186: Revolutionizing Dentistry: Maximizing Profitability with Rectangle Health's Tech Solutions

You know, when I think about collections, I think, okay, I've already done the marketing, I've already got them in, right? They signed, they did all of the, that piece, they've sat in the chair, the staff have, sir, I've now, you know, treatment plan them, treatment coordinated them, we did the work and it's literally the money sitting on the table. 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 MA 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 Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott and today I'm here with Brian Doyle from Rectangle Help. And the hot topic that we're all focused on is profitability for many of our members at D E O. I've been going through their financials, helping them organize their financials. And Brian, you don't know this, but we have a 15 point constraint list that we go through with our members to help them really figure out how to get to profitability. And number one is get your financials clear. Because if you don't have your financials clear, then which part are we working on first? Right, but, but number two, and this is why I'm really excited about this because it lines up right with our number two, which is your collections piece. You know, when I think about collections, I think, okay, I've already done the marketing, I've already got them in, right? They signed, they did all of the, that piece, they've sat in the chair, the staff have s. I, I've now, you know, treatment planned them, treatment coordinated them, we did the work and it's literally the money sitting on the table and what is the effort that's going into that as well? Right? So if I've got a $25, a $25 20, you know, over the year, over the month, like those could add up. Plus I've got this over here. But if I'm putting a lot of payroll and effort, my processes are clunky. And one of the things, Brian, that we tell people to start off with, which is really tough for them, is to run their collections report by the service date, not by the post date. Right. So that they can look at, hey, in August I did 200,000. How much of that have I collected for August? Not how much did I collect in August? And what gets exposed very quickly is there's a lot of opportunity there, you know, where maybe they were kind of looking at the average and it's kind of playing out now. All of a sudden it's like, oh, we've got to clean up this collections or as more formally known RCM process. And the ideal, and this is why it's going to be great to talk to you is what, to what extent can we use technology. Right. To simplify that. So anyway, tell us a little bit about you Brian, a little bit about Rectangle Health and then we can get into solutions here.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm pretty excited. Obviously the DEO is doing a lot of great stuff. So I've been with rectangle health for 14 years. I am now the senior vice president of sales and commercialization, best way I could put it. So I'm in charge of getting our products in front of you amazing people out there. So I've been with the company. I was a street rep going door to door selling to Dennis exclusively in the Chicago market. That's where I started my career. And from there we built out a mid market and enterprise market targeting growth organizations. The five location group looking to go to 20, the 20 looking, go to 50, the hundred looking go to 500 the thousand. Right. That's where we specialize today. And that's a lot of where our product has morphed and grown. Because Rectangle Health we've been around for 30 years. We are a very.

Yeah, you haven't just been doing dental, you're, you've done a lot of, I mean the principles are the same. So you've really been able to take the best practices whether it's over in optometry or whatever else. And you're bringing those into dentistry.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's, we're still 50, 50 dental, medical, but we are 100 healthcare. We cut our teeth in dental. We started in dental. We know dental the best. It is still 50% of our total locations, total revenues, all, everything that goes with it. So we still, we, we are the incumbent in dental payment software, engagement software. We work with 1 in 10 dentists. Right. That's a pretty big deal. So we love dental. It's a market. We, we spend a lot of time and so. But Rectangle we were known for years as the payment technology, which is great. We have best in class payment technology. But over the past 2, 34 years we went through growth just like everyone on this podcast is going to go through growth. We took on private equity funding. We're actually on our second round. What that allows us to do is expand, innovate, get new features, two way texting, reminders, self scheduling, financing, HIPAA compliance portals, you name it. It's all bundled into one central platform for our users today. So I went through a growth spurt in the last 14 years at rectangle and so has the company. So it's been really fun to watch.

That's awesome. Well, I mean let's get into solutions. The primary focus right now for whether you're one location or you're 500 locations and in DEO we're from one and a half million to 300 million is how do I get more profitability, you know, and how can I cut costs or increase revenue. It's a pretty simple formula and as I said a big part of that is I've already done some work, I need to make sure that collections piece is there. Can you talk a little bit about a typical implementation of your product? So give me case study for you know, Sam dentist who has doesn't have rectangle what his typical situation is and why rectangle like makes that streamlined.

Great question. The Everyday Dr. Smith DDS Regardless of your one locations or 50, you're using three different vendors to collect money or to fill your schedule of some sort, right? You have a payment processor in the clinic that's a commodity. We have some software doing our texting, our two way, our reminders, our recall, what have you. Then we have another vendor maybe doing financing and then we maybe have another vendor doing our statement vending our online bill, pay our post adjudication. So when we think about the patient journey, we have our pre care technology. We need to remind me to come in, we need to capture my payment, we need to get paid. We have our in clinic technology which is take a payment. Whether it's doesn't matter how we take that payment, get paid, right? Keep a card on file, set up a payment plan, offer financing. Then we have our post adjudication software that's out there as well. And there are really good softwares that do a piece of every part of what I just said. Our entire value prop comes from reduction of overhead costs, right? So we want to consolidate vendors. We want to give you everything we just said built out of one platform. So you're the users. The FTEs at the clinic level, they have one gateway, one software platform that they go into all day Long and take their payments, run the reports, send out text, collect money online, fill the schedule, go through the schedule maintenance that lives in one platform. So we don't need to bounce around from Eaglesoft to another vendor, to another vendor, to another vendor. They simply live in our platform.

Well, we were just doing a webinar where we were talking about 2024 trends with some of the leaders in the industry and Ray Caruso, you know, over 70 locations, etc, was talking through how much turnover rate is being driven by mental load. Right. We hear this a lot. And if we bring that down to a dental office, it's the multiple applications. Right? It's exactly what you said. So yes, we'd all like it convenient in one place. There is an exclamation mark on that right now because our team members, or our inability to get team members has a lot to do with the fact that after the first week, after the first 30 days, after the first 90 days, they still don't understand what's going on. Right. There's just too many moving parts. And we're talking about front desk, we're not talking about someone trying to do clinical care.

Absolutely.

And so simplification of the job, you know, like some CEOs are like surprised that someone left them and is taking less money. And I said, well, was the job simpler, right? Whether that's chick fil, a McDonald's target or whatever, was it simpler? Did they feel successful in a week? And so one of the things as you're talking that I see as an opportunity, yes, it does all these things, but one of them is makes it simpler to hire someone and say we use one software here.

That's absolutely right. One of our biggest sell points, ROIs value, props, whatever you want to call it to a provider is ease of use. Right. We could get a user because there's a lot of turnover right now. We could self onboard the users in less than 30 minutes. So when you think about an implementation or change management, what are the two big things that come with that? Well, I can't disrupt my staff and I don't want to disrupt my practice management system because that keeps all of our clinical. We need that. Okay, great. Let us come in and do a very easy, very high level, 40 minute implementation and you're up and running. And then obviously we have continued education, CSM support, etc. But it's all about maintaining that smooth workflow. And then by leveraging technology to your point, the staff opens up time. Right. Time is valuable in the, in the dental practice. In life, by using technology, we start to open up that FTE's schedule. They can concentrate on what they actually want to be doing, which is taking care of patients. Right. So software is designed to do that and if you have that centralized, that becomes a lot easier and then that's where those ROIs start to start to add up for a group.

Yeah. And I, I think is one thing I wanted to call out. You guys aren't a practice management software, but you're integrating into those. And can you kind of talk a little bit? Because I know that's going to be an immediate question. Everyone's thinking is, does he integrate with my software and how hard is that and does it pull over and what do I have to input two times? And so can you answer those questions?

Absolutely, yeah. The way we look at ourselves is we want to be everything the PM is not. That is our goal. PM systems are awesome at what they do, but they're not going to really invest heavily in pre care card on file collections for outstanding balances do they're going to more concentrate on the clinical side of the world. So we look at ourselves at the

big, big three by the way, have a schedule, they do that. Right. Be able to chart stuff and be able to bill it out and then everything else, you're on your own. How you actually fill that schedule, how you actually collect that money. But those, those three things they can do. Right.

And listen, I'm not going to compare us to Apple. We are not Apple. We would love to be, but we're not there yet. But when you buy an iPhone, Apple doesn't care if you're Verizon, at, AT and T Boost Mobile, they just want to sell you the platform. That is exactly what we're trying to do. We want to give you the technology that will push back into the PM system of record. So when we think about growth deos, we want to scale. You're not, if you're a, let's just use Dentrix. If you're a dentrix shop and you see a really appetizing acquisition, but they're on Eaglesoft, you're not going to say I don't want that. Of course you want that. What we do is we bridge that gap before you integrate to whatever PM platform you're going with in the future or if you keep them separate, that's fine too. We're going to go work with all of them and push and pull data all day long. So if we had this conversation five years ago, most of the big PMS they were a little tighter with access APIs. In today's world, we are an integrated vendor of the majority of the big PM systems out there, if not all of them. So that the times are changing as well. Um, it is a lot more about partnerships and strategic than it was five, six, seven years ago.

Yeah, that's, that's an interesting one you just played out, which is I kind of said, hey, will you integrate with my technology? But you're saying, hey, by the way, if you do an acquisition, they happen to be on something else and you're not going to just convert them day one. Rectangle is going to be able to handle that as well. Right. So again, the team will have some consistency on things like patient notifications and

yeah, the financials will all be centralized. All of that will still live in one place, regardless of how many PM systems you have. So this mid market enterprise level dso that is one of our biggest value adds is this consolidation of the financials and patient engagement, patient interaction from one platform.

All right, I'm going to kind of push you here to, to prioritize because Rectangle does a lot of things and I don't want to say any of them are bad, but we're going to say some are really good, fast ROI and then some of them are really cool to have. And, you know, so what would be the thing you're like, okay, if you were only going to choose one thing that you were using on the Rectangle platform. This will get you the ROI and kind of justify everything else.

Yeah, that's a. It's tough.

I know. That's why I asked it.

I'm going to say it is our post adjudication balance collect with balance due program. That's a fancy way of me saying we're going to look at what your AR is and we're going to attack it through technology without disrupting the patients. Because the patients, the consumers, statistically in every survey you'll read, want this. They are craving this. I actually have a bill on my desk right now for $12.26. There's no online bill pay. There's no QR code. I'm a good payer. I will never pay that bill because I'm not calling and I don't have checks. It's never getting paid. Right. What we want to do is we want to.

Don't you actually kind of wait till they call you? Just. I'm glad you called me. Here's my credit card.

It's almost a game at this point. It absolutely is almost a game. And I will get a Second, probably a third bill that costs the practice more than the 12 bucks I owe. Right, Right. So, but what if we insert technology before that statement even goes out? Post adjudication 8020 rule. We're left with 20% left over. We all know how this goes in dental. Instead of sending out statements which are. Netflix doesn't send statements. They have 40 million subscribers. Why don't we send out a text? Why don't we send out an itemized two way message that says balance due. We have card ending in 1, 2, 3, 4. Click here to pay or we're going to charge this in 10 days. Or however you want to phrase that. It's all customizable, but that's the quickest, fastest way to revenue. We're not disrupting the in clinic experience, we're not disrupting the staff. This is a plug and play software that will, through automation, through two way texting go after that AR. We have seen up to 22% reduction of AR once this is fully implemented.

Well. And then the team is now working on really the most critical things instead of chasing down $12, which they're all doing, by the way.

That's exactly right. It's exactly right. Exactly.

Okay. So that is the fastest roi. I could see that. I could see that. That would be super helpful. And again, what's interesting is the alignment with the customer and the practice. Yeah. So you wouldn't think of like collections being something the customer's like, I'm so glad you got this better collection process in place. But they absolutely are. You're exactly right. When I get something, I'm like, where's the online. Where's the QR code? Yeah. Otherwise it's like, I'm sure you'll send me another one.

That's right. There was a study done. It might have been a DSO in the beginning of the year that said patient loyalty is directly tied to their billing experience. That's a fancy way of saying, if it's hard for me to pay you, I'm just going to go to the next shop next door that has better technology. That's what they were saying. Right. So online bill pays. Table stakes. QR codes are table stakes. Most restaurants don't even give menus anymore. Like this is technology that we as consumers intake all day long. Dental has this technology at the fingertips.

How well does it. There's a couple things you answered in that, but I want to make sure we called out. Number one is all the compliance. So I don't also have. Can you tell me your credit card number so I can put it into here and sticky notes of credit card numbers. Right. Don't worry, I'll destroy it. So this is all secure and you probably have what the fancy words?

Yes, I have all the acronyms. I have all the acronyms. But you're exactly right. By using technology you remove what's PCI off of your, off your to do list. Right. Please don't take credit cards and write them down like that's no good. We don't want to do that.

It's, it's PCI is like the HIPAA of credit card.

Of credit card. Easiest way to put it. That's exactly right. It's exactly right. But we take it a step further. We're HITRUST certified. Everything, all the phi information is protected. Where we have a HIPAA portal, an OSHA portal where we can onboard your staff, make sure they go through the right trainings that their CE credits in there, all of that is designed to make sure everything we do is buttoned up in compliance and compliant in the market.

What about, I'm, let's say I'm creative, innovative. I've got, you know, I've got a third party financer that's, that's doing. But then I've decided to do my own finance plans as well. Can, can I set something up where it'll hit their credit card every month on the 1st or 15th and work that out with them too?

Yeah, absolutely. Card on file is in my opinion the most underutilized piece of software in, in the dental world today. CAR 56% of patients have said I want to leave my card on file. We can't go to the barber without a card on file. We can't go open table without a card on file. The gym, this is again table stakes. But in the past, pre Covid, the providers have always said my patients don't like that or we know our patients don't pay us. Right. We've all heard those stories post COVID Patients don't want to go through that process anymore. So card on file should just be check. Do it compliantly, do it in a secure system. Yes, but card on file should be table stakes. From there. That's where this flexibility comes in patients are used to. We're all doing holiday shopping right now. Amazon was asking me if I wanted to split up my $52 present for my niece into four payments. We can do that in dental today. Hey, come on in. Give us a third. A Third and a third. By the time you have your treatment, we're covered. That is all automated once we have card on file. So yeah, we, we love recurring payments Orthodontics does this very, very well but that it's becoming very mainstream in GP and specialty and oral maxil. So card on file payment plans. Big yes.

Where does that kind of exposing maybe where some manual work needs to be done. Does the, does rectangle feed into payment plans and things like open dental or other places or does it feed over to the, to the claim or does it go down the procedure? Like where would you need to like tweak some stuff and set it up?

Yeah, it's a great question. It all depends on the PM, right. So some PMs have very robust APIs. Open dental is a really good example of that where we could push that data to the ledger level within open. Some APIs aren't that robust and it limits us on how deep in the PM system we could push that data. But no matter what, we're going to capture the payment, give a report at a minimum and then funnel that report as deep into the PM as we can.

And by the way, you have this employee who is not on the phone anymore trying to collect all this stuff, who's got this time to tweak, to do those last little tweaks that they were going to have to do anyway. All right, so that's massive value. We could just end the podcast right there. But I'm going to give you a second one. So now number two, I did that. I freed up all this time. Collections are better. What would I do next? What would be the next product?

Yeah, so I'm torn between two, but I'm going to give the newest one because I think it's revolutionary. I do. It's something called straight through processing on virtual insurance cards. What we're seeing today is more and more medical does this. They've been doing this for years and years and years. But dental is starting to trickle up where we're getting paid via, from the payers via digital credit cards. What we have to do today, if it's a $10,000 EOB, we have to take that, allocate it to, let's call it 10 different patients. We have a technology today that we could go capture that bulk payment, run that payment and integrate it back to the ledger level per patient, completely eliminating the FTE having to track down where this payment needs to go and then post it to the ledger. So we are working diligently with companies like Zealous, who we have formed a very good, strong partnership with to make this one more efficient, two more cost effective and three, just easier for the market because virtual credit cards, you get paid instantly. So I had a. We had a doctor go on vacation over Thanksgiving. She came back with nine insurance cards totaling about $84,000 that no one ran. What we did is we automated that so she went on vacation, came back and still had that money in her bank account. So we automate that entire insurance payer process.

Now when you say this credit card that might be throwing me off when I think about this is insurance posting.

Yeah, insurance payer post. So the payer post. Yeah, that's right.

So the, the trouble has been that these insurance companies all have different technologies, different languages, et cetera, to actually get that posting to work. Are you saying for a big portion of payers now you've decoded that so that you can put it into the ledger?

Yeah, they've been trying to do this for a few years and it hasn't worked. Right, right. We, our technology practice management bridge is the differentiator now. So what we've done is because we have the posting capabilities and we have had the posting capabilities for years. That's what made it be theoretical to actual. If we have this in the market today, we are going to all of our 15, 20,000 dentists we have in our portfolio and saying, hey, this is how it works, let's use it. So this is a reality today versus a theoretical maybe a year and a half ago, Two years ago.

Wow. So the RCM process in general, you guys are just knocking out each.

Yeah, we want. That's exactly right. So we, we think of it as a circle, a loop. Right. We have to engage the patient, we have to treat the patient, we have to bill the patient, we have to work with payers and then everything in between, the scheduling, the reminders, the wait list management, the reputation management, we want to touch every aspect of that as deep as we possibly can.

I could see us really lowering costs too so that if I've got the automation on technology, let it do as much lifting as possible. And then we have other sponsors like Support dds. Right. Where you're outsourcing at a low cost solution there and they're doing those final little tweaks.

Absolutely right.

Yeah. I mean your cost just went. That's right. All right, I'm going to give you number three.

Okay.

What was that third one? Because you.

Yeah.

Hung that in front of us. That was smart.

Number three is keeping the schedule full. Right? Like we have to make maintain a like for like full schedule. So wait list management, patient self scheduling. And I know there's a lot of reluctance around patient self scheduling, but man, the data is there to say if we allow this, your revenue will go up. So if I we're watching Thursday Night Football, I think the Steelers lost. I don't want to go into my dentist at 8am tomorrow morning or I just don't want to have that cavity filled today and I cancel last night at 9pm well we as the provider can't eat that block and write it off anymore. So our system will automatically fill that with the same amount of revenue or a like for like appointment that your patients are looking for. So we constantly maintain a full schedule, which is, which is critical to maintaining top line revenue.

So let's talk through tactically. Yeah, is it looking for unscheduled treatment that has a similar dollar amount or similar type and then it's doing like a mass tax saying we've got an appointment open, do you want to come in?

Or I just know that's basically it right now we do tranches, right? So the top 25 that meet the criteria will get the first text. If we don't have a response within customize the time limit. But we want to keep it pretty quick. 10, 15, 20 minutes, we go to the next tranche of the 25 with the same exact criteria. We wouldn't go outside of the meeting meet criteria without the provider approval. They would have to set the, the system to do it that way. We don't recommend it, but there's always that, hey, we just want something in the seat, right? So we could work through it. But that first 25, the hit rate is very, very high because they are waiting to get in. We all know getting a cleaning takes. I mean if you miss your appointment, you're waiting another three, five weeks. This is designed to get all those patients back in.

You know, on that online scheduling I, I've never understood the reluctance there because to me it was much easier for my schedulers to have people just schedule and yes, maybe it's a mess. And then call and say, hey, we're noticing this appointment might go long at 1 o'. Clock. Is it okay if we move you to 2:30 and people are like oh wow, thank you so much. Yeah, that works. Or how about 3 o' clock if I've got, you know, too many appointments on that I have to rearrange. That feels a lot easier than like hey doc, it's blank. What should we do?

Right, so 100, like we think about it. If, if I owe you 500 and I want to pay you 600, take the 600 and then refund me later if the EOB comes back less. Right, like we want that. That's a good problem to have versus we missed our 8, 9, 1 and 2 o' clock slots like that. That's not a good, good problem to have.

Right. Because again, I'll go back to my other constraint theory, which is I paid for marketing, but no one came in. I have the staff, but no one's there. Blank chair, nothing to build out. Right. So.

And what's the alternative? I mean we have our quote unquote

make up for that.

Yeah. And what's the alternative, right, we have the FTEs pick up the phone and start calling a bunch of people. Right, that's, that's not a productive usage of our time. It's just not.

Yeah, it's my, my massage place that I go has this every time a massage therapist has an opening. I'm. I'm vip, right. So I get a text that says, hey, we got a 30 minute, we got a 90 minute, we got. I love just knowing I could if I.

Absolutely right. Absolutely right. Yeah, absolutely right. And when you decide, I would love

everybody to be telling me especially stuff I want, like get into the doctor. Get into. I mean, I've got doctor appointments I need to schedule, like, you know, making the phone call, etc, wait on hold. We all know that. Yeah, we all know we're now choosing restaurants and others just based on can I schedule.

Absolutely right. So that. Yeah, this patient experience, patient loyalty thing is real. Right. So it's millennials in younger. They are shopping their experience based off how easy it is to do two things. Make an appointment, meaning online scheduling. And to pay their bill, they're actually shopping their dental experience to the next, the next one, the next one, the next one versus, you know, my mom with the same dentist for 40 some odd years. That is it. It's a different environment in today's dental world. They are shopping based off technology and ease of use.

Brian, this is massive value. So thank you so much. I think it hits on the heart of multiple levels here we're trying to solve. Dentistry has always prided itself on being recession proof to some degree. But this inflation thing is new for us and we're not inflation proof for sure. We've got, you know, insurance companies aren't just saying we'll move this up 30% because your labor's up 30%. And so we're having to be more creative. We've also got customers who post Covid. Covid. And by the way, we're those customers, too, that want convenience, want it easy, want it simple, want to not talk to anyone, you know, whatever it might be. Want to reschedule just by texting back and forth.

That's right.

And whatnot.

Absolutely right.

And the fact that you're great on the clinical side, we kind of expect that to already be true right now.

Absolutely right.

We need these other things to make us come into your office, to help us to pay and if it happens to lower all of your most expensive costs, too, like, win, win.

Bingo.

Brian, thank you so much. If somebody wanted to reach out and just, you know, get the demo, kind of talk this through, see if they're the right fit, see what the ROI would be for them to do this. What's their best way to contact y'? All?

Yeah. Please go to our website, rectanglehealth.com you have full access to me b doyleectanglehealth.com one of my amazing teammates will be able to run through a demo, high level, show you the ROIs. But, yeah, our website will have a lot of this on there for you.

By the way, if you're at two locations, three locations, 10 locations, it's just exponential ROI there, so.

That's right. It doubles triples and quadruples real fast. That's absolutely right.

Yeah. It's awesome. Thank you so much, Brian. Really appreciate you have being on.

Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. For those interested to continue this conversation, come over to our website at DEO Growth Secrets. 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.