135: Technology Solutions To Achieve Business Success and Patient Satisfaction

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate right out of school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level.

You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott and today I'm here with Adam McDaniel who is director of product management at Henry Schein One. You know, and one thing my team knows about me, Adam, is I'm really passionate about two things, technology and marketing. But like, those are two conversations that if you get me sucked into, oh man, there's just so much leverage you can do within a business if you can get the technology right. And of course marketing so customer centric that it ends up influence everything from HR to operations and so forth. But really grateful to have you on today. Henry Schein, of course, everyone knows that name, global leader in dental and a lot of what probably people don't know, a lot of other healthcare segments. But Henry Schein One, that's a newer name, kind of branding that we're just starting to hear about. And I've had some friends who've gone to some of your advisory groups and stuff that you all have put together. But can you kind of talk about why Henry Schein put together Henry Scheinone and what the goal is there?

Yeah, absolutely. So Henry Schein one is a joint venture between Henry Schein and Internet brands. And basically what we did is we took some of the top technology in the industry, the Henry Schein companies, which is Dentrix and Dentrix Enterprise and Dentrix Ascend and a number of other businesses and put that with some of the top patient relationship management tools in the industry like Demand Force and Sesame and Lighthouse and then recently Jarvis in that group. Yeah, absolutely. I was just going to say that, yeah, recently we just acquired Jarvis and that's now part of the Henry Schein One family. And that's super exciting because analytics, there's huge opportunities with analytics to help your business make the right decisions.

And so is everybody in Henry Schein 1 owned by Henry Schein in some way, but they might be segmented off or do you have ones that aren't even. Henry Schein doesn't have an equity interest in.

No. So the whole everything I just talked about, that's Henry Schein one, and we're all Henry Schein one employees. And you know, as. As a business leader like yourself, you know, trying to get all the companies put together and using the same processes and that type of stuff takes. It takes a little bit of time.

But Henry Shine one's kind of like a dso, right? You got all these different practices, and you're looking for where the right synergies are and where they kind of need to take care of customers separate from the group, Right?

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. So the idea and concept behind Henry Schein one is really to bring together all of these best technologies into one simple solution for practices of all sizes to be able to leverage this technology to help them run a better business and help do better patient care.

Well, as much as I love technology, I am not envious of people who are constantly trying to keep up on this. It was interesting. I was talking to an executive at Southwest. One of the strategies they came up with, which this is one way to handle it, is they're like, we just didn't take on technology. There's a reason Southwest Airlines never put any television screen on their thing because there's like, it's moving so fast. We're just going to provide WI fi and we'll figure out devices later. And it ended up being a very nimble way to do it. But the reality is, you know, you guys can't do that. Like, hey, we'll provide you WI fi. Good luck on your practice management software. But, man, how do you keep up? It seems like the challenges, well, let me say the entitlement of the customer, both us as DSOs and dentists and so forth, we pick up these iPhones and we're like, well, I can do this on my iPhone. Why can't I do it on an enterprise software solution that integrates with medical billing? Right. So can you kind of talk through the retail side of what I see on my iPhone versus why? I don't know. Enterprise solutions can't move quite as nimbly.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a really good question. You know, it's technology, like you said, it's tough because there's a lot of different things to consider when you're building in features or when you're adding things to software. It's a little bit more than the retail world where you talk about what's the coolest technology with dental. We've got to worry about regulatory things, we've got to worry about hipaa, we've got to worry about security, we've got to worry about, you know, updates to keep the practices running with tens of thousands of patient records. And so we really take a hard look at prioritizing what is the most important thing to help people be successful with their business. Now, part of that is what you said, being able to take advantage of some of the latest technology that's out there to be able to better interact with your patients. And the great news is Henry Schein one was put together for just that very reason. We wanted to take the different latest technologies that are happening with two way text messaging on the patient relationship management side and payments for patients from their devices that we had with Henry Schein and our solutions and bring those together and combine those together to update features for all of our customers across the board. And it's happening. Last year we were able for Dentrix Enterprise to now bring electronic statements. And so now you can send out your bills via email to your patients and have them be able to click and view those. And we'll be able to this year work on text payments and other things like that that are coming out that will really help as well as history.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, I was just going to say things like patient forms for Dentrix Enterprise are coming soon and Dentrix Ascend has patient forms and online booking integrated. A lot of those really, we call them the cool technologies that everyone talks about, are in the solutions today and are coming soon in a number. But then on top of that, we also want to make sure that you're covered from a security standpoint and a performance standpoint and all those things as well.

Well, let me first say, very appreciative of you tackling this. I saw a meme where it's like Apple TV, Hulu YouTube TV, Amazon Prime. Can you guys just all get together and come up with one solution? Right. And in some ways I think that's how we feel in dental. I'm over on an open dental platform and I've got 15 programmers and I'm trying to connect all this middleware all the time to do two way texting and get my BI solutions and all of that. And I think what you're saying is as entrepreneurs in the technology space have created bolt on solutions at first, kind of like Microsoft, we're like, thank you. We're glad we have access to all these things. We are tired of blue screens, though, right? We're tired of that not connecting or it only connects here. And I think that the world tends to go from Microsoft. I want access to Apple. I want everything just to work seamlessly, even if that pushes me into one committed network. It's one committed network where there's not finger pointing. Everybody's owning it, right? And it sounds like that's the vision here, is, hey, the marketplace is going to get exhausted of trying to bolt things on constantly. We need to come together, create kind of one language where everything talks to each other, where all the drivers work together so you can sign up, be in that ecosystem and know that the App Store is all going to work. Is that the vision here? Am I catching it?

That's precisely right. I think you nailed it on the head. We really do feel like putting these technology solutions in one place and in an easy workflow for practices really solves their technology problem. So we don't. Just like you said, we don't want people focused on technology. Let us take care of the technology, and we want you focused on improving patient care, growing your business, and then we'll be there to help you with all of those technology pieces along the way. Our practices and the people using the software deserve to be able to have a simple workflow, to be able to say, my patient wants to fill out their forms, it should be right there available on their phone, and then right back into your practice management system, not in some separate application that you have to access differently. With staff turnover, which I know is a big issue right now across the board, we can't take weeks and weeks and weeks for people to learn how to do things, to be able to take care of patients. And so we want those workflows to be part of your practice management system, easy to access, easier and easy to learn. And that's really the vision of Henry Stein. One is to make it all those things are together.

The elephant in the room is inflation's killing all of us, right? And so it's like, hey, do we move up price or do we lower expenses? And one of the places that we have a lot of expense is people doing redundant tasks or doing tasks that technology could be doing. And if we could redeploy those people to be able to, you know, support another dental practice or other growth initiatives rather than that redundancy, there's a lot of savings there. So, you know, we've looked at that and said, wow, this is like gotten to a meaningful place where the inefficiency of just humans checking on did the technology come over right, or humans doing workflow activities that technology can do.

Right. So absolutely. And listen, I mean, we're not perfect. We certainly do try to make sure that the things that we build really solve problems and actually help the practices that we serve see a marked improvement or be able to reduce the human spend on that task to be able to redeploy it towards other things. And you know, there's sometimes that we don't quite do everything that we needed to, but there's a lot of times that we really do. And we've seen through a number of organizations that we're working with, we have this service that we offer called the workflow analysis, where we'll actually come out and we'll observe the team through certain workflows, whether it's processing insurance or whether it's processing patient billing or whether it's doing, you know, you know, whatever it may be, the process that you're doing, whether it's centralized or decentralized, we'll observe that and then we'll help you come up with the standard operating procedures that best use the technology that you have to really reduce the time that it takes to do those tasks. And.

Oh, cool.

We've seen.

It's like, it's like FedEx. I know FedEx does that for, you know, a lot of their warehouses. Right. It's like how to get the, the line set up so you can use FedEx more efficiently.

Perfect.

So this is like. Yeah, is this like current customers then can really maximize the software within Henry Schein one by saying, hey, I bought the software, but like, how do I maximize the solution?

Exactly. And what we notice is, and this is the, this is the tough part about software. You know, we keep making changes and improvements constantly because we're getting feedback from people and we want to make those changes to make the products more easy to use and also more efficient. But there's the human side of the change management that takes place when you introduce the new features to take advantage of those new features and improve your workflows and make those workflows better. And that's actually harder. I'm in technology and building software is hard, but getting people to actually humans to change is, is the harder one.

And so are you still waiting for the matrix part where we can just plug in the back of rain, do the download and like, okay, version 2.0. Emmett now knows how to use the software better? I mean, it's so true. I see it all the time where people Are like, I hate this software. It doesn't do these things. You switch software and like, yeah, but this new software doesn't do what the old software that does. And you're like, but you hated the old software. Right. So it is always or anytime, you know, typically where you're making the changes in software is an employee type who's looking for stability and redundancy within their job. Right. You're the executive levels, like, yeah, change it all. That sounds great, sure. But down where people have to do the day to day operations, they don't technically like a lot of change anyway. And so yeah, being sensitive to that, well that's, that's an awesome service. Because what I'm finding, and it sounds like you guys are solving it, is one marketplace issue is all these different softwares, how are we going to get them to work together? And then number two, whenever I'm considering software changes, even if I'm super excited about it, love the demo, see all the savings, I'm thinking about Susie and Frank and how am I going to get them on board, right. And I'm like, who's going to help me do that? So yeah, that's going to be something you guys provide.

Absolutely. And a lot of times that technology companies, we love to talk software, we love to talk cool features and the new things that we're building, which we are, we're building a lot of that and it's really good. But there's the, like I said, the human side of it. Our services organization is just second to none. I mean they're just amazing group of people that really understand dentistry. I mean we have hundreds of years of dental experience in that group. Combined of people who've worked at DSOs, people who used to run practices, people who were consultants with a number of practices. And when it comes time to say, okay, let's look at implementing our technology, we're there to walk you through, okay, how are we going to do this? How should we approach it? I mean we have people who worked in the military rolling out new initiatives across the military for tens of thousands of people that are our project managers today. And so they work in our project management team. And our project management team lays out a plan of, okay, this DSO wants to implement our technology. Let's roll it out this way and let's talk about how we're going to handle change management. And so not only do you need to find, you know, I've said this a lot when people ask me how do I choose the right software product to use in my practice and my answer may not be what people expect. I wouldn't look at it necessarily from a feature to feature perspective. I know it's tough sometimes to not go there where it's oh well, this product has these features, this one has these features. I'll choose this one. But I would also look at it. Which company is going to provide you the best partnership for your business? Which company am I going to work with that does more than the technology, that builds more than just software and releases the software and lets you buy the software? Which company has the best support? Which company has the best implementation services? What about follow up training that I need to do or maybe even consulting that I may need to help me use my software better? I believe when you're choosing a technology partner, you should think about it more as a business partner, not a technology partner.

Well, yeah, let me pivot off of that. I think maybe that needs to be added to the feature set matrix. So, hey, is the button blue? Okay, I really like blue better than green. You know, whatever it is. Or does the charting work this way versus that way? Right, so but I think what you're saying is just expand out the feature set. Right? So the feature set is, hey, do they have a solution for change management? When I'm going to want to start doing online billing, do I have a partner in that or do I have to do that totally separate and then try to plug it all in? Right, so I'm curious as you work with customers, because that's a big part that you're getting feedback on. If we did kind of Maslow's hierarchies of needs here. I was thinking through this in my head. So the charting piece, right? That's kind of baseline, air, water, clothing type stuff. The ability to schedule, the ability to bill. Right. Are you finding too that that being cloud based multi practice is kind of becoming a standard request now too? Not, I mean even for a single practice, are they wanting it cloud based at this point?

More and more we're seeing a lot of people look at when they're changing, what are the cloud options available? I mean listen, there's a ton of benefits to cloud. There's a lot of benefits for both the customer. There's a lot of benefits for us as a technology company. And so the cloud has a lot of benefits in other industries, medical and then in other things like telecommunications, manufacturing, even retail management. A lot of those other segments have gone cloud in major way. I mean you see like customer relationship management with Salesforce has almost Completely gone cloud at this point. So we see more and more people are looking for cloud options. And that's.

Do I have it in the right order though? Like charting, scheduling, billing. Right. Those three are all kind of necessary table stakes kind of stuff. And then is cloud kind of the next consideration or is something else the next consideration?

Yeah, I definitely think that, I definitely think cloud's on the, on that list of something to be considered. I mean, we do have quite a people, quite a number of people who. That's, that's not their first question. But as you said, charting and scheduling are kind of table stakes at that point. And so they wouldn't be calling us if they didn't think we had those pieces covered.

Right. If you're like, I'll get this great thing. Oh, charting, no, we don't do that. Okay. And then once you get past that, where are you finding a lot of energy? Is it? And you know, I'll throw things out there, but maybe you are, you know, is it the two way texting community? Is it online scheduling? Is it by solutions on the back where, you know, if you took even just like I like looking at single doctor offices because really a DSO is just a conglomerate of a bunch of single practices.

Sure, sure.

But yeah, where do you see them go next as far as needs?

One of the, one of the biggest needs I think we're seeing right now is how do I better understand my data? So I've got so much information in my practice management system. I've got all my charts, I've got all my treatment plans, I've got everything that I've been scheduling. How do I understand that data better? And that was why we wanted to work with a company like Jarvis and bring them into Henry Schein. One is because we believe for both solo practices and Even the largest DSOs, data is one of the things that is, you got to get better. Slowly becoming table stakes. Right? It's slowly becoming. We need something to help us interpret the data because there's a lot of reports in practice management. I mean, there's hundreds of reports in practice management software. But what do I do?

But let's be honest, Adam, we've been relying on really high margins. We're like, we don't need data. I've got a bunch of money in my cash in my bank account. What do I need data for? Right. And I think as margins squeeze, you know, the best companies who work on tight margins and Amazon, et cetera, Amazon's like, I don't know what my margins are for every. No, they know what every little bit of their margin is for everything they do. Right. So that makes sense. And I'm actually really happy because that's a sign that we as an industry are maybe getting a little smarter. It might be bad because it also means margins are probably squeezing as well.

A little bit of both.

One of the problems with creating software like this, even basic reports within the practice management software, or Jarvis, and this comes down to the human component, is the whole MDM component. The definition of the words themselves, like I've seen this internally and I've seen it with others, is, well, that's not how I define production. Well, that's not how we define collections. Well, is that collections for the month of January or that's collections that came in in the month of January. Right. How are you guys solving that? Or is there not a great solution at this point? Because one of the things I'll see is people will grab a data platform and then they'll say, yeah, I don't trust it. And I'm like, well, why don't you trust it? And I find two main problems. Number one, they're not putting the data in the way that the software pulls it out. Right? Yeah. So they're like, well, I put that data over here in notes and it's like, well, the software can't pull out of your notes, you know, and then number two is, well, that's not how I define hygiene or whatever it might be. Is that something you guys are looking to tackle is helping people put the data in the right way and number two, get definitions aligned across?

Yeah, I think there's a. That there's a lot to that answer. I mean, simply put, one of the great things about a product like Jarvis is because it works with so many different data sources, you know, works with a number of practice management systems can also integrate other data sources that you may have in your practice into one place. It can help you standardize and get a single view of what the truth is. That can be your single source of truth. I mean, with any data platform, you know, we call it garbage in, garbage out. So basically, what you put in and what you get out could be, you know, based on how you put the data in. But I think there's the second piece which I was going to say, and that is standardizing on a single platform for your DSO is really important because then you can have some standards about how the data gets entered and some standard operating procedures about how we define production, how we define hygiene, how we Define payments that have been posted. I know a lot of.

I feel like a lot of the groups stop short of having that part of the conversation. They think that this is a transactional download the software like you some app and then it plugs in and magically. I think you're right that they need to be having the next conversation, which is, hey, do we understand the definitions here being pulled out? And then though Jarvis goes across multiple platforms, the data available and let's say Eaglesoft vs. Adentrix vs. An open dental may be totally different available inputs. Right. And so are you having those conversations as well around what's reasonable?

Exactly. And I get it, changing practice management's tough. It is. I mean, it's kind of the central system in the practice and there's a lot of change management to that. But I think it goes back to my earlier comment of choosing the right business partner, technology partner, if you will. Really helps with that change management because then we can come up with the right process, the right standard operating procedures and then talk about the rollout plan to make sure everybody feels comfortable and everyone's ready to go. I think with platforms like Dentrix Ascend and with Dentrix Enterprise, you see that people are able to use the same inputs and so the data becomes a lot more normalized and becomes a lot more standard when you're connecting it. Now, with that said, I mean, that's ideal world. I get it. You know, there's going to be situations with you're going to have a mixed environment in your dso and that's okay. I think that's where we talk about that. Jarvis really helps normalize that data too. So there's. We don't, we don't. Just like you said, you call us up and you buy Jarvis and we say, okay, here you go, it's installed. Enjoy. We want to work with you. We want to understand how those data inputs are put from each of the different systems that you have, so that when you look at a production report or you look at an insurance report, that you actually know what that data means and know where those data points come from and what's, I think more important. The last thing I'll mention is with, with a product like Jarvis, it's not just about reports, it's about actionable items. Like I have, I have this information now. What do I do with that information that I think is really more important

than what have we decided as a team to do with that information, if it's above or below or sideways and whatnot. Right. So that Everyone knows how to emotionally react. I mean, in some ways it's like the technology or the data is like falling down and then the kid looks up and says, all right, so how am I supposed to react to this? Right? Supposed to be happy, mad, etc. Well, I love how you're thinking about it and I think one thing to call out if you're not happy about how things are playing out. Part of the reason might be you need to standardize more. Right. Part of the reason is like, yes, the technology, like a Jarvis, is trying to pull it in from multiple solutions. Great, that'll get you to one level. If you're wanting more standardization, you have to do more standardization. Right. So I think that's what you're hinting at. I'm just going to say it is, hey, if you're mad because your iPhone's not interacting with your Windows as good as you'd like, well, you might have to go fully in on the ecosystem to get to the next level of performance. Right. So there is some connectivity that's always you guys are trying to bridge. But let's be honest, everything works better if it's all same team, same thinking. Okay, just because we're running out of time here, a couple other things. What do you think's the next thing after data that people are saying, hey, I want this solution?

I think the number one thing is the patient experience. How does my patients. Because there's the actual treatment hands on part of the dental visit, but then there's everything surrounding it that technology can help with. Like, how does my check in process work? How does my appointment confirmation process work? How do my, you know, do, do I want.

Oh heavens, please don't make me fill out a whole stack of paper. It's like, we are not 1995, you know what I'm saying? I went into healthcare environment and they have the dirty pens and the clean pens and I'm thinking, how about no pens? How about you just text me and I fill this out, right. And let my phone that automatically puts in my name, which I love, and automatically puts in my address and stuff.

Yep, right.

It's that kind of stuff. We're so entitled at this point, like filling out paper. You know, my kids will joke with me like, dad, you can get a paper cut from that dude, that's dangerous, you know? So, yeah, we're pretty entitled. You guys are. Yeah. I think everything around patient experience we've got to solve because this literally could be the reason patients don't come in is because they're like, I just don't want to fill out all that paperwork.

Yeah, totally agree, totally agree. And so I, that's what I think the next level is, is really taking the patient experience to the next level. And the great news is, I mean Henry Schein one has those tools and solutions. That's again one of the reasons why we've done this and that work with a number of different systems so that we're capable of helping you improve that patient experience from the technology point of view and making it so that those things don't become the, those things don't become the big issues that really it's about how does the actual hands on visit go? How does the patient feel comfort wise?

Right.

How does the treatment plan?

We want those things to just work, right?

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah. We don't want to be like, yes, our signing on software worked. Yes, I have data. We're like, we just want that to be. Yeah, just normal, you know, kind of like patients don't come in and like yes you do fillings here. You know, we want that. It's just standard work. Right.

So that's exactly right.

Well I like it. My entitlement is getting happy the more we talk about this. Is there any others? What would you say after patient experience? So you've got like the sign in, you've guys got solutions for billing, right. So patients can pay online. I'm assuming this. I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So all those, all those solutions are things that are available in a number of our practice management systems by default and a number of them that are available if that's what you would like to add to your practice management system. And then if you, even if you don't have, that's the great thing. Even if you don't have one of our practice management systems, you can still use a lot of our patient relationship management tools functions to be able to help better your patient interaction even if you're using a different practice management system. So I think after that there's some really interesting things. Like you said, there's the chart and there's the schedule and then we talked about all the other things kind of circling back to the clinical piece. There's some changes happening in the industry to really help the clinical side of things with artificial intelligence that I was

going to ask you, are you guys making investments there you think on the AI side?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. You know that, that for me is I think one of the areas that will help our, our clinical staff be able to review the patient's oral health and get some additional insights that they haven't gotten before. Because we talked about the data piece helping you run a better business, helping you better understand your insights from a data perspective. So now bring that back to actually chair side, where you're taking X rays of patients, or you're doing a perio exam, or you're doing something like that. And then the software can say, hey, you might want to take a look at this. There could be something there. Just an extra pair of eyes is always helpful. And it's interesting three or four years ago, or maybe even a little bit longer than that. I've mentioned that to a few dentists and a few dental teams, and they're like, I don't want that. Yeah, that's not going to help me. Why does the computer know better than I do? And I had a great opportunity to meet with the chief dental officer at DSO just this last week, and we were talking about artificial intelligence from a clinical perspective. And he mentioned to me, I think it's more and more important that we're able to provide a standard level of care for our patients and that we're able to have something help us be aware of areas that we might not see with the naked eye or we may not see because the X ray wasn't perfect or whatever the case may be. Companies around the world are using this stuff to do all kinds of things. And I really think bringing it back from a clinical perspective will really help patients obviously feel better taken care of, in my opinion, but also help the clinical team be able to address concerns that the patient may have that we may not even notice.

A third party in the room is so powerful on multiple fronts. And that's how I think about BI software and data, and that's how I think about AI software. You know, it's funny how you mentioned this. I'll just call it out. It's like people think that if a software says something, it's going to, like, reach through the screen, grab the dentist's hands, and make them do the procedure, right? It's like it's a green color on the screen. You either say no or yes to it, right? But the idea that a computer can't be smarter than the human eyes is ridiculous. Like, of course it can. It does a ton of things. Faster brainstorms. Plus, why do I want my brain figuring out something that I could have a computer do? And then I could work on the interactions with the patient, you know, helping with treatment coordination, etc. And choose what to do today versus the future. Plus the, you know, I've been handicapped if I'm a dentist, because I've had to use this white, gray, black, you know, thing and say, hey, that right there is twelve hundred dollars, you know, and they're like, well what about that over there? Oh no, no, that's a Cheeto that's in your tooth. You know, it's like, it looks like this looks like tea leaves, right? But if it's like green, red, purple, whatever it might be, it's clearly outlined. I think the patient's like, oh, okay. And you know, to your point, the chief dental officers, I think if you have an associate, every time you've tried to mentor them, you're always feeling like you're going to be walking on eggshells. Um, so yeah, you're pulling the data and stuff, trying to do it there. But oftentimes talking clinicals, like talking religion or politics, to have that third party that's like, hey, the software is showing, you know, this opportunity. What do you think about that? It at least gives like an open conversation. I jokingly tell my team all the time, clinical aside, hey, this will get a lot easier when standard of care is standard, you know, so. Well, you know, that's part of what we're working towards.

You know, it's interesting you bring that up. I mean there's, there's been a process and I think it's something that's really unique with Henry Schein one we have these things called clinical decision support and AI is going to be part of that in the future, near future. But just let me give you an example. With our Dentrix Ascend product today, as a dentist you can walk in or an assistant, you can walk in and diagnose. You can say it looks like there's caries here or it looks like there's this issue, an impacted tooth or a crack or whatever. Dentrix Ascend actually can provide treatment recommendations. Now those treatment recommendations are things that you set up or things that is a dso. You can say whenever we have caries on the occlusal surface, these are the things that we want to recommend as our standard of care for our dso. And you can do this solo, practice or multi site, you set it up. It's not something that Dentrix Ascend is coming up with it on its own. But what's great about that is at that point forward, anytime you diagnose a patient with those pieces, the software reminds you of, well, here's our clinical standard, here's the things that we recommend be done for.

And if the science changes or your modality or new software, you just go on the back end and say, hey, we're not going to do it that way anymore. We're going to do it this way.

Yeah, exactly.

And again, the software doesn't reach through, grab your hands and make you do it. It just says, hey, based on past performance. Right. Here's how. Yeah.

And I think that's. That's really cool, really beneficial, because it helps them understand, okay, here's the different treatment options that I can provide the patient based on this diagnosis that I've had. And, you know, our Dentrix Enterprise software is actually getting that same feature in the chart so that they can be able to use that, too. And it's something that we believe is really powerful. And that's just one workflow. There's an imaging workflow that I think is second to none in the industry. And I'll just mention this briefly. I know we're almost out of time, but for years and years, X rays and practice management have been completely separate. The only thing between them is the patient name. Adam's X rays are stored here. Adam's clinical information stored here. Well, with our systems, what we've started to do is bring them even closer together and say imaging is actually just a clinical tool, just like your periochart, just like your odontogram, inside your practice management. And what we've done now is make it so that the workflow of taking an image is actually the same thing as the workflow of diagnosing a tooth. You basically say, I'm taking this image, which is actually a procedure code. And what's great about it is we automate on the back end the stuff that the staff had to take two to three minutes to do after every single visit. Number one, they have to post that the procedure, the image got taken. So you have to put in your practice management system. I took a bitewing because your imaging system has a bitewing. Did you know, this is interesting. We did a study. 33% of the time, dental teams fail to put radiography information in their practice management system. And so their radiographs in their radiographic system and their imaging system and the practice management system are completely off. And we've now made it so that those are one solution and one piece together.

Well, that's going to help. Okay, let's talk about the thing dentists really don't want to have to do is doctor notes. Right. So the more you pull that data together, the More you can start, you know. Yeah. Having doctor notes start to fill in. Okay, quick, quickly. Then let's talk about specialties. Any roadmap for ortho or endo or any of those things, or is that still going to be kind of a separate solution for now? And then health care generally, I know there's a lot of talk about the guys doing sleep dentistry have had to try to figure this out for a long time, but there's definitely more integration happening. You got dentists now giving out vaccines and stuff. You can talk through specialties and then healthcare generally.

Yeah. So from a specialty perspective, I mean, Henry Schein one, we have specialty specific software. We have Endovision, we have OMS Vision, we have Periovision, which are excellent products and have done a great job serving those customers for years. We also are working closely with Ortho

2,

Henry Schein and Henry Schein 1. Ortho 2 is part of Henry Schein. That is a great product out there for ortho specific treatments and financial and clinical. Both are addressed in that product. We do believe, and it's a great question because we've actually been having these conversations recently. We do believe that those will come together at some point. One of the most important right now

you're layering like a Jarvis or other solutions on top of it to do that, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But we believe that they are going to come together. And we believe because there's a lot of multi specialty DSOs now and there's a lot of even specialty specific DSOs, but we believe that that's really important for us to be able to have a way for them to expose specialty workflows or certain things like ortho contracting or certain things like implant planning or certain things like vitals monitoring. Those are being done more and more now in a lot of different offices, not just your specialist office. And so we're working towards bringing those all together.

Well, and eventually, Adam, doesn't that also allow the AI to say, hey, this is a good ortho candidate or. Right. Because you got a general dentist head down, not making those referrals with a lot, you know, they're, they're taking care of disease and decay. So now the AI can start prompting some of that stuff.

You got it. Bingo.

Yeah. Yeah, that's, that's going to be awesome.

And then from a, from a. It's, it's a really good topic. Interoperability started to become more and more of a topic that's discussed in dentistry, which I think is really important. Because, you know, somebody once said we need to bring the mouth back in the human body and make it so that it's a holistic approach to the patient. And I completely agree with that. We've been leading that at Henry Scheinone now for a number of years. I mean, our Dentrix Enterprise product is the product in the dental industry, the only product that integrates with over 43 different medical systems out of the box. And so if you have an environment where you're mixed dental, mixed medical, or you need to be able to communicate your dental records over to a medical system, then Dentrix Enterprise has that capability today. And we are, I think, the only. So don't quote me on this, but I think it's the only certified health IT technology for. It used to be called Meaningful Use. It's now called promoting Interoperability. It's the only certified dental solution now in the general space. If we're talking like DSOs, being able to communicate information to healthcare providers, there's a number of ways that we do that and we like promoting that interoperability. We have APIs to be able to communicate that information to other health information exchanges or other places that have medical, as well as a number of reports that we can send, both send with the patient or send electronically to medical providers or specialists or other dentists to review. The great thing about having products like Dentrix ascend in the cloud is you can be very collaborative across your organization once that data is all in one place. And with Dentrix Enterprise, we even offer cloud hosting, which does the exact same thing. And so now you've got a solution where you can ask for a second opinion inside your dso. You can collaborate on a case that's a little bit more difficult. And that's also an aspect of interoperability. It's not always just in these conversations we've heard. It's always about, well, how does medical and dental work together? And that is absolutely part of it. But the other piece is how do we collaborate in dentistry too? That's also interoperability is making sure that that data is in a place that we can communicate it back and forth. So it's a big initiative for us and something that we'll continue to expand and grow on over time.

What's the next thing we should be watching for? What's the next thing you're excited about? It sounds like there's quite a few projects going on, which is kind of its own fun. What's kind of for you? The. The next one you think is going to make some waves that you can talk about.

You know, I think we've talked about a lot of them. You know, as far as Henry Schein one, we really.

Is the AI already available on the X ray or is that coming?

That's. That is available through some other companies out there today. There's a number of companies that are doing things like that. I think the next piece is to have that somehow work better with the practice management system. And between you and me, it's coming.

Okay, cool. That's what I was looking for right there. So that's awesome.

I don't think I'll get in trouble for that one, but it's coming. Yeah, that's something to watch for. I also think more and more analytics and how those analytics can turn into actionable results. Because if people say, well, I've got a dashboard solution, that's great, but can you make decisions from that and can you act on it inside the dashboard? And that's I think, where. Where we really feel like analytics should be and where we're definitely. Where we're definitely at and building more into that.

So, yeah, I mean, I'd love all the best consultants, brains out there to just pour into an AI solution. And then the dashboard comes up and you know, they come up and they say, emmett, here's the behavior you should change to get better performance on this metric. So I love where you guys are going. Hey, Adam, you've been very generous. I appreciate the time. Again, I love technology. So the. To see where you guys are starting to bring this consolidation, if you will. Right. We focus on the dental practice consolidation, but the software consolidation. And in some ways it's just as complex, if not more so, to get all of that to talk together. So appreciate your work.

I appreciate it. That's our goal at Henry Schein One is really to consolidate those and make it so that it's simple. We want to take the complexity out of it.

We're excited you guys are sponsoring deo. So for those interested in learning more, obviously they can reach out to you directly, but also DEO events come there and have the conversation.

Yeah, we absolutely love being part of the organization. The DEO is really critical for, I think our industry to bring together some of the best minds to have conversations like this and other things. So it's great to be involved in that.

If somebody wanted to kind of act now, where would they go? Adam, to start learning more or digging

into this, the easiest place is just go to our website. Just go to henry scheinone.com and there's ways that you can fill out some information there. If you want want one of us to reach out to you, we can do that. There's also our email address and phone number are all listed there. And again, great thing, you just call that one number and we'll take care of whatever product you need to talk

about or get involved in the ecosystem.

Yeah, exactly.

Hey, thank you again, Adam. Appreciate everybody who's been on here. And if you are listening to this, you want to have more conversation around technology, come over to our Facebook page at DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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