144: An Inflection Point: Technology & Consumer Demand for Convenience

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 am your fearless host, Emmett Scott. It's fun to be with you on this Friday. You know, one of the things that you hear me talk a lot about is just how do we get this industry upgraded so that we can have more patient flow or, I guess, more patient care just generally, you know, I feel like two things are happening in the marketplace, colliding and really upsetting industry. One's been going on for a while. One just came out of, like, left field here. And the one that's been going on for a while is the fact that as customers, we want more convenience. I've got this iPhone. It's been training me for years now that there's this app store and I can get whatever I want out of it. And so the demand to just make my life as easy as possible on businesses is just constantly been going up. Now you've got this inflationary process that's the new one coming in that's driving up labor costs. So I'm excited today because Dr. Ryan Hungate, CEO, founder of Simplify, which man who doesn't need, like, simplifying our lives right now, but we're just going to kind of dive into this. And you know, Ryan, as I've been pondering talking through this with my executive team, it's just. It's a unique time where technology, we've always liked it for convenience, but it solves, like, a global problem right now. You know, businesses, let's say, under attack in a way, or has a challenge and an opportunity that's somewhat like inflectionary. And what I mean by that is it's kind of that moment where those who pivot and adopt are going to flourish and get into this, like, wave where they're lowering their costs generally and they're providing more convenience to patients. And those who miss it are just going to get crushed under the weight of the demand. From patients and then trying to fill that with labor costs because they haven't simple, they haven't simplified, they haven't systemized. Yeah, there you go. There's your plug for this. So, anyway, yeah, just curious your thoughts and thank you so much for being on DSO Secrets today.

No, it's fantastic to be back on DSO Secrets. I love this podcast. It's one of them that not only I listen to, but on top of that, all my friends tell me, hey, I listen to this podcast. Have you ever heard of it? I'm like, yeah, hell yeah. Check this thing out.

Yeah, check out this episode. I'm on it.

Yeah. Yeah, this is going to be. It's going to be rocking. No, you're absolutely right. These tailwinds have been for. Change have been coming for a while. You know, I think a lot of. There's rumors that the great resignation that everybody talked about was coming before COVID and Covid just poured gasoline and airplane fuel all over it and lit it on fire. You know, people figured out what they wanted in life. Maybe they wanted to be with their family more, maybe they wanted to be with their family less. You know, they wanted to work from home some. There's all kinds of different things that happened, and we are paying the price for that right now in a big way. We used to have lines down around the corner to work at our offices. Why? Because it's a pretty fun lifestyle. Doctors are pretty chill people most of the time.

And you wanted to be in healthcare, too. I mean, you could upgrade your resume and your career by being in healthcare. Covid made it feel a little more dangerous a little bit.

Definitely. There's people, people that don't want to come back to work still to this day now, that's subsiding because I think financial headwinds. But at the same time, you have a big problem that is actually quite easily solved. But at the same time, we have to address it. One person now has to become three. You actually saw it first in the restaurant industry, right? The restaurants out there were the hardest hit, honestly. I believe second hardest is retail healthcare. Right? Dental esthetics, podiatry, chiropractor, veterinary. They're hit the second hardest. Hospitals kind of forced everybody to come back in, right? We had to do that. So they kind of bypassed that. But I think we're the second hardest hit. And you go to any restaurant right now, the only way that they've moved past and survived closing at 5 o' clock every day, and I think we've all experienced that is by automating things. So Toast is a huge software company out there that said, what if I'm help you not only book appointments within your restaurant, I'm going to help you pay easier. I'm going to text and email you your receipt. I'm going to do all these little things that maybe don't seem like a lot, but at the end of the day, add up to huge amounts of time and allow one person to become three.

Well, that's the, that's the bigger issue too, I think, is that it's death by a thousand cuts. You know, it's all these little administrative items. It's not some big strategic cool thing, like I'm going to add this specialty to my practice that's really going to solve it. What's happened, I think too is the margins have been so good in dentistry that our need to really be as efficient as possible, to really kind of lift our heads up and say, hey, partners, vendors, we need this technology, we need this solution. It was kind of like, I'm already making, like, good enough and I don't really want to rock the boat. You know, frankly, it's a little bit of what I hear from insurance payers. It's like, yeah, we could get more efficient. But, you know, I don't want to really lay off anybody or have to like, figure that out. So to me, I think this is a huge opportunity for those who are the most entrepreneur, which are the ones that listen to DSO secrets or Interface.

Yeah.

To start saying, okay, what's really going on here and how do we solve it? Now the majority of people will sit back, complain about it, and wait for it to change. It's not going to change. You know, I don't know if you saw the Economist at the Adso conference, but he's like, this is the best it gets, basically. And he's like, yeah, we used to be, like, scared AI was going to take everyone's jobs. Now we need like AI and technology just to keep the trains running on time, save it.

Exactly. No, you're 100, 110% right. It's, you know, a lot of people don't think about this, but every time you check somebody out of your practice, it's a five minute process because you're not just swiping a credit card, you're swiping the credit card, then spinning your chair around, typing that into the electronic health record and making sure those things match, and then at the end of the day, taking an hour to find where you screwed up. You know, all those little bitty things, not only do they add up over time, right? If you 20 patients a day, that's 100 minutes. But on top of that, the errors start to compound and smack you in the face too. Like, have you ever typed anything into a calculator wrong? Me too. You know, so all those things you start to think about are bad.

Well, then you start like simplifying your value offering because you can't handle the amount of mistakes and the labor it takes to do those outcomes. So you're like, no, we're not doing any payment plans because then, you know, the software doesn't management well. Or what if their credit card this. And how do I get this to tie in here? Right, so now you're working against what I talked about, that patients want more and more convenience. And so you go, hey, no, no, no, Emmett, I don't. I don't have the problem with the labor thing and I don't, you know, have all these innovation issues because I don't innovate. You know, that's not the best answer either. So there's this huge demand for us to get more sophisticated. I always say, like, we're at 40% penetration rate in the marketplace. You know, cell phones are 110%. Part of the reason is the incredible value cell phones bring. And part of it is it cost me 39.99amonth, not $1,200. Right. So them being constantly innovative on how to fit that into my budget has been something that dentistry has been, you know, slow on.

So, yeah, I completely agree. I think that you're starting to see, I believe what the economist was saying. I think that we might be in the best of times, meaning that the cat's out of the bag. Just because we get a huge class of hygienists coming out of school doesn't mean they're all going to be like, oh, well, now drop my wages back to what they were a year ago. No, they're going to say, I know I can get this number. Pay me. Same with doctors. Same with assistants. Same with front desk team members. Our margins just shrunk. They definitely did. Now, what's interesting is we can look at that and we could do one of two things. We could fix it the easy way by increasing prices, and we can add to this whole inflationary mess problem, which we should, by the way. We should increase the prices. Everybody out there, that's not increasing your prices. You should definitely do that. But at the same time, you could also start to utilize Technology to remove some of the burden there where you were saying hey, I need to rehire or add three more people. Right. Maybe I can actually relax the burden on the existing person and not have to hire an extra two people to do the same job.

That's well. And I think if you, if you raise the prices but you don't increase customer convenience, that's going to work against you. Right. So I think the customer convenience is the North Star. I think you're just kind of getting a two for one now when you invest in technology because you're streamlining processes. You know the other thing the economist pointed out that's been a long time coming that kind of hit us like a wave is just birth rates have dropped so much. And then immigration, which I think was less about building a wall and more about COVID just shut all the immigration down. But we just don't have the workforce. We didn't produce it 20 years ago. And so yeah, there isn't going to be, as the economist said, any great solution coming except for starting to leverage technology. And you know, when you say cats out of the bag, I don't think I'm going to all of a sudden become less entitled. I mean frankly, I want things faster to my doorstep, you know.

Yeah. And I think all those people out there that are going, well, Dr. Ryan, my, my population that I serve is, you know, much older. They don't need that. I'm like, go to any of your grandparents house right now they are on their iPad more than you are. Right. They live on their iPad. They bring that thing to a concert and video the whole thing on an iPad so I can't see behind them. Right. That's how it works, you know, like I know 90 year olds that are on Facebook. I mean look, go to Facebook right now, it's just full of 90 year old trolls tagging everybody. Right? That's what it is. It doesn't like maybe they're, maybe they're not using app stores because they can't remember their password as much. But, but at the same time they're definitely online and they want convenience more. Heck, maybe they depend on it more. You know one of the things I always tell my parents about, I'm like, you know how excited I am about self driving cars for you. I remember when I was volunteering when I was like 13 years old, I remember at a nursing home, I'm sitting there and I asked them what do you miss most? I don't know why I asked this as a 13 year old. But I was like, what do you miss most? And they said when somebody takes your keys, you lose your freedom. And it's weird to think about, right? But now with self driving cars or even Uber and you know, Lyft, that's gone. It's absolutely gone. So this is the kind of stuff that they are maybe even more reliant on technology than, you know, you're seeing

a pendulum switch, right? Whereas before it was, it was new and it was cool. And now to your point, it's an enabler, right? I mean, it does, it allows for parents to connect. I see more parents using FaceTime. Right. Where that was maybe before, just a teenage thing. Now it's like, hey, that's how we're going to connect. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the thousand cuts, which is going to go into some details. But frankly, I think we've got to build these administrative things. I think we've laid the context well enough that these administrative things aren't just like, well, that's only five minutes. Well, that's only 10 minutes. You know, it's like, no, no, no. That's an impression on a customer that you are not modern. That's what it is. It's actually working against your marketing strategy.

Absolutely.

It's an impression on a customer that it's just harder to do and it's going to, you know, lower everything from how fast you're getting paid to how quick appointments are getting scheduled, whatever it might be. So talk a little bit about how Simplify is taking this on.

Yeah, so look, I will ask every single doctor owner to look in the mirror really quick and say, when you go to a doctor, how do you want to do it? Do you like to call them? Like, is that what you like? Do you like to call your doctor to make an appointment? Do you like it when somebody sends you a paper bill in the mail? Are you happy about that? Or do you maybe let it sit on your desk for God knows how long and you wait for the second one and the third one and the fourth one? Why? Because who the hell calls people anymore and gives credit cards over the phone, you know?

Well, it's funny. When you get the paper, isn't the first thing you do on the paper now is you look and see if they've got like a QR code or some digital way to pay it. That's always because if I'm like gonna have to write a checker, you know, right in my credit card, I'm like, you can hunt me for this one?

Yeah, you can find me. And more than likely it's for $16. You know, it's for something that's. That I definitely have in my bank account. The EOB came back and I owe an extra 30 bucks or maybe 70 bucks, whatever it might be. It's not like, oh, you owe eight grand. You know, it's never that because you're calling that person over and over again. You know, you want your 8,000. So that's kind of where that happens. And look at the end of the year you end up with your accounts receivable being, you know, you know, hopefully it's under 8% or 9%, whatever it might be. But it's ridiculous. I mean it costs real money at the end of the year and it's not the patience. Like let's focus on payments really quick because it's a fun one. Like first of all, if I always tell people with. If you're not direct scheduling, get it together and start direct scheduling. Right. You have to do that. Right.

Pay attention down what that means just in case there are some.

Yeah, yeah, of course. So what I mean by that is that right now when a person comes to your website. Okay. Which by the way is the way a majority of people find you now. Right. If you think that it's still word of mouth. It is, right? It can be word of mouth. But guess what happens? Like Emmett, if I tell you, I what's their website? Yeah, yeah. You're immediately going to go Google, you know, and you're gonna find that person. Nobody really full on trusts people anymore, meaning that they want to at least see what it is before they leap into it. So they're gonna go to your phone.

You don't know the. And if I asked you, okay, great. What's their phone number? You'd say, dude, do you not have Google?

Yeah, exactly. I barely know the name of my doctor, let alone the name of the practice or the phone number. You're absolutely right. Nobody memorizes. You know, it's funny, I ask people what's like your girlfriend's phone number nowadays? Like ask like a young person that. No clue.

Right, right.

I don't know. They're. They're on my. They're on my phone.

It's like they're My favorite Snapchat handle is blah, blah, blah.

Yeah, that's it. Right?

So you're right. So, so if we follow the patient journey, you say, hey, you gotta really check out this Dr. Dennis. Really great. I'm like, yeah, awesome. Do you remember the name? Oh, I think it's Dr. It's something. Blah blah, blah, smiles. And then I open up Google Maps and you're like, it's over here on this crossroads. And then we find it. Then I click on that, right? Oh wow. Yeah, they've got pretty good reviews. Oh, this looks like. Then I look and see if the website's there. Or do they? I probably am going to do that first to see if I have to go to the call. Then I'll probably like, okay, I'll just call them later. If I'm like sitting there bored with you at dinner, then I might be like, you'll be like, emmett, what are you doing over there? And I'm like, oh, I'm just getting scheduled real quick with that doctor. You said it looks like they have an appointment Wednesday at 3 that I can hit, you know?

Yeah. And they're like, oh crap, that's amazing. You're absolutely right.

But I'm not going to be like, hold my phone up and be like, hey, I've got this issue, I want to talk.

Exactly. Nobody, nobody does that. And the other thing that I try to convince people of is that, look, if somebody's searching for a doctor, they have one intent, one. Schedule an appointment. That's it. That's their only intent. They want it, they need it. They believe at that moment in time, they need it now. If that time goes by, other things happen. Right. Little Johnny needs an Xbox. I stubbed my toe, like whatever it might be, that's the next priority. You had front and center at that moment. And if you were not allowing them to take action at that moment in time. And guess what? It's not always 9 to 5. Right. And even if it is 9 to 5, do they really want to call you? It's so hard to pick up a phone now. It really is. And we have to embrace that. You know, there's so many doctors out there that tell me they'll call me anyway. Ryan, maybe do you want to throw the dice around besides that? Right? Like 30% of patients schedule right. With somebody else if they have direct scheduling. That's all it takes. Because patients believe that each doctor is equal. They don't know that when I graduated dental school, I would have let eight people out of my hundred person class work on me.

Right.

They don't know.

Well, and think about this, let's bring it down to everything else. How often do you find something and you go to Amazon to see if you can get it delivered quicker? Right. It's the Same concept. For most people, the service is somewhat of a commodity. Yes. If you're, you know, two stars, three stars, they're going to be more concerned than someone who's four or five. But even still, I mean, even when you said that picking up the phone. Picking up the phone's fine. Holding it to my ear even feels like I might get cancer or something. So, you know, there's just all these things, all these reasons I. And it gets hot, you know, so yeah, the more that you can just schedule directly. Okay, so if you haven't gotten that point and you haven't done it, is that a service simplify offers, by the way?

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And the other thing is, is that you got to make sure that you have one that actually reads and writes back instantaneously and one that allows you to actually schedule like your front desk team. Because look, the way that you schedule, Emmett, is different from the way that somebody else schedules. And everybody's got a special way to do it. Right. And if you are actually, you know, there's a lot of people that create those ghost columns and then they have to manually move it back over. That's more work. No, make it so you do something one time and you never think about it again. That's what you have to do.

Yeah. And so when you say read, write back, then there's also not like, hey, open up this other portal. This is where they scheduled. Now go over and input that into your open dental or dentrix or Eaglesoft or whatever else. Right. Tab 32. You're just going to talk to each other.

Another thing to think about on this, that a lot of people don't. This gets more on the operation side of things. One of the main reasons that we talk to these DSOs that are growing, obviously you're just growing. And I think every DSO wants to grow. That's the whole concept of it, is that we don't think about that when we grow. We have to think about the integration process. I think the fastest growing DSOs are the best integrators. If you have a software that can be a even playing field, I don't care whether you have Dendrix, Eaglesoft, Opendel, Dentrix Enterprise, or these other like orthosoftwares, I don't care. Right. What's cool is, is layer of software across all of them. All right. That will automate your billing, that will automate your review process, that will automate your scheduling. If you have that, what does the new practice have to change when they join cdp or anybody else. Nothing. Right. It's just now you have an automated way to make their lives better.

They're just like, hey, who helped me schedule appointments today? Right. That's the idea.

Exactly. That's the magic. And that's what you want.

But yeah, what about. What about revenue cycle management, payments stuff? You guys have been making some headway there. You kind of talk through. Because, you know, we talked about getting the paper form and all that stuff.

Yeah.

What are you seeing there as an opportunity for dentists to kind of, you know, upgrade to the next level? And again, I. I see this crossroads of patient convenience, reducing labor friction, labor effort, you know?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is the next big wave. Right. You're starting to see a lot of companies circle around this, simplify. We're lucky that we're the first ones there where we have an actual complete payment platform. A lot of people have been doing text and email invoicing, which we'll talk about, and you have to do that. The problem is, is that they only did that. So it's just another one of these point solutions that floats around over here

and you have to pay another portal. Another portal. Another portal.

Right, Another portal. And you might as well hire more people to run it. That's not cool. Right. You don't have that. That defeats the whole purpose. Okay, so. So what simplified did and what everybody should start to look at is the payment processing process. I always thought that when I talked to these DSOs, that they would have an automation portion of that. Because, look, these are built into the electronic health records. You know, Dendrix has one, Eagle south have one, Open dental has one. They don't. Because a lot of times they have great deals with banks that they've run and they're okay with because of their huge amount of savings that they swipe it over here and then, you know, Bobby spins around and types it into open dental, you know, to reconcile it. And then they have these huge reconciliation processes at the end of the day, and they're wondering why there's problems. Right. One of the things I was saying earlier, Emmett, like, have you ever typed anything wrong into a calculator before?

Right.

This happens. A decimal moves here and we lose money. So one of the things that we have to do is we have to make it so we have a system that when we swipe a credit card, it instantaneously reconciles in the patient's lab ledger and line items that to that actual treatment. Right. So I know that Ryan paid for his, you know, extraction of number nine and he swiped his credit card and we're done. And.

Okay, so not just going into the household, not just going into, like, the bigger claim, but you're starting to hit procedure level.

Hell, yeah. Yeah. That's what you want to do because. Because then, you know, like, how many of your treatment plans right now do you think? Do you have some old stuff in there?

Right.

Almost every. Everybody does. Everybody has messy treatment plans sitting in there. So what happened? And this is going to become a bigger, bigger deal. You know, a lot of times we say, how much money do we make? I can tell you that. That's easy. But then you say, well, what. What actually made you that money? And somebody goes, I don't know. Right. All you can say is, I planned this many implants, and I think I completed this many implants. I don't know where the payments were allotted. So that's a big thing that's coming down the road. You're going to want to know where you need to specify that can happen automatically. Like, that's built into open dental. That's actually built into Eaglesoft. Dentrix doesn't have that ability, but Dentrix Enterprise does. More and more people are going to want line item accounting, and you don't want to change anything to do that. You want that to be automated because, remember, change is the devil at the end of the day. Right.

What about, like, payment plan solutions? Because I know a lot of issues there, right? Because you've almost got, you know, let's take open dental. You've almost got this separate system that's doing the payment plan.

It's not pretty. Yeah, right. So one of the things we've found with all these different systems out there, open dental being one of them. Dendrix, Eaglesoft, their payment plan options were built as an afterthought. That's why, Honestly, that's why people use ortho software. Ortho software was built because the payment plan stuff was good in them, but that's the only reason. So then you end up having an Ortho 2 over here or Ortho snap over. It's all these different things, and that's a problem. So what if you could fix that? And what are the real problems with payment plans? So we looked at that. One of the things I'll lead with is, have you ever noticed that your credit card never expires on your Netflix account? It's weird to think about, right? Like, it's odd. You're like, wait a second. You're right. I've definitely gotten a new credit card. I've definitely lost my credit card, but somehow Netflix keeps charging me. Well, they have this Technology, they have 300 million subscribers. Maybe like -20 million nowadays, but. But like 300 million subscribers. If they had the same problems that we had at our dental offices, that'd be a non starter.

You'd be screwed.

Yeah, they'd be screwed. Right? You'd have to have a.

Hey, I was just trying to collect that 1499. You know, I've never gotten a paper statement from Netflix.

You know Netflix, right? It just magically updates. Right. So what we are able to do is we took the same technology that Netflix has, we call it card updater, and we plug it in and it enables two really three really cool things. One, it allows you to be like Amazon. Like, you know how on Amazon I don't have to type in my credit card every single time? Would you buy as much stuff if you had to type it in every single time? Probably not. Right? So when we enable that we have now, it's called proper tokenization. We're swiping credit cards and we're saving them as a token. That's not the actual number. All these electronic health records hash the number. Not only is that more scary, but because you actually have credit card numbers stored in your system, even though they're encrypted, it's still if somebody decrypts it,

not a bad day.

Right. Let alone ach information that's really bad. Right. So like you can look in the news. There's been some bad things happen lately because of that. So one, we tokenize that and save it properly. We save the connection between patient A and business B. So then if they get a new credit card, it updates automatically and you never even knew what happens. This is magic for payment plans. Yeah, Right. So imagine all those ortho plans that you have going Emmett, right now. Would it be a big help if I was able to update credit cards automatically?

Yeah, absolutely.

Hours.

Hours, yeah. Because what I found when you say that, Ryan, like when I first got into dental and we said, we're going to do payment plans and dentists said, well, patients never pay. Every excuse they had when I dug into it was really just administrative. You know, it's the same excuses I was giving. And like you said, I had enough money to make the payment, but it was like someone would call me and say, hey, you didn't make this payment. Like, oh yeah, I got a new credit card. You ready? Here it is. Boom.

And then we were so sorry.

And they weren't even doing that. Right. So. Yeah, but now they're doing that. But it takes labor. And so what this does is just streamlines that process. So now you can use that individual to do a thousand other things.

It's amazing, right? There's actually a thing called a sheet mint where if on. On the second invoice sent. Okay. It actually cost you about 30 bucks to send that out the door because somebody had to print it and mail it and stamp it and reminder and then call somebody. Right. That's a problem. I mean, what's the lowest you're paying somebody now? 15, 20 bucks an hour. It's something crazy like that. So. And it takes 30 minutes of a phone call to get a credit card. Not worth it. Rip that invoice up, you're done. Right. So this automates that. The other cool thing about our payment plan stuff is that let's say that you completely delete the account. Right? That happens every so often. Maybe you nuke the account again. They were probably doing that not to stop paying you for your ortho because their kid's still in jail. Right. They're still got the braces on their teeth. Right. They're not deleting it on purpose. What they're doing is they probably had something screw up over here in life and this pays the price. So what we do is we also automatically send them a text and email saying, hey, you need to put another payment on file. Yeah. And they do it that they have to call anybody. No, it's the same thing with Netflix concept. And then lastly, we remind them of their payments, all those good things. People can make payments ahead of time. Right. And it automatically factors that in, reduces the overall cost, and divides it out right now in every single electronic health record. To do that, you know what you have to do? You have to go in, delete the old payment plan, do the math to make sure that you got that right, and then re add the payment plan. Think there's any mistakes made doing that? Right, right. So there's like. So that's the payment plan. The other cool thing that we need to start doing.

That's awesome, by the way. I mean, we started off by saying we're dying by a thousand cuts here. So congrats, man, on solving this.

Thanks. Yeah, yeah, we're pumped. We're pumped. The whole thing is like everything I solve.

I don't have to have a software development team that has to go solve that. So I'm always.

Millions of dollars somebody else.

Yeah. There's so many different components. When we say dso, we act like it's this like clean wrapped up, you know, one skew, we're selling mattresses type thing and it's so much more complicated. I mean, you're talking about everything from marketing to scheduling all the way over here into revenue cycle management stuff, you know, and, and accounting and finance and payment plans and credit card collection and anyway, there's just so much there that I'm truly thankful as individuals solve these things for us.

You were the one that talked about the DSO in a box concept. I love that. That's what we think about too. What if we could help you with that DSO in a box? I'm never going to help you with the people. I'm never going to help you with the financial management of those things. The human aspect is what DSOs are amazing. If you can take your Disney experience and you can take that somewhere else and apply it, that's magic and that's what you guys are good at. What we were trying to, we are trying to enable is what if I could enable all the nitty gritty technological stuff in between that and make it so you can concentrate on the Ritz Carlton experience? That's awesome.

Well, you want to commoditize the administrative so you can customize the experience, right? And if you're spending all this time and money just trying to get paid, for example, or trying to get scheduled, that's money getting sucked out of making the experience amazing. Even just the mind share of your best people are now sent, you know, trying to figure out some of this administrative stuff.

So it's goofy, right? The, the other thing that I was going to bring up too is that something that I think I want to start to normalize in our world, that has been happening in the MD world for a long time. We can take a page out of their book for a second. Have you ever heard of the concept payment assurance?

No.

So you might have it. So you might have. You've definitely experienced it. So what happens is when you walk into a doctor's office, they'll say, hey, you know, hand me your insurance card. And they'll also say, you know, we also put a debit card or a credit card on file for you so that when the EOB comes back, right, we're going to hit that card for the extra. We'll let you know, don't worry, we'll call you and let you know what's going to happen. But we're going to hit that. That's Part of my financial policy. You actually put it into the financial policy that this is going to happen.

It's the 200 bucks the hotel holds for, you know, me eating the Eminem snacks and stuff out of the.

Exactly. And even better yet, you don't even have to hold the 200. Now what you can do is you just tokenize the credit card. So we've never had the technology as retail health care physicians, or especially dental. Right. We've never had the technology to hold credit cards appropriately. Right. We always have to swipe them. We don't get to hold them. So now what? Simplified is we said, look, allow patient X to put a credit card on file, save it to their profile, just like Amazon. So then what happens is, EOB comes back, I still owe 30 bucks, and I have two options now. And we'll talk about the second option here or the first option here in a second, which is send a text and email invoice. Or what you do is you have a team that calls them and says, hey, Susie, your eob came back. It looks like you still owe about 17 bucks here. I was gonna put that on the card ending in 9969. Is that okay? And they're either gonna say, yeah, that's fine. And you go, okay, see you later. Right. Because then I go in there, I hit enter and it runs. Right. I don't have to save it. That's magic, right? The patient wants that, too. Or they're gonna say, no, and then you're gonna say, okay, what would you like to put on file? I'm here.

I'm on the phone. Yeah, exactly. They're gonna be like, no, but I've got this other one, 8828. And can I give you that one to use?

Yeah. And you say, okay, let me run that. Yep, it went through. And then, by the way, that card just tokenized and saved their profile, too. Right. That's what you need to have. Guess what? Your accounts receivable goes to Emmett Zero.

Yeah.

That's cool. You know, that's real money. You know that. And that's honestly what patients want to. You know.

Totally.

I have a line. Yeah. If you want to get paid, make it easy to pay you. That's easy, right? That's all you got to do. If you want to get paid, make it easy. If you don't want to get paid, make it hard. It's real simple, you know? And that's the line that we have.

The same with scheduling, too.

Yeah.

If you. I remember at one point, you know, Jody was overseeing some of our ortho stuff, and our scheduling was not streamlined at all. And she said something that she goes, if you want an ortho appointment with us, you better really want the appointment with us.

It was like.

And, you know, if you. If you haven't tried to set an appointment with yourself or whatever, it'd be worth testing that. You know, just call in and be like, hey, this is Janie. I'd like to get an appointment set. You know, hey, I'd like to pay and see how hard some of our systems are like. And it's not because our people are bad. It's because our systems are so broken, you know, and they're so clunky.

It's tough, right? It's really tough. Like, how do you not have a pay now button on your website? How do you not have the ability to do these things? They were like, oh, man, my accounts receivable is 15%. Yeah. You know, guess what? You know, it's probably tough to pay at your office, you know, and we talked about this, too, a little earlier, but, you know, you talked about payment plans. If anybody's wondering if this is going to be a bigger deal in your life coming up, it definitely is, right? More people are going to ask for payment plans. And whether you're doing that in house or making it easier for them to take outside financing, Right. We need to make that easier. One of the things we built into our system, and you'll like this, is that we made it. So at. On checkout, you can see credit, debit, cash cost, right? And they can choose as low as 48 bucks a month to show it to them. Why are we not showing that to them? Why are we not giving them that option on checkout? This is what you experience on Amazon. This is what you experience at Kate Spade when you're buying a purse, right? This is what people want, and this is what people don't understand yet. And this is where I'm gonna break it wide open.

It's the weirdest thing now on. I think it's one of my AmExes.

Yeah.

It's line item by line item. It says pay later. Pay later. Like, yeah, it's. It's payment planning. My credit card, you know, I mean.

Yeah.

Just trying to break things in so many chunks. And I think what's worse, Ryan, than people are gonna start expecting this is they just don't communicate it and they just stop coming in. Right.

I'll think about it. I'll think about this. I'll see you later. Right? That's what it is. Oh, let me think about this. Yeah, they get scared. It's embarrassing.

One interesting thing too is to the extent you have payment plans, if you listen to how customers communicate with each other, if you have it, they say things to their friends like, oh, yeah, they're really great. They work with you. You know, they make things very. They're very affordable. If you don't, then you. Then you hear things like, yeah, they're just. It's hard to pay them. Or, yeah, they're just really expensive. That's the other thing. It could be the exact same cost, right? It's like, they're really expensive. So anyway, this is awesome. Hey, anything else? Yeah, that we should touch on?

You know, the last piece we'll touch on is that, you know, we talked about the paper bills. Right, we talked about those paper bills, sending them out. Another thing that people need to look at is they need to look at also in the exact same system, by the way. Not some disparate, hey, I've got this thing sitting over here for text and email invoices. That's great. But it's super manual, right? You got to type it in. And then the worst part is when somebody pays, right? Because what happens, it comes back and you don't know what happened. You don't even know. And now it's like, hey, Johnny, you need to pay me. I already paid you, man. And you're like, oh, sorry, go find that payment. Enjoy. And then you gotta go over this other. Oh, yeah, he did pay two months ago. Darn it. I've been sending out 20 of these stupid bills and I didn't have to. So one of the things that we do is we also send text and email invoices, which is great. Okay. But when they pay it, it instantaneously reconciles within the electronic health record magic.

So that read write capability is amazing.

Yeah, you have to. And even down to the line item, too. That's the other nice thing about it, right? So when they pay, it shows what they pay for. On top of all that, you know,

we talked about, how does it know the procedure level? Like if. Yeah, so what if they're doing this and they're doing that or I run into things with, you know, I got to send it to the parent, but it's really for the kid and there's two kids and they owe. Right.

And yeah, guarantor. So one of the things we do is we can break things up with guarantors. So let's say I want to send 50% to Emmett and 50% to the. To Bobby. Right? I could do that. Okay.

So that's why divorce parents. I can do stuff like.

You've got it.

Oh, wow. I wasn't even asking that. That's awesome.

Oh, okay, Gotcha. Yes, you can do that.

I was just saying, if I've got three kids, can I get to the right kid?

Oh, yeah, you can do that too. Yeah. That's the easy stuff. So what's nice is that. Yeah, so we make it. So it's funny, whenever you work with PETO or Ortho, you're gonna work with divorced parents. It's just gonna happen. Sadly, 50% of them are gonna be like that. Right. So you're going.

Well, and you've just got this guarantor component that I think a lot of those who work with adults don't even know. Like, they have to deal with some of that stuff, right?

Oh, it's a. Yeah, it's a nightmare. And you want to watch some good fighting, you know?

Yeah. But I mean, what I was asking is like, sometimes it's like, you know, hey, Johnny has a credit, but Jimmy owes money. You know, it's like, same family. You're just trying to reconcile all that stuff, right?

Yeah. So we, we pull from what's called a fan. Like, most of these people have concepts of family files, so you can do transfers of what we call suspended credits. So let's say that like little Johnny comes In, I put 50 bucks down, but little Susie executes early. Technically you have that money on file. Theoretically, you could transfer the suspended credit to the other kid if you wanted to.

Got it.

It's not easy. It's not easy. Normally it's really almost impossible within. You almost have to delete a payment, which is really scary because then you got to do what, ask them for more money. Right? So. And that's scary because now maybe they got the credit card on them that day, maybe they don't. So it gets a little bit hectic. So we can transfer suspended credits, which is cool. The other thing that we do is that when we're sending these text email invoices out, when they pay them, they can also use things like Apple Pay and Google Pay. Right.

So that's one of the things, like when somebody does. It's funny how entitled I am now, but it's like, I have to go find my credit card. What? That's how bad I got.

I love it. Like, this is the best thing ever. There's my credit card, it's on my watch. Paid. You know, like if you live in New York City and you don't have Apple Pay and Google Pay, walking through the subway, it's like you're paying with a check at the grocery store. Everybody yells at you, you know, like, you suck so bad. Yeah. So it's interesting, like having that ability to send the text and email invoices is a big deal, making it easier, easy to pay the text. Email invoices is a bigger deal. And lastly that when they do that, or whenever you send a text and email receipt to the patient, they can also log into their profile and see their past history, which is beautiful. Right. So they can log in there and see it. And then one thing that we haven't even talked about or added to it, but it's an added benefit. You know, you're a DSO that's made up of multiple different brands and locations. Now this doesn't happen often, but it's something that we should start to think about because especially as a dso, how do I create network effect within like CDP or Guardian or whoever else it might be out there? How do I create network effect without having to tell these brands they have to be friends? You know, like that's just how it works, right? We're all under this umbrella. Well, if you start to put a cool software layer, like let's say simplify in there, not only am I able to go from location A to location B because my simplified username is the same. Right. So I can literally go to location A which might have a completely separate brand. And then I log in over here and I have location B. Right. That's magic. Now I have all my invoices under one place. They're separated out by location. Everything's still completely separate, but we take

care of the routing this consumer. Right?

Yeah.

Hey, I was just thinking about something else. Whenever you get to a form and it doesn't have like that auto fill of your name and stuff, it's like you don't know who I am. I have to type in my name.

How dare you? Yeah. So second half, I'll give you a little peek behind iron curtain. Emmett, what you're talking about second half of this year we got forms done. So now theoretically you could go from one location to the next location and it will ask you, Emmett, do you want to transfer your forms you've already filled out to this location?

Oh, wow.

Yes, I do. Done.

That's. I was just talking line. I am. Just remember what my Name is so I can click through it faster. But now it's like, just fill out nothing.

Yeah. Sign here for your financial policies, whatever it might be. That's going to be magic. And even better yet as that's network effect for sure. Yeah, yeah. Optometry and, you know, audio, whatever it might be. Why does it have to stop in one place? That's cool. Yeah, yeah.

I feel like you're simplifying a lot of stuff. That's what I feel like we're trying. Hey, Ryan, thank you. This is. This is awesome. This is definitely a place I have a lot of passion for the industry right now. You know, every business on a macro level is getting hit by these same forces. They're not unique to dental, but this is the industry I'm passionate about and trying to support. So thanks for being on. It was like the timing was perfect. I was just chatting with someone else about this yesterday. These two forces of patient convenience and inflation are such in a unique place for us as business leaders to continue to move up the scale. By the way, you gotta see my cool shirt. You know, I talk a lot about, like, businesses like moving up a Slinky, right? Cause you, like, solve something like payment plans, and you're like, good enough. And then you come back around, you're like, is it not good enough anymore? Right? And then you're like, okay, now I gotta solve my marketing, et cetera. Anyway, Tim Richardson, who's a pediatric dentist, said, I'm surviving the Slinky and DEO actually made.

I love it.

Surviving the Slinky.

That's a good one.

Anyway, you're the next step on the Slinky, man. Next step up for many of our listeners is you got to check out Simplify and at minimum start thinking about these thousand cuts administratively. And what are you going to do to start solving them? So, hey, if anybody wants to get ahold of you, other than going to Google and typing in Simplify, is there anything else they should do?

No, yeah, they look, they can go to simplified.com. s I, m, p, L, I, F, E. We spelled a little bit funny. Simplify.com. masterCard owns the other one, so you don't want to go there. But yeah, Simplify. S, I, M, P, L I F, E Y E dot com. You can check us out there. You can see all the different things we do. You're right. Emmett, get one thing started, whether that be direct scheduling, whether it be even review generation, because there's some people that aren't automating that. Right. But payment processing is something that a lot of people go, is there anything on earth that I can do without any change whatsoever and make more money? That's payments, right? Give us a call. Right? It's really cool. Heck, we even do 0% on merchant fees, which we didn't chat about. But 0% and it's automated. Really cool stuff. And yeah, we'll try to rock your world.

Awesome. Hey Doc, thanks for being on. Appreciate you innovating in the space and bringing us great value. If you're listening to this on the podcast, make sure you come over to our Facebook page on DSO Secrets. Continue the conversation. Dr. Hungate is on there can answer additional questions and until next time, keep smiling.

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