153: Is It Time To Start Our Own Dental Insurance Product

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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 I'm really excited about this host or this co host, I guess, partner today on DSO Secrets, Ryan Chan, who is with Bento and specifically helping DSOs. Before I get to him, I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had around Emmett. Is it time we start our own insurance product? And I think it comes from a couple of components. One is, you know, no one's been thrilled about payers for a long time, and maybe some of it is just dentists and owners complaining about certain things. So we'll put some of that in that bucket. But it really got, I think, disheartening for me was when we went through Covid and I watched payers cut payments to clinicians who were on the front lines here who were trying to struggle with staff, et cetera. They were still collecting premiums. And, you know, I'd love to have a payer on to say, here's why we did that and we needed to do that and get that perspective. But I haven't heard one yet that I'm like, yeah, that really makes sense. And then I saw dentists who, you know, in that struggle were trying to pay for PPE and supply costs, would try to pass that on to the consumer like my local Home Depot does. And payers actually sued the dentist for trying to pass it on, but they wouldn't reimburse for it either. So I get that there's frustrations. Of course, if you're, you know, working in a Medicaid environment, MCO environment, or you're doing certain procedures that need a lot of pre authorization, you often find that there's clunkiness on the other side. It almost feels sometimes like they don't want to pay or approve for things. If you get a lot of audits, you know, sometimes what you're getting on the other side doesn't feel fair. As I talk to dentists, this is what I hear. And so eventually, I think especially in this high inflationary environment, people start saying, okay, Emmett, if. If the payment is coming down or staying flat year over year over year and inflation's moving up eventually, like, I can't be in business. So they do everything they can here to create efficiency. But eventually, like, we got to move the payment up. And so I think that leads a lot of individuals to say, let's just start our own insurance product. And the entrepreneur in all of us are like, yeah, if there's a problem, like, let's go solve it. But like every entrepreneur who whiteboards an idea, the devil is always in the details. Like, dental insurance really starts with selling HR directors and HR executives and all of these companies, because that's how everyone gets their benefits. They're not, you know, you don't go into your local doctor and say, hey, what health insurance should I go buy? You know, you go to your HR and that's typically how you get your insurance benefits. So as soon as we start to innovate, we see there's fundamental issues that we're going to have to get around and solve for. I mean, it's no different in some ways than maybe Tesla saying, hey, we want to sell direct to consumers. But then there's all this regulation. And speaking of regulation, like, if you say, I want to start an insurance product that's a regulated product. So if you're truly going to do insurance, you got to go state by state, every insurance commission, and make sure that you're in line with that. Even if you're doing a discount plan, you really need to be careful that you have all of your eyes dotted and T's crossed. Because it would be really terrible if you created something amazing. It just happened to be fraudulent. So you don't want to do that. So you got that sales. You've got to be able to adjudicate claims. I mean, if you truly start, even if you put a group together, I hear people say, hey, Emma, maybe just like all of us get together, whoever that all of us is, maybe they say, oh, what if deo, what if Adso, what if this happened? What if that happened? All really great ideas, but again, the devil's in the details on how would we administer this and how would this work and how would you sell these things? So that's where I've always struggled with trying to figure out the project plan for execution. And I think, just like taxi service, if the other side doesn't innovate at some point or the cost of gas continues to go up. Eventually the entrepreneurs are like, enough's enough, and they create a solution. As Ryan and I are talking here, that's what brought us together is in talking with ada. And again, this is the cool part about creating relationships. As Adso is talking with Ada, they're like, you should talk to Bento about what they're doing, because ADA gets hit with this all the time. What if all the ADA members got together and created their own insurance product? And what Bento is really solving is how do you administer that? And is there another word other than insurance, like discount plans, et cetera, that from a consumer's perspective, what do they really think about dental insurance? Right? It's like, I want my free cleanings, I want this, I want that, I want these discounted here. So what could get created? So, Ryan, that's like a big intro, but hopefully that sets the groundwork and maybe gets a few people fired up, because I know they're excited to figure out how do we do, you know, dental insurance, or we should say a parallel product. That's. It's got to really be two things. It has to be better for the consumer, and it has to be better for the provider. Right. And then you can eliminate the middleman using some technology. So Ryan and I also started talking because Smilecon is coming up. ADA in Houston, October 13th through 15th. And if you're going to be there, then you can come chat with both of us. I'll be podcasting live. They have a little. I mean, this is just so cool how ADA is starting to have every dentist supported there. Anyway, with all of that, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Bento, maybe a little background, and then bring us up to speed on what I said was accurate and then correct anything that's off, too.

Yeah. So thanks for having us, Emmett. I mean, you hit the nail on the coffin, so to speak. I mean, dental insurance is a problem, and I think we all know that. You know, health insurance, auto insurance, you know, once you paid out, like you're covered with dental insurance, it this deductible and everything is out of pocket. And it's not just a frustration on the provider side. I mean, that's. I mean, low reimbursements, I mean, all kinds of problems. Right. But even on the employer side. And so just, you know, some of our. Some background on our company. Our company was founded by Ram Krishna, who's a serial tech entrepreneur. He's founded several companies. And back then he saw the frustration when he was trying to provide quality dental benefits to his employees. Generally speaking, 20 to 40% of the premiums, the money going into is going to the insurance company. And so the provider's getting low reimbursements, the patient is getting inadequate care. And so he wanted to create an end to end platform that solves that problem. And so we actually started out approaching employers. That's how our business started was approaching employers, groups, associations, et cetera, and allowing them, those organizations to build an in house employee benefit plan that they can control, they can control what money comes in, what services are covered, what is covered outside of the plan, et cetera. And you know, essentially cutting out the middleman that everybody doesn't want to deal

with and like a self insurance solution

then that and much more. So our platform is an end to end platform that you can build multiple plans, you can have it self funded, you can split it, there's multiple configurations that can be done and you know, it's like real time adjudication, you know, like we handle claims like there's a lot of stuff that we do on the back end. And so in doing that and having a lot of success with that, we also identified that there is an opportunity on the provider side to utilize our platform for a product that can replace traditional dental insurance in the form of in house office plants. And so it just kind of all fit together. And so that's when we launched our in office plans and partnered with the ada, which has been a really exciting thing. And so yeah, I mean it's really taken off for DSOs. Kind of what I would say separates us from that, from the membership plan aspect to many, you know, providers in the market today is that we started on the employer side. Right. So we're not just a membership plan software, there's tons of those, but it's more. So we have an experienced sales team that are completely dedicated towards any DSO that decides to utilize Bentos platform, not just maybe for their internal employee benefits, which the platform can do, but also for in office plans that they can sell to their patients, not just uninsured patients but, but even insured patients for services that are outside of what is covered. And so that's a big opportunity. Right? You know all the, all the different companies today, it's all like going to the SaaS model, it's all monthly subscriptions. And so our platform can kind of work against that. Right, because we're building reoccurring revenue for practices, helping them retain patients, elevating the care that they can provide. Right. Cutting out the traditional middleman and you know, providing plans that patients actually want to buy and then even on top of that, going out and selling these plans for that DSO to local businesses.

All right, I'm going to unpack some of this because it's super rich. It's fascinating because you have discount plans out there. But where you started in trying to solve insurance for the corporations put you in a unique position from a tech enabled mindset to say, you know, when you said end to end. Right. Where some of the places that, you know, if I, I fall short if I have a discount plan is getting all the way into the employer's HR director level. Because if I can tap into that and I can start doing that on scale. The other thing that would be interesting is if I could take my plan so Community dental partners, we'll call it, and I can customize it for me and meaning what I, what I want and maybe even for each of my brands. So I'd like to unpack this. So let's say I support a pediatric group. I support, you know, an end to end adult to family care group. And so they want to each create their own insurance plan because part of it, where you can get misalignment is the insurance doesn't cover some of the procedures.

Yep.

That the clinician or they do cover procedures that the clinician isn't going to want to provide. So if I could have a pediatric plan that covered certain things. Right. For those dentists who want to do more pediatric or perio, for those who want to do that, that would be great. Then I'll take it to another degree. If I could hook up, link to or allow to kind of extend my network, if you will, from a tech perspective that there's another DSO or another group that we could be on. So if somebody's doing a search and I don't have an office there, they do. Or I just get bigger reach too. Let me say, can Bento do The first part that I'm looking for, which is I want to create insurance plans or what's the proper regulatory discount plans? Is that the regulatory word to use?

Or I would say, I would say membership plans. Yeah. Discount plans are, yeah. Discounts are, you know, pretty generic like you said. It's usually like, you know, pay US$99, get a flat discount on X services. But those don't tend to be that attractive to patients. From what I've seen working with various DSOs. Okay.

So I can think of Amazon prime membership. So These membership plans can be customized based on different member types. Like if I want to go after a geriatric market, I can create a membership plan for them. If I want to go after a pediatric, I can create that and I can have that all on my platform. Correct?

You're 100% correct. So one of the nice things about our software, our portal, is that you can create membership plans utilizing any CDT code, any of them. We even have the ability to add products to your plan, which just adds more value to it. Right. So to answer your question, you could have a pediatric plan, an adult plan, a senior plan, an ortho plan, a perio plan, anything and all the above. And you can control that at the corporate level of which locations can sell what. And then furthermore, yeah, when you say

product, like, hey, if you buy this plan, you get a toothbrush, toothbrush, Philip

toothbrush, mouthwash, Botox, you name it, whatever you want.

Or adding kickers to it, kind of different kicker benefits.

Exactly.

A traditional dental plan wouldn't have, Right, Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, that's the main thing with membership plans is like as a patient, like when someone presents it to you, you want to see exactly what you're getting, what the cost is, what's free and what's discounted. So you can have that whole package and be able to look at and say, okay, well none of the other practices I've been to have something like this. Now I understand exactly what I'm getting. There's value to this. That's why I want to buy it. Now, in terms of what you were mentioning about seeing practices in your area, so one of the things we didn't talk about is the member experience. So Bentos end to end platform has a patented mobile app where members can track their benefits. They can sign up themselves, they can sign up their family members without ever having to call your office. And then within the app get, you know, real time estimates, they can pay, they can, you know, track what benefits they have for their themselves and their family members and search for a dentist within the area. Now obviously if they purchased your membership plans when they go to view that, they're only going to see your practices unless, as you stated, you wanted to work something out with a different dso.

And you know, I could be like pretty aggressive in my marketing and I could put, you know, some QR code cards at, you know, the gym or whatever I wanted to target and say, hey, check out this dental membership plan, right? And then they could click on that, buy it and like, this doesn't have to just be a front desk in my office type thing.

That's the other big thing. So when I have conversations with DSOs and they're like, well, we have a discount plan, I'm like, well, are you happy with your sales results? And the answer is always, no, absolutely not. We're 20% of what we think we should sell. And it's like, okay, well how are you selling them? Well, front desk, whenever you know an uninsured patients, we present it. Do you have any other ways to sell it? Not really. How do you market it? Right. So there's a lot of things in there that we do that takes it to a whole nother level from a sales volume perspective.

That's because of this app piece. Because if I gave them a QR code, I mean, I'd have to set up a website and so forth. But being able to have an app that then lets them search for the dentists associated with that makes that more real time. Because they're going to look and go, yeah, I want to buy this. But like, who takes it if they can see something that's close? Because hopefully I haven't spread this into like a state or city I'm not in. They can see something close and they can go, oh, like this is right by my house. There's a dentist right by my house for this. This would be great if it was a pediatric plan. I could target pediatric locations, right?

Yes.

If it's geriatric, I target geriatric. And then you mentioned something kind of interesting, which is selling membership plans to people who already have insurance. So a guy comes in and goes, oh, I already have insurance. And you go, great. Goes and does his initial gets a treatment plan together. Insurance only covers or doesn't cover. This is where membership plan could start coming in.

Yes, I would say so. I mean, so I'm the patient, I go to your office. Okay. I got my cleanings, whatever. I need to get a crown. Okay. So the estimate is 900, 1200. So you have that in our platform. You can also immediately have a side by side estimate with what services are covered that are outside of the plan. So you can say, all right, the crown is 900. Or since you're a longtime patient, you can roll our membership plan. That will bring your crown down to, I don't know, whatever you decided, 15, 20%. So it brings it down to 600. But we're also going to include these other services that your insurance doesn't cover. Junctive oral cancer screening. Maybe you guys are utilizing Vel Scope or something. The big buzzword today is AI, right? Everybody wants AI. And that's great. Are you getting reimbursed on it? No, but you are obviously getting value from it. But what if, what if on a plan you can say community dental partners, we include twice a year AI screening at whatever the retail cost is. So you can include all those services and have that flat discount applied to services outside the plan. So that's a moment that you can make that sale, you know, even though he's insured. Because there's a lot of other things that their insurance plans is not covering or though maybe.

Yeah. So that's interesting because now you could almost start hijacking that con because then the, the patient's next thing is like, well, if I had this membership plan, it looks like it already covers the cleanings, like depending on how you designed it, right. Or they could say, do you, it looks like you have another membership plan. What if I bought this one? And, you know, so. Exactly, they start going, wait, I think I could cover everything without having this insurance and I could still get the same value.

Right?

And in fact, if there's somebody especially who's like, well, I only wanted to come here anyway, cuts my costs, increases my, my benefit, I mean, that would be a really great conversation.

Exactly. I mean, that's the future. We like to say our slogan is the future of dental benefits because, by God, we need a new future on it.

Yeah, well, and the core thing is everyone agrees with that. The core thing has been the devil in the details, like, how do you administer all of these components and how do we get a bigger reach? Because in fairness, really what the insurance companies have, I mean, other than adjudication and so forth, which are real things you have to solve, is they've got a massive salesforce.

That's true.

So they're out there selling. And so how do you compete with, you know, in hr? So this is, this is what's interesting with us.

With us, that's how you compete. So the big thing, you know, and we know this, where our team has been doing this for years. And a lot of those guys have been in the insurance business for decades. But, you know, having the relationship with the brokers, that's a big one. Right. Understanding who those HR contacts, the insurance

brokers who are selling the health insurance. Right. Because that's really how dental gets in. No one's like, hey, let me find dental insurance. They're like, I'm trying to re up my health insurance. And then the brokers the insurance brokers are like, hey, I can throw in vision dental. Here's what that would look like, right?

Correct. Correct. So that's, so that's, that's a piece of it. Now, when you talked about the salesforce mean, the scenario I would paint to you is this. So let's say you wanted to try out Vento, right? So you give us a list of your uninsured patients. Number one, they're all going to get marketed to where they can sign up to the app right through the phone, like never having to call your office. So that takes quite a bit of burden off front desk having to sell plants. There is a really good training program that we offer for front desk to train them as well. But on top of that, if you have businesses in your area that you know, that you regularly patronize, you can provide that to us. And our team will do nothing but call and market to sell your membership plans to those businesses. So when you talk about having a salesforce to do that, that's where we come in. And even beyond that, not just the marketing. And sign up through the app for your existing uninsured patient base. If you want to provide a list and you know, of maybe insured patients, particular categories, pediatric seniors, etc. We can also call them to sell your membership plan, which we can build any way you want. Right. So there's other avenues there as well that can be taken advantage of.

Yeah, it's fascinating because you're solving my checklist of issues, which is I need this administrative, this adjudication solved for any. And then I need somebody, I need a salesforce to help. Right. Go solve this as well.

So, yeah, and, and here's the other cool thing, right? So I mean, the way, the way we price our services out, it's completely free to use, train be implemented. There's only a cost when a sale is done. So when a plan is sold by us, then there's a cost to that, to that plan. But think about that though, right? What marketing company is going to say, hey, we're going to do all this work for you, and then if you get a lead that can be tracked to us, then you pay us, Right? Who does that? But that's how confident we are in our salesforce, as well as the connections and experience we have on that whole team that does nothing but go after employers. That's all they do.

It also makes you a variable cost on my P and L. So I'm only having an expense related to revenue, which is exactly easier to justify Yep. Hey, this has been awesome. Ryan, you're coming to ADA Smilecon October 13th. Do you guys know what booth you are? If we wanted to stop this in Houston, by the way, for anyone.

Yeah, yeah. So the booth number is 954. I wrote it down. Okay, cool.

All right, so keep that or you can come back. You know, listen to this. What else? Anything else that people like, if they just want to contact you directly, they're like, oh, my gosh, I want to brainstorm this through. What if they're, like, on a current plan? You know, maybe they're using a discount plan or another membership, or they just want to start. What's your thoughts on that? Like, do you do some transition work, or do you typically keep those plans in place and then start adding in bento? Or how does that work?

So there's a lot of ways to go about it. Number one, any plan that they currently have, whether it's a homegrown, a discount plan, a third party, we can replicate all those plans in our platform, plus create new plants. That being said, if they want to just keep that separate as a whole, that's fine too. So right now I'm talking to a pretty decently sized dso, and they're like, well, we do have two solutions because we acquire practices and, you know, we keep whatever they have. And so, you know, my. My comeback was, okay, that's fine. Keep those. Implement bento at one region, maybe not your whole dso. Let's just try one region, and let's have a comparison. Let's let the numbers speak for themselves, because I can assure you those other platforms aren't getting you new businesses, new patients at best. They're just letting you retain and sell to existing. So. And once you try it, because it's free to try, you can say, well, what are we doing? Let's just implement this throughout.

Yeah, Simplify things down.

All right.

If somebody wanted to contact you directly or reach out, I mean, it's. Bento is spelled B e n t o.com or so it's.

It is bento. It's not dot com, because there's a million Japanese restaurants. Okay, so it's. It's bento.net. but yes, I can be reached at our chan@bento.net or, you know, my direct line, which is 470-373-1166.

Hey, thank you so much for being on. Like, I love innovating. If you listen to this podcast, if you watch what we do here on. On Facebook, it's all about the coming things and how do we continue to move this industry forward? Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. We'll keep moving this industry forward. If you're listening to this on the podcast, come over to our Facebook page over at deodso Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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