176: Overcoming the Cost Barrier Early in the Patient Journey

We've got to think of how we help reduce friction, not just in the chair, but before they even come into the practice. If we know cost is a barrier, how can we overcome that? Earlier on in the patient journey.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started. Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO Growth Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and today I'm here with Shirley Meshak, VP of National Accounts for Dental for CareCredit. And I'm really excited to have you on because, you know, we're. We're in this environment where profitability is more important than. Than ever. Taking care of customers is more important than ever. Figuring out solutions for those patients more important than ever. But before we get into this, I have some really key questions I do want to ask you, but I'd love to hear from you, Shirley, like, a little bit of your background and how you got with CareCredit and, you know, and now some of the new, innovative things that you guys are doing as well. So go ahead.

All right, well, thank you so much, Emmett. It's awesome to be here with you today. As you said, there is so much going on in the dental industry, and I have a lot of exciting things to share. So excited for the opportunity. As you said, With CareCredit, my journey with CareCredit is a little unique to a lot of folks that are in similar roles. I actually started in the dental industry about 15 years ago. I came to CareCredit about 13 years ago, and before that, I was actually working for a dental lab. And I have a lot of parallels to the things that I did at that dental lab with the place that I'm in today and treatment acceptance. I was working with a lot of doctors from dental lab needs, but never really realized that at the end of the day, we can prescribe dental care all day long, but if patients can't accept, we're not growing as an industry. When I started my career 13 years ago, I actually worked practice by practice and really more of an implementation role. That's where I really came to realize the challenges that every dental practice faces today. And I loved the role Very passionate about what I was able to achieve. I think of stories where I was doing trainings and able to help and actually see patients get approved and move forward with the care. I would drive home from those days feeling very rewarded on what I was able to accomplish in those days. From that role I went into more of a regional role where I actually managed mid market DSOs across five states in the Midwest. And that's really where I started to learn more of the DSO model and the challenges, especially from these emerging groups. And we'll talk a little bit about that today on some of the nuggets that I learned over that time. So I took that experience, moved into actually a technology and integration partnership role where I got the opportunity to work with the industry leaders in manufacturing and technology and worked cross functionally internally to bring some exciting new products to market to really fit the need of patient financing. I'm new to this role. I say new, but gosh, it's been almost a year. My role today is working with the larger DSOs. So I have a team of six talented account managers that work with all of the enterprise DSOs and basically oversee our top 20 accounts. And the insight that I'm able to share and I'm extremely passionate about it because there's so many best practices that I'm able to see across those top 20 DSOs across the United States. So we've got a lot going from CareCredit and I think, you know, just having opportunities to talk with you Emmett, is, is awesome because you know, we, we can advertise things that we do, but really talking through how it relates to the economic standpoint that we're in, you know, the challenges from, you know, all of the different, you know, technology and enhancements, that's what's really exciting.

Well, you've kind of gotten us interested in this. Like I'm working with some of the top 20. So let me ask kind of a question that comes to my mind. Give us a little insider ball here. But like what are the friction points, challenges you're working through with them? I'm always interested. And in what ways are you able to solve them? Not solve them. You know, what are they really seeing in the marketplace?

Well, I, I think that, you know, and I stay close to my counterpart that also oversees, you know, our, our next level in mid market DSOs there, there's so many synergies. I think, you know, people assume that, you know, the larger DSOs aren't challenged. They are and you think of they're

just a Bunch of individual practices. Instead of solving it one time or five times or 10 times, they have to solve it 400 times. Right. It's the same issue.

Yes. And you know, the fun part is that we, you know, we get an opportunity to help them through those challenges as they continue to grow. You think of some of the larger DSOs that are acquiring, you know, the smaller DSOs. So when you go to onboard, you know, it's not onboarding one or two locations, it's onboarding 20 or 40 locations.

Right.

And you know, from, from a scalability from our team, you know, having the systems in place, the training, the onboarding, you know, those are the things that we were helping with. When you think of things that are affecting them, maybe a little bit different, but you know, when you think of that size, you know, staff, you know, staffing obviously is such a common, you know, challenge. I think staffing has always been a challenge from my past 13 years. But you think of how that affects, you know, some of these very large DSO organizations. I think technology that you have, obviously maybe some more enhanced technology when you get to a larger dso, but still the implementation, you think of how you scale that and make it standardized across the entire DSO organization, it's still a friction point. I think the mid market, certainly it tends to be a little bit more fragmented as far as the technology, but it's certainly still still a challenge in both organizations. So that's a great question.

Yeah. I mean, when we think about the revenue cycle management process, which anyone who's maybe new to that, you know, everything from treatment coordination to doing the billing to collecting that, getting the eob, getting those posted correctly, whatever it might be. But when it comes to patient financing piece, what are you seeing there as well? And are there ways they're solving for some of this that maybe five or ten years ago they didn't have a solution and now they do.

Yes. And I think the first and foremost we have to solve it with more automation. We've got to look at ways to streamline, to have more standardization and it's streamlining that tech stack and certainly can help because you think of CareCredit, been around for 35 years, as everybody knows, we have different technology integrations. That's what I got to do in my former role before this role. And we have so many Options to help DSOs by integrating and streamlining the process with different practice management software, different patient engagement tools. Those things are making it so easy. But we just have to help to maybe help streamline that tech stamp so we know where we're integrating and make it, you know, easier from an implementation across the entire organization.

What would that look like? I mean, if I'm a practice with five locations, what would integration start to look like? Where would that know? If I'm on Dentrix or Open Dental or Eaglesoft or one of these other main platforms out there, maybe I'm, you know, on Denicon, whatever. What is the integration like today that maybe wasn't or people wouldn't be aware of that they had in the past.

One of the, the, the latest, which was an exciting product that I was able to launch with the first tech partnership a couple years ago. It's really the, the thought of increasing that ability to pay for, for the dental practice and knowing what the patient's ability to pay before they walk into the door. You have the option now through various softwares to look even in a morning huddle making this very streamlined to say, okay, here's what my, my patient flow is today, here's the schedule, here's who's coming in, here's who would be pre qualified for a CareCredit option, here's who already has an existing CareCredit account. When you start to think of the amount of folks walking around that have CareCredit today is such a great value for folks to be able to leverage that when they come for their dental needs. But a lot of times they just don't realize it. I myself have used my card, I guess fortunately and unfortunately for the vet, several times. But I think a lot of consumers don't realize that this is a great option to accept the care that they need when they go into their dental practice. But it's hard to realize and put those two and two together so that

I think that's almost like X ray vision, frankly into their personal credit account. Right. And specifically obviously with CareCredit. But I hadn't thought about that. You know, oftentimes we think of CareCredit or one of these other products as something that we're offering to the patient. But CareCredit's been around so long, has so many utilizations. I love that you brought up the vet component that they might already be sitting on some balance that they can utilize. Right. And so even being able to remind them of that, it's kind of like that credit card of like oh yeah, I do have that. I didn't even realize that. So yeah, being able to just leverage right into that is, it's powerful.

Oh, absolutely. And I think if we're looking at the biggest Hurdle that we've always faced is being afraid to offer the program if they're not going to be approved. And I would overcome that working. I had the Chicago market and I would work with practices that would have a 20% approval rate, but they were so excited when they got the approval. That's been a hurdle forever, but just obviously depending on their patient demographic, but knowing that they're already pre approved before they even sit in the chair gives that confidence to the treatment coordinator to, to give them that option. They're already pre approved. And you think of, you know, the, the process today to actually go and get them pre approved, that automation saves time. And so we think of, you know, some of the hurdles and the friction in a, in a practice today, in staffing, the easier you have automation at your fingertips, the easier it is to be able to offer them the option. We also have, you know, the, with a lot of the practice management software is the ability to post back. So you think of the automation from doing the transaction right from the software auto post back to the ledger. That's also a time saver too. So when we look from an integrated process, we're trying to think of ways that we reduce that time that is needed either from the treatment coordinator or revenue cycle manager and say, let's automate some of these things so you can spend more quality time, you know, bridging that, you know, that human touch with these patients and focusing on how to get them moving forward, making feel comfortable about the clinical care that they're being diagnosed.

You know, I think dental has been a little bit slow that we're getting there much more quickly to align with the patient's need to have a payment system. You know, when, whenever I like look at my iPhone and I think to myself, this didn't cost me $1300, it cost me $49 a month integrated into my, you know, Verizon plan or whatever in, in dental, I think that's always been an issue is we haven't been as quick to provide them that level of payment system. Right. So is that, is that still the opportunity? Like when you look at the patient issues, you know, people had a pretty big influx of income though, from everything I've heard, those bank accounts are shrinking quickly now. What are you seeing as far as challenges? Again, you have this broad perspective with some of the bigger DSOs as well. What are you seeing as far as, like what the patient challenges are? Are they pretty much the same or are they changing?

What we see from various angles, not only from working with DSOs. But as synchrony, we have consumer insight studies that we share with our DSO partners as well as we know the macroeconomic environment changes. And I think those are conversations where we can bring some outside point of view and really talk about consumers as consumers. Right. Because the same consumer that is sitting in a dental chair is the same consumer that is shopping for furniture or over in the retail side of our synchrony business. So we look at what type of programs are consumers wanting more and you made monthly payments. That is really the way that we talk to patients in other parts of the business, we advertise things on monthly payments and it works extremely well. Obviously in our case presentation and it has to be a great standard operating procedure and a lot of it can be automated. But then having the confidence just to be able to offer that payment option, it's not designed for just affordability, it's designed for convenience. So when we're working with our DSO partners about things that are relevant and common strategies like ortho, let's say, for example, that doesn't necessarily mean that I don't have $5,000 to do Ortho. It just means that I might not want to spend $5,000 on Ortho today. But if you gave me an option and said that I can do this treatment for $188 a month, I might say yes to this today. So I think we have to change the perspective on the need versus want. We've learned, you know, obviously as 35 years, we've seen every environment, every macroeconomic uncertainty that has come up. But we know that where we help the most is when it is offered to every patient in some sort of standard operating procedure. You've got, you know, here's my financial process, here's my three steps. It's the same. We go out as a training team and help train to that. What you'll see is it's not just the acceptance of care. It's the acceptance of, of the total treatment. It's comprehensive care. It's larger cases out of COVID What's interesting, we watched our transaction sizes and we're like, oh my gosh, these people are saying yes to these larger cases. It was that pent up demand, right? But we're like, why isn't this a key learning for us that patients will do this all the time. This shouldn't have to just be a post Covid aha moment. This is. These patients were using carecredit to, to pay for larger treatment plans. Let's not go back to presenting single tooth dentistry anymore. We don't have to.

Right. Well, man, there's a couple of things I'd love to unpack on what you said. One big part. It made me think of a friend, said, I want to get better at marketing. I want to be better in my sales process. Like, where should I start? And my response was, increase your empathy. Right? Because once you really understand where the consumer is coming from, and frankly, it's pretty easy because we're all consumers, too. So we just have to, like, switch on our, like, normal consumption hat. But when you start thinking that way, you start to organize and present things, like you said, in a way that's just easier to consume as a consumer. So I love the ortho point because maybe I just feel SAFER Keeping that 5,000 in my savings account. Maybe I have something coming up. My kid just broke his arm. I'm not sure how that bill is going to play out, whatever it might be. And until some of those things settle, I just want to keep it in there. And why are we starting with the overall number and then trying to break it down for. Why not just start with the broken down number and then let them. If they want to build it back up, they can always ask that question. But that little tweak says it's not just gives them better financial choice. It says, I get you. I am you. I think, like you. I'm in the same spot you are. You know what I mean? Like, there's just so much as humans, we communicate when we do it in the order we would want it in. So I love what you're saying. Now, you mentioned this company, Synchrony. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Like, what is that? Because one thing we haven't thought of sometimes in dental is we got caught up for a while and thinking we were competing against each other. And that's just not true. Right. 50% of the marketplace is like, not even going to the dentist. So we've got plenty. We're not competing. It's not like Verizon versus AT&T where it's just like we're trading plans all the time. Really what we're competing against is everywhere else someone could spend their money. It's that opportunity cost. Right. So now you've got this insider look with Synchrony. So tell us a little bit about what Synchrony is.

So Synchrony is our parent company. We've had the synchrony brand since 2014. Before that, we were GE. But you think of as you alluded to consumerism, and that's a topic I actually talked about in a panel recently, and it was about the ability to, by income level, the ability to take dollars out of their pocket. And what I loved about that is we're giving insight that even folks with, say, for example, their income bracket, $100,000 plus compared to folks with a 30 to $50,000 income bracket, the research shared that they were all relatively close in their willingness to take anything out of their pocket. So when we think of leveraging synchrony at a larger scale, it's about having insight of consumerism. We also in dental have the opportunity.

Would that mean. Sorry, just to kind of insight into consumerism? Could be things like, here's the monthly price point that people are getting comfortable with right now, Right?

Yes.

Is it. Is it 99, is it 188? Is it, you know, like each of those for these different brackets as well? Like, that's a very powerful concept to know, right?

Yes, absolutely. And we actually shared a recent study with a large DSO partner on deferred interest, because that's, you know, that's been a common question of do consumers really want deferred interest or are they good with, you know, more of, you know, installment plans? And, you know, obviously important to us as we just launched installment plans a couple of years ago and that kind of waterfall to be able to offer a, you know, a full ecosystem. We, we wanted to look and say, okay, well, what is it? It's not just us saying, but what is the actual consumer saying? What do they think about deferred interest? And it's great to bring that insight because we want to make sure as a good partner that we're collaborating in bringing the right programs to market that helps more patients say yes. So it's important, obviously, for us internally as we bring new products, but it's important to a DSO as well.

Yeah. This reminds me of where FedEx went originally. It's just shipping, and then they actually have services where they come in and help with logistics. Right. To make sure, especially for those doing high volume amount of packages and like, how should they set up their conveyor belts and all of that in a lot of ways with synchrony and with this business partnership component. You're not just saying here's a product, but you're saying, here's how to develop the logistics. Right. The treatment coordination logistics inside the practice in order to have the best. We'll call it flow. Right. Of patients through the practice and to make that friction point as smooth as possible. So that they feel like, because I tell people patients are not experts in clinical, they're only experts in one thing and that's how they felt. And this point in the dental life cycle where I'm, or dental process where I'm making a financial decision is very vulnerable. And when you make that smooth, it almost doesn't matter what you're selling. You know, it's like you just made this really easy. I was already vulnerable with my mouth open and you poking and prodding. Now I walked over. On this financial side, if you're making all of those things very empathetic and smooth, people are going to talk about it and they're going to say it's just really easy to work with them. They just really worked with me. They understood me. They don't know what the margins are on their teeth. Right. Or on their crown. But they do know that they felt like they were treated like a human, oh, 100%.

And I think for, for me, what excites me the most is it's not just helping my DSO partners and dental providers. At the end of the day, it's the patient and it's that patient experience. And there's no prouder moment than situations where I'm at a festival in Chicago and somebody, I have a CareCredit logo on my jacket and somebody thanks me for what we did and you know, that's my six year old daughter next to me. Seeing that there's, there's no better story that, you know, that mom gets up and does things like this today. Yeah, it makes, it makes me feel good and it makes us as an organization know that we're doing the right thing. Because at the end of the day it's those patients that we're helping move forward with care. And that experience means a lot. You know, them not understanding that we're just here to take care of their care today, but we're here to take care of them long term. That they, you know, they have an option for them for, for anything in the future as well. And so those stories, you know, obviously the, the more warm and fuzzy stories are probably the ones where we save dogs and cats, but, but we love the stories where, you know, we're able to help people smile. And you know, those, those stories, I mean, that, that's life changing for folks that, you know, go from not being able to smile to being able to smile again.

Yeah, it's a good reminder too that CareCredit's not just like some kind of gift card for that Dental procedure. But you're really layering in now a financial capability for them to get healthcare and pet care for their family. So, Shirley, if you had just a group of dentist owners in front of you right now, you know, what, what would you say to them? What. What do they need to do? Because for me, I'll tell you what my one takeaway was is, hey, if you've heard about CareCredit, there's more to it than probably what you've heard about, right? You're probably thinking of it a little too transactionally, and you probably need to engage at another level to see how you can really boost the logistics, the treatment acceptance and the care within. And you need to look at some of the technology that now exists, et cetera. What would you add to that?

Well, I feel like you stole my thunder. However, there's more. You know, I would say it's, you know, it's not just singular to CareCredit, but, you know, from, from my standpoint, where we fit in today should be strategic. It should be collaborative. There's, you know, any sort of implementation plan needs to start with looking at KPIs, first and foremost. I'm a big believer in understanding, you know, what the starting point is before you put in any sort of game plan for continued growth. So having great KPIs, looking at, obviously from a technology standpoint, what is out there. And really starting to think through the patient journey, we've got to start thinking of the title of reducing friction. We've got to think of how we help reduce friction, not just in the chair, but before they even come into the practice. If we know cost is a barrier, how can we overcome that earlier on in the patient journey? So really starting to think through if, you know, if you were one of those, what's the TV show, Undercover Boss, where you started, you put on your patient hat and you went in, you're like, okay, well, this is how the patient flow truly is. From the origination and awareness of the practice. From going to Google to the website, to scheduling, are we making it extremely easy? And if I'm thinking of financial options, is that presented to me or am I going to cancel my appointment the day before because something came up and I didn't know that there was a financial option? So we've got to start to think through the whole process. And then, I mean, really it's gotta be collaborative between our team and a dso. Things like AI, you know, if there's things that we're bringing in, you know, to really enhance the treatment acceptance, looping us in to say, okay, well, how does this fit in this particular flow? And let us integrate CareCredit within that flow. It needs to be customized, and we've got to start, you know, just. Just being better partners. At the end of the day, if

someone's listening, they're like, oh, man, I have CareCredit. I didn't think about integrating some of that technology. I need to do that. Or maybe they're like, okay, I haven't done CareCredit yet. It's like, time. How should they reach out?

Well, you could start with me. So, Shirley Meshach on LinkedIn or S. And then Meshach. I'll spell it M I S I a k@carecredit.com okay, awesome.

Shirley, thank you so much for being on. I really appreciate it. These are kind of the discussions we love having at deo. We know that the entrepreneurs are really fighting through some critical issues right now. So hopefully you'll take some of this. This will create part of that solution. I also want to encourage our members or others who are looking to check out deo to go November 10th through the 11th. We have a virtual bottom line boot camp, so we're going to be talking about things like this. You can go on our website, deodental group.com events or check us out on DEO Growth Secrets on Facebook page. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders. Get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling.