’m going to just say, it’s dcuthberston@gen4dentalpartners.com. Best way. I will get back to you as quickly as possible, but best way to get ahold of me right now.

Bill Neumann:

Excellent, and we’ll make sure we put that email address in the show notes. Eric, if they want to find out more about InsideDesk or they want to talk to you?

Eric Gallegos:

Yeah, they can go to insidedesk.com. We have a bunch of great information on there. They can schedule some time with some of our great account executives, Whitney Ehrlichman and Andrew McMath. And if you want to reach out directly, it’s pretty simple, eric@insidedesk.com. Yeah, that’s a way to get ahold of us.

Bill Neumann:

Excellent. Yeah, and InsideDesk has a couple of great articles on our website, Group Dentistry Now. We’ll make sure we drop those links in the show notes with both your email addresses, your company websites, so people can find out what they want to find out.

But great conversation about RCM today, or as Danielle has coined, OPS 2.0. So I like that. That might take off. You might want to trademark it. Well, thank you both and thanks everybody for watching us today. This is the Group Dentistry Now Show. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann.