208: Grow Your Dental Practice with Streamlined Ortho Care and Financing

A dental office. Listening. These are the two things you're thinking about. Am I able to serve more of that demand and give patients what they're asking for? And then how do I make it easy for them to accept the treatment, follow the treatment, and pay for the treatment?

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.

Welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I am Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO. And with me today, I have a new budding partnership inside of the dental industry, which is here to help serve dental offices and really patients to really get more orthodontic care out there and get those patients to be able to even the means and the methods to actually accept that career. And so with me, I have Kevin Gladstone, director of sales at Orthofi, and Jay Hogan, vice president and co founder of Perfect Fit Ortho. So, Jay, do you want to give yourself a little bit more of an introduction, let folks know kind of a little bit more what you guys are doing over there?

Yeah, sure. Thank you. Glad to be back on again. Yeah, we, you know, my partner and I started Perfect Fit Ortho to be a virtual orthodontics solution for general dentist. We noticed that the majority of general dentists across the country end up referring their patients that need Ortho out, and we recognize that those patients want ortho treatment. So we came up with a service and have started packaging some of our value propositions with Kevin and AcceptCare to allow General dentists to treat more of their patients that need Ortho, spend less time doing them, and make more money. Profit's not a bad word, Jake. What do you always say? Something along the lines of balance. No profit. There's no mission or.

Yeah. No margin, no mission. I mean, I think business owners, especially in health care. Right. It's a particular tough thing to tackle. We're trying to make people healthy, but, you know, we need margin to make this thing last for 50 years, so. Yeah, exactly.

Yep, Absolutely. That's us.

That is exactly. You know, a lot of the services, like you're all. Is really. And at the end of the day, you know, this Is this is demand that's out there, right? This is either a patient desiring this treatment or really, they really need it. And in a lot of places, it's just not getting served. So I love what you guys do because you're just simply, you know, you're just giving people what they're already wanting or asking for or needing. So beautiful there. And then, Kevin, how about you help folks who are listening understand a little bit about you and where you're. What you do? Yeah.

Great.

So Ortho Phi was formed about 12 years ago, and really the mission is to help practices start more orthodontic care. Whether that's with general practitioners doing orthodontic care or specialists. Our whole goal is to provide the support, scale, and resources to help practices take the burden off of their administrative team and allow them to focus on more patient care. So we'll help manage patient ar, we will manage insurance ar, and we will provide flexible financing to practices so that they can make care affordable to their patients.

So from the bystander like myself, this seems like a match made in heaven. You got Perfect Fit, which is, you know, allowing offices to generate or serve more demand. And then, Kevin, you all are helping those patients accept that care and pay for that care. And so this is a really good match. So beyond what I just mentioned, why did Perfect Fit and Accept Care decide to partner? What were some of the reasons you guys started talking and then decided to make this thing happen?

From. I mean, from our end, it was very clear. We. We came up with a solution to a problem that a lot of general dentists were having. But at the same time, what do they say and mention is mostly out of necessity. We realized that we were getting a lot more patients. Doctors were becoming much more comfortable presenting treatment plans. We offered them the opportunity to get a treatment plan to their patient in 15 minutes while they're there. The challenge then became, as these doctors started offering more and more treatment plans, becoming more comfortable, they couldn't get these patients, number one, to say yes, or they didn't have the ability and the bandwidth to manage that. Accounts receivable, month in, month out. We needed to partner with someone. We needed to find someone that had a very smooth system that was very easy for doctors to integrate. We notice a lot of times there are challenges with practices taking on anything new. So it needs to be simple, needs to be quick, and it allowed patients to get the treatment that they wanted on their terms. And once we found. Once I met Kevin and we kind of really started talking through the whole process. And I said I immediately the first time Kevin and I spoke about, I said this is it. This is exactly the piece that we were missing. We rolled it out within weeks of our first conversation together. And now we're, we're sending treatment plans to patients through Accept Care. Financial treatment plans, excuse me, through Kevin's platform with Accept Care before patients are even stepping foot in practices, patients are now taking photos from home, getting a treatment plan. And these patients are signed and they've paid and they haven't stepped foot in the practice yet. It doesn't get, doesn't get much easier than that for us.

Yeah, I just, I love some of the ways technology is enabling the dental world to just again, just serve patients better. Right. This is nothing crazy we're trying to do here.

Right.

We're trying to make it easy for them to get the work. And so you know, Kevin, on your end, what made sense for you to partner it with, with Perfect.

So as I sort of look more about what Perfect Fit was doing, what we were looking for was offices that were forward thinking that focus on orthodontic orthodox as part of maybe their growth model. And those aren't easy to find. You know, you don't, there's no way to just search for those necessarily. So Jay's team is actually finding the practices that are growth minded. They, they have the patient base that is interested in orthodontic services and we became a natural fit because as they were offering those services they had to make it more affordable. So Jay is really helping us really find the customers we integrate into their existing technology. Jay builds the clinical treatment plan, we provide the financial options for the patient to say yes and kind of what he was saying earlier is it's, it's simple, it's simple for the patient and it's simple for the practice. And that simplicity has allowed it to grow.

Yeah, I mean both are needed. Right. Because Jay, you could find as much pent up ortho demand as you, as you can. But if people, if the patients don't accept it and they don't actually pay for it, then it's not long term sustainable. So this makes tons of sense. I think if you're a dental office listening, you know, you're, these are the two things you're thinking about is how do I am, I'm able to serve more of that demand and give patients what they're asking for and then how do I make it easy for them to accept the treatment, follow the treatment and pay for the treatment? So so let's talk about growing ortho in your location or locations, because I think that's what a lot of doctors are interested in. So what are the primary metrics that organizations should be reviewing when growing an orthodontic specialty? So let's start with you, Jay, and the kind of the, the demand part of it, the generation and the being able to treat people. And then we'll talk with you, Kevin, as far as once you're able to, you know, show people treatment, like what once comes in. So, Jay, how about you? What metrics should be looking at?

I think doctors should just be looking at. If they're not offering the service now, whether it's through us or they're doing it on their own or what have you. How many of your patients are you referring out? Because, you know, the national average we found right now is about 80% of patients with some form of malocclusion are referred out. And so we're not asking and we're not, and we're telling doctors, you don't have to earmark additional marketing dollars. You don't have to shift your budgets. You don't have to campaign. You just need to treat the patients that are already coming in your door. So from a matrix standpoint, we just look at now, once we convert them over into our workflow, how many treatment plans or how many consults are you doing? That's it. If you're doing, if you can get your team to buy in, if you get your hygienist, your FDA's, your front desk, your associate doctors to just take the photos of the patients who need orthodontic treatment, it really just becomes a numbers game because with Kevin's integration, now you've explained to the patient, while they're there for a cleaning or what have you, what their challenges are, how they can be fixed, how long that treatment will take them, and how you can pay for it. Once you're doing all of those things at once, it's really a win, win, win for everyone involved. The patient gets the ortho treatment they want without having to come into the practice. The doctors get to start cases instead of referring them out, and the patients find a way to make that fit in their budget. So long answer, short consoles, how many consults are you doing? Make sure that you set a bar, set a number, and just make sure that you can continually. You're sticking your finger on the pulse with your team to make sure that that's happening. And you'll make an extra, you know, 10, $15,000 a month in revenue just from taking photos.

Well, let's, I mean, let's talk about it. Let's do an average office doing 1.5 with like, you know, maybe, you know, experienced doc and maybe an associate. Give me, give me some average numbers you would see there.

Sure. In a practice where a doctor is seeing eight to 10 new patients a day, the best performing practices we have are doing two to three consults a day. If you can do two to three consults a day based on an eight to ten patient average, God forbid you only close one of those a day. Well, that's, that's substantial amount of revenue that your practice is doing with little, little to no chair time. And the best part is too, not to steal Kevin's thunder, one thing we really love about Accept Care is that it does all the follow up. So if that patient does leave the practice that day and they need to talk to their mom, dad, husband, brother, what have you. Accept Care is going to send emails, send text messages. Our team also follows up with phone calls to answer any additional questions the patients may have. Review the treatment plans and those patients can sign and execute and pay a week later from home.

Walk me through the actual logistics of Accept Care, you know, step by step so somebody listening can understand if I were to implement this, this is what it looks, looks like.

Sure. So it's a web based platform, so it's accessible on any connected device. And think of it as a treatment acceptance tool. So within the platform you'll create a financial treatment plan. The practice will enter in the total cost of the treatment. They have the option to enter in any sort of insurance or expected insurance benefits. And ultimately we land on a patient responsibility amount. Right. So let's say it's a $5,000 treatment, they have a thousand dollars in benefits and they're going to be responsible for $4,000 out of their own pocket. $4,000 to any patient is probably an unexpected expense when it comes to orthodontics. So the number one metric you're looking at is your conversion rate and your affordability. How affordable can you make this? Affordability is not the cost of the care. Affordability is what can you get my monthly payment to so I can fit it in my budget today. And so once you enter in that patient responsibility amount, Accept Care provides three methods. A patient can pay. They could pay in full, which is great for the practice. Drives more cash flow. They could split it up over a few short term payments. So three, four, five, six months, for example, and we would collect on behalf of the practice. So we would automatically collect on behalf of the practice over that time period. Or they can apply for extended financing through a third party lender. And we have a network of lenders covering the full credit spectrum. And the patient chooses this whole idea of patient choice. The patient chooses what's affordable for them. So we aren't presuming, can they pay in full, can they, do they need financing? Let the patient choose. Show them their options. Let them choose. Inevitably, that freedom of choice will drive more case acceptance. And once the patient accepts the care, we provide the financing to the practice. As Jay mentioned, if they don't accept today, we'll go back and follow up. They can sign all their documentation from home and the practice is notified as soon as the financial arrangements are made and they reach back out to the patient to start the care.

Love it. So what kind of results do you guys see when you start to implement this type of method? I mean, it is tough. You know, a lot of doctors, a lot of treatment, even treatment professionals struggle to give the patients the choice. They kind of sometimes are deciding for them, sometimes feeling this person can't afford it. So this method, how does.

Well, does it work?

So when you would, if you were to look at a. We have this involved, this in place of orthodontic practices and at general practitioners, we would expect at minimum, that you'd be able to start converting 50% of your patients, at least. Right. So once you get onto the platform and get used to it and start to present the clinical care the right way and the financial options the right way, It'll take a little bit of time to ramp up and kind of integrate anything new into a practice like anything else you're going to do new. But once you're up and running, you would start to see over a period of time between the follow up and the initial patients that sign up in the office, about a 50% or more case acceptance rate.

And Jay, that lines up kind of. You guys are all working together on this? Oh, yeah.

No, I mean, we, you know, we take. We have doctors who are doing, you know, a substantial amount of cases a month that are coming on board with us because they need more chair time free. We have doctors who are just dabbling and we have doctors who aren't doing it at all. If you're not already churning out, you know, 10 cases a month, five. 10 cases a month before you sign up with us, we see about a 60% increase in case acceptance. Now, some of those patients are obviously paying in Cash. But I will tell you, probably around 85% of the patients that have signed up since we've started with Accept Care are on some form of payment plan. And, you know, just to elaborate or to drill down on that just a hair, it's insane. As I'm talking about it out loud and I'm listening to Kevin talk about it, how little the practice is being asked to do. We have DSOs and small group practices that we've integrated Accept Care in that are now using Except Care as their treatment plan tool for everything. Implants, dentures, cleanings, what have you, because it's so easy and so efficient, and it puts all your patients into that ecosystem. Oftentimes, we find just in general dentistry, that a lot of times treatment plans just kind of die in the wind. This keeps that from happening because there's constant touch points that the doctors, the offices can set based on their parameters. If you want them touched every week or every two weeks or every month, what have you, you can set that up.

Well, I love that. I mean, Kevin, you talked about kind of the financing portion of it and the logistics of the financing. Anything you can add about the actual treatment in executing on the treatment plan, really like, it sounds like the whole. The whole flow.

So, I mean, you know, we. We built the platform originally thinking that, General Dennis, we're. We're going to incorporate this into their workflow and present this as a form of financial options for every patient. Right. And it's certainly built for that purpose. What we found is that, you know, getting general dentists to change the way they do their daily workflow is very difficult. And there's so much going on. There's chaos going on in the office. They revert back to what's comfortable or, or known.

Right.

So when we started prescribing it, saying, listen, use this for all your orthodontic cases. First, the practices are, no, they're probably going to need to finance orthodontic care because it's going to be 4,000, $5,000. So they're expecting to have to pick up this tool. So what it allows us to do now is actually get them comfortable using it. And then as they build confidence in the platform, then they extend it to other forms of services that might, they might offer, like implants or crowns or anything else. Because the platform is agnostic, the treatment doesn't matter. It's allowing the patients to say yes to the treatment that matters. And you think about it, I mean, you mentioned, like, on a $1.5 million practice the average practice only sees about a 35% case acceptance rate across the board. If you were just to increase that to 40%, 45%, what would that do to your business? It would transform, you know, the way that you would think about, you know, the services you offer, the way you, you treatment plan potentially, like just these little, little improvements go a really long way in a practice.

Yeah. You know, there's kind of a philosophy where if you're looking for the biggest opportunities, you kind of start closest to the patient. Like, you know, it's one offering amazing care and then kind of making sure treatment acceptance is good and then making sure people show up for their appointments and then kind of work your way out. And those are the best levers. And so what you're talking about is very close to the actual dental care. It's also often a huge low hanging fruit to, I mean, 15%. 15% increased treatment acceptance is literally 15% right to the bottom. I mean, it's the same, it's the same economics.

Right.

Like you would improve your top line

by 15, especially if you're talking about ortho care, which is significantly more profitable.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, we talked Jay, with, with you in another episode, so catch the other episode too, about going deep into perfect ortho, about how you guys help implement this. Right. How do you get this on the ground level knowing that changing behaviors and people are, you know, the office is chaotic, people will fall back into kind of what they're used to. So, Kevin, how do you guys help offices implement this and make sure it sticks so they don't revert back to the old ways?

We, we really had a hard time with that in the beginning and we, we focused on the fundamentals of let's start using this just for ortho care. And let's start with just, you know, you want to grow ortho? Jay and his team are helping you clinically grow your orthodontic business. They're taking all the clinical confusion off of your plate. Let us take all the financial confusion and noise off of your plate. And let's just focus on giving the patient a great, great experience on a great platform. And you guys just, you know, do what you do really, really well, which is take care of patients. That's, that's how we help to kind of just initially set things up. We'll provide training, we have online training that the offices can go through. In fact, we do a lot of the training with Jay. So it's really a partnership in training because we don't see this as something separate. Like, I think Jay and I view this as one continuous workflow which makes it easier for the office to implement and understand. It's not like they're going somewhere else to get the expertise. It's all contained within that environment so that they can actually implement this much, much easier.

Yeah, it's pretty. It seems pretty symbiotic between cenk.

I get. I get accept care calls from some of our doctors when they have a question or they want to try something different. But I'm still waiting on that accept care paycheck. So we're hoping. Fingers crossed.

Totally. Totally. It's been a loving words, I think. I mean, it's a really tight. It does make tons of sense. And you can really see pretty easily how this will increase, you know, the orthopedic that's given. Jay, anything else you'd add about some of the challenges? It really. It's a system. Right. You guys are together as a full system. Any other.

Yeah, Jake, when we implement, we. We don't. It's not. I want to make sure I don't say this so that it sounds crass, but it's not. It's a part of our service, if that makes sense. We don't. You know, I think we may have one doctor who hasn't implemented the accept care portion of our workflow. It's just. That's how we do things now.

Beautiful. I mean, it makes sense. And so what. Any other challenges that people might have, Jay, as they're kind of trying to increase ortho in their locations and going

through this, just comfort, you know, again, you can. And I. And it's important to say that, you know, doctors can do this on their own. They can. They can work with accept care without working with us. The challenge is for a lot of doctors who want to implement ortho, more ortho in their offices is case identification. They're not necessarily comfortable with the dialogue with their lab of choice. So they don't know how to design or set up or stage the case. And then you're going to be adding a lot of chair time. Most doctors see their work about or their patients every four to six weeks. Whereas with our system, because we're monitoring these patients remotely, you may only see that patient bond and debond. And then with accept care helping them say yes, it literally will become the most profitable thing they do in their practice. If you're basing it on chair time.

Yeah, makes tons of sense. So just a couple more here so there's a couple ways to let your patients know about this. Right. And so there's probably a few, a few methods. We'll start with you, Jay, and then, and then you, Kevin. You know, what are some of the different ways that offices might kind of communicate this new service out?

Yeah, I would say, you know, from, we kind of are behind the scenes as it relates to the patients themselves. We just tell doctors, just ask your patients if they're happy with their smile, if they notice tight contacts, if they have food impaction, ask them if they would be interested in aligners and then give them an opportunity to buy it by looking at that accept care treatment plan. I don't want to oversimplify it, but that's it.

What about you as far as like kind of launching this?

Yeah, I think one of the things that, that I've found in, that's successful or maybe we'll start with maybe where the challenges lie. A lot of offices get really excited about offering orthodontic care, but they don't necessarily change the way they do things to enable that to really be successful in their practices. And they tend to stick to what they know is true for general practice. For the general practice, which is, you know, they're not providing affordable options to start the care. And I can't emphasize that enough. Like you, we, especially in this economic environment, we have to be able to help practices and patients offer the most affordable options available. So, you know, I would, I would go back to that as a, as a fundamental need to communicate to patients that this is not, doesn't have to be expensive. This is care that you need and we'll make it affordable. We will give you every opportunity to get the payment plan that you want with a bank lender, with the office, or paying in full if you want to. But like the, the way that we're going to make sure the patients know about this, that we're going to tell them it's available and we're going to

tell them it's affordable.

Yeah.

And every patient's going to get an offer. Jake, that's, I think that's crucial. Right. And it's no impact to these patients credit. Every patient's going to have choices available to them.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it makes tons of sense, guys. It makes tons of sense here. Well, this is exciting. We always love folks who are complimentary coming together inside of the dental industry. Is there anything else that you want to leave somebody with that who is listening, who, you know, is considering this or is maybe even Doing it in another method. I'll start with you, Jay. Anything else that comes to mind?

No, just, you know, offer your patients an opportunity to buy the services that you offer, and we can help you do that if you want to do more liners, spend less time doing them, and make more money. Between Accept Care and us, that's literally the perfect fit.

Hey, no pun intended, right? That sounds like a tagline to me. How about you, Kevin? Anything else you leave with? Anyone kind of thinking about doing this? You know, still kind of kicking around?

Yeah, I would say if you've started down the path of offering orthodontics in your office, or if you're considering it and. Or maybe you've done it for a while and you don't like the results, start to look at a few key metrics. What is your conversion rate? How are. Are you communicating to patients? Are you making yourself affordable? Are you showing them, you know, a great patient experience? It. It doesn't have to be the results you have now. Don't have to be the results you have a month or two months or three months from now. Take a minute, evaluate your processes, and see if there might be a better way to do things and. And reach out, because I think they're like, we can offer between Jay and. And accept care and a better way potentially to get the. The care that your patients need.

Amazing. Well, thanks so much, guys. Thanks for making it easy for offices. I think you all have a really strong growth path ahead. It makes so much sense, this type of partnership, and really just the concept in general. Jay, starting with what you're doing and then making it easy to, you know, actually implement it makes a lot of sense, guys. So we're looking forward to some of your growth. And reach out to Jay and Kevin if you're interested in seeing how you can implement more ortho care.

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