211: CEO Series: Is AI the Path to Dental Growth or Is It People

The biggest revelation was that being able to train AI to contextually understand operational capacity, insurance language barriers, pricing objections was the big epiphany where we thought that if we could bring these things together, we can drive growth on autopilot.

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 DO 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 problem, 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's Growth Secrets podcast. I'm Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO, and I have a special guest with me, Amal with Patient Prism. So Amal has been a longtime friend, and we're going to talk today about something a little different, actually. Amalgama. Some probably topics that we've never talked about together, which is just the life of a CEO and how you think about leadership and how you think about growing your company, Patient Prism. Gosh, I think you guys must have launched, you know, 2015, 2016, somewhere around there. That's when I first met, and I've been in touch with you since then. I've seen the whole journey. Y' all have grown and expanded. You've worked your tail off in this industry, really trying to help people really was living out one of our core values inside the deal, which is giving to get. I just, I saw you just give, give, give. And here we are. You're at an inflection point with your business where you're starting to expand into other health care verticals. You're expanding into other, other continents. And I would love to get into, you know, how you're thinking about leadership. So before we do, maybe a little bit about yourself and a little bit about patient prison.

Yeah, I mean, I'm an accidental technologist. I was trained as a cpa, ran a CPA firm doing M and A work for healthcare and dental companies. Ten years ago, I had a professional midlife crisis saying, hey, I need to do something else with my life than accounting. Launched Patient Prism as an AI company and launched a hedge fund. With both of those businesses, I've thrived really well. Completely different verticals. One was in finance, trying to use math to manage money and algorithms to manage money. And then we decided to optimize the patient experience using math as well, which is Data Science, which is the foundation of AI and I simply started in 2015. I asked my co founder, hey, could we teach Alexa how to understand dentistry? That was the question that got everything going. And eight years down the line, we've built AI that actually helps improve the human connection. Not AI that just. Okay, well, here's. AI is the biggest noisemaker today. And the way we think about AI through all my mistakes that I did as I built this company over the last eight years is today we help dental support organizations, medical supporter MSOs, really optimize the top of the funnel journey for the patient so that every patient, every lead that comes into the office or the call center is optimized and if optimized for conversions. But beyond that, we also understand the marketing aspect of that as well as the operation side of it. So that's Patient Prism Manager in a nutshell right now is it really is about optimizing conversations and understanding deeply how patient flow occurs in an organization and what prevents it from happening. And sometimes it's not marketing, sometimes it's not sales, and sometimes it's not. Sometimes because we thought, right, Jake, I'm sorry for continuing this. We thought that it was all about the receptionist or the call center agent. And we knew it was always. But then we realized over the years that sometimes it was a bad lead and the marketing was not driving the rest. So no matter how good the receptionist was, it's not going to do it. And then the biggest revelation was that being able to train AI to contextually understand operational issues, capacity, insurance, language barriers, pricing. Objection. All that stuff. Understanding operational challenges was the big epiphany where we thought that if we could bring these things together, we can drive growth on autopilot.

Yeah, yeah. As you're, you know, running any kind of business, I think the experience leaders have grown to realize that the points where your company engages with the, the customer, when that little, that little tip point happens, right. Those are the most important points in business. So in dentistry, obviously, when the dental services or procedures are happening, the dentist is talking to a patient. But before that is when a patient first hears about the office maybe engaging in the website and then calls. So that call, that phone call or that outreach, right. Maybe it's email, maybe it's for. Via some kind of app or something is crucial. And that's where you live. Right. You live in this point where. And really where you started out with Patient Prism was phone calls. What was recording the phone calls, analyzing the phone calls. And I'm sure you've expanded since then, but just kind of saying the context here, that's where patient prison lives, is like understanding what patients are saying to the people who work in a dental office.

Yeah, absolutely. And then optim. And understanding more on, okay, here's somebody who called or filled out a form or texted us or chatted with us. Here's what they wanted, here's. And we couldn't schedule them because of these reasons. And we launched this concept called early warning signals. Right. The idea in business is if you knew early enough how to prevent a hurricane from happening, there's no way we can know that. Maybe we can figure something. But if you knew, if something broke just now and you had the ability to fix it quickly, then, then you would fix it, because if it helps your business. And so what we devised is because AI got better and better and better over the course of the last eight years and it's exponentially becoming better. We are able to now understand signals in conversation that are beyond just the receptionist making mistakes that are operational signals like, oh, you have capacity challenges in these offices, you have insurance challenges here, you have out of network challenges here. But by the way, in this place, you need more training on pricing. So the continuum that we have worked on at Patient Prism is really how do you convert hindsight into insight and foresight? All this data, we're gathering unstructured data, which is conversations like, okay, well, it tells you what happened. But, but the next generation of analytics, which are going to be AI driven, are going to say, why did this happen? Why did it happen? Like, like what, what? And then eventually, what could I have done to prevent it from happening? Or what should I do more of, what should I do less of? And it's really the evolution of AI is, is to give us insight and foresight into what we should be doing less of and more of in real time, so that even the middle management of your organization can take that data and affect change without needing all these very sophisticated guys at the very top trying to analyze, understand, and then have directives. AI is the now what. What did. What did say, you know, it's. You have like Albert Einstein teaching you math or physics. It's the same concept. It's. You imagine having the best tool in that, telling your middle management how to function without having to actually do anything else to figure out how to grow your business.

Yeah. So actually, I think we should dig into this because this is absolutely incredibly important right now, is for business owners to understand what's going on right now. So everything the juice Think about all these phone calls that are happening in a dental office and how rich they are with information. They're so rich. And I mean about operations, about the marketplace, about competitors, about the individual staff. That, that's, it's, it's, there's, it's all inside this phone call. Right. All this information. And up until now we didn't really have fast. I mean you guys did, patient prison did, because you were way, way ahead of this. I'm all. But most, most people didn't have a way to analyze that. So now there's ways to analyze it. You all are way ahead of that. But it's getting people to think. And my belief is the first step of all of this is getting those things documented, these like points of contact.

Right.

So I'll give you an example. While we do a lot of one on one coaching now with our members. So we have a suite of coaches. When, when somebody comes in as a deal member, they want to improve their profitability, we look at the coach. Well, those coaching calls are the juice. There's so much juice in those coaching calls. Right. They're telling us what their problems are. If we have 100, a thousand of these, we're able to extract a lot of the similar data. So step one though is getting those recorded.

Right.

And getting those not just recorded recorded into a way that can be analyzed. And this is what you, you solved seven years ago. Right. So if I'm signing up with Patient Prism, this is not supposed to be actually an advertisement vision. I just want to solve how ahead of you are with this. But you're getting the calls recorded and they're all getting into some area, some, you know, some data warehouse someplace where data stored and, and you have all those, which means you can start layering on top AI to start reading them. So we're, we're, we're here, you've been here for seven years. But like everyone's mindset I think is getting here that they've got to have these things recorded and put into a data spot that's readable.

Yeah. And then we got to give them, we've got to actually drive growth. Right. With all this data we have recorded, analyze them. But what makes us a little unique, and it's again unique not because we figured this out on our own. We made tons of mistakes. Building was understanding that people don't really care about AI and people don't really care about technology. People don't care about how good my features are. What they care about is how do I Alleviate a pain point that they have. And so once we figured that out, Jake, like during the pandemic is when, when we figured out, like, I don't need to really talk about AI a lot. What I'm going to talk about is what is your biggest problem? And let me figure out if AI is the right use case for that or not. And so we, we, we literally went back and rebuilt the entire product from the ground up, all over again from first line of code starting in 21, and rebuilt it and relaunched Patient Prism all over again. Because sometimes imagine, Jake, if, if you had an opportunity to go back in time and redo some of these decisions that you made, you would do them different. Yeah. And we took that big risk and saying, my God, we were not customer focused as much as we should have been. We were not pain focused. We were just focused on building the great product. But then we realized if we focused on people's pain, then the product will just take.

Yeah. Would you say that it's almost like not if AI can help you in the process. It's almost like, well, yes, that, that, but. And is, is there clues to your problem inside your phone calls with your staff like that? It's almost like whatever problem you're dealing with, like the capacity or training or 9 million problems, are there things that are happening when your front office or any of your staff is talking to a patient that will help you sell that? If so, we can get some software involved and, and extract all of those learnings for you very quickly to create plans.

Yeah. And today AI is, is getting better and better at unstructured data than ever before. In the past, when we started Patient Prism, we had to structure all these conversations into these buckets. We needed humans to create ground truth and everything else. But today we, AI is the ability to take a whole bunch of unstructured data, a whole bunch of information from everywhere, from all the conversations and find all the needles in the different haystacks. That's what Patient PRISM does. It's really in the haystacks.

Let's talk about some specific needles. I bet you have some crazy stories or use cases or things that were discovered. So just by the way, you should send this amal to every large group that you're looking at. Like, this is the kind of fundamental theory is, let's say you got thousands of phone calls that are, that are happening every day, get those recorded, get those analyzed, and the possibilities become endless. That is the oil that everyone needs to start mining is what happens on these phone calls. Have to, I mean, have to, right? If you're not doing it. And so in the other office down the street is over the time it's going to compound, they're going to learn faster and they're going to get ahead. So, so what are some of the, I don't know, some of the more interesting or crazier things that you've discovered through having access to all this information in dental?

Obviously we're a dentist entrepreneur organization. So we do QBRs with our clients every quarter. We do monthly touch points with our clients. We provide all this data on a platter. Like an insight would be, hey, in Florida right now, an insight would be in Florida right now. There is an average wait time for Invisalign of 32 days across the state

or just across the street.

And I would, I would, I would say this to a group that is a lot of Florida office versus Georgia or then we can gradually down that. By the way, every time a patient calls about dental implants or implant related stuff, our team doesn't mention financing, only mentioned it 50% of time. I mean this is so this is like six levels deeper. Right? So now what do we do? Well, we're advertising Invisalign, we're trying to get more starts up and in our offices but somehow we're booking them out 30 days and so what should we do? But we have a, we have a supply problem, we have a capacity problem, not a demand problem. So let's start marketing, let's add clear capacity, put them on a different schedule and let's figure out how to preach for revenue not just first in, first time. And when you can tell people that oh my goodness the world that. Another problem I'll tell you we solved for a large group was if you have a big footprint in a geographic area, new patients are calling in, you don't have providers and we have a mechanism where we can tell you that hey, you could put this patient somewhere else. It's a brand new patient, they don't have an existing relationship. So how do we optimize for capacity? Right. We're not airline business where we know exactly, you know where we have to get the right fare codes in every beat. Right? So if every, if everybody, Delta airlines bought basic economy tickets, Delta would be losing money hand over fist. So patient mix is something we talk about a lot is that payer mix is important. You have to have the right insurances, fee for service, all that stuff. But about patient mix, in order for you to drive the most amount of revenue per Hour. You need the right buds and the right seats at the right time, paying the right press. And if we can help you triage that through AI then you're instead of, you're only two hygienists and you have one doctor. Doctors need to produce $2,000 an hour. You can produce $2,000 an hour if you're prioritizing hygiene patients over specialty patients, especially if you're driving those specialty patients from Google Ads. So that is, this is what insight and foresight mean us. Yeah, it's not about. I didn't talk about AI at all.

And well, and it's just, it's just the beginning because once you have access to the words being spoken to, from, from front desk to patients, right. It's only going to, it's only going to increase the amount of insights that happen there. So next year we're going to be able to get more insights than this year and next year it's just getting access to that is the key. And we all need to be figuring out how to, how to get access to these, these bits of information that are happening inside of our companies.

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back to the episode.

So, so Amal, what you were talking about this seven or eight years ago, probably longer. Of course. Now it's, it's the hot topic and you know, you get, you, you know, you could, I'm sure you're very humble so you're probably not doing it but you got to be like, hey guys, I've been, you know, hey, welcome to the show. I've been talking about for eight years. What, like how have you been thinking about AI and like what's, how are you staying up to speed on it and what's the future like? What's your mindset here?

It's tough because it's being democratized. The tech is being democratized. So, so what you have to worry think about as a CEO of an AI company day is let's not chase features because you can always, somebody can always build a feature that's faster Cheaper, better than you. Right. You got to think about a comprehensive. It has to be a product that just can be disrupted with like all the changes. And it has to be a product that supports an organization at various stages in the organization. If it's just a feature, oh, let me launch the virtual receptionist, that's just a feature. Let me launch AI assistant, that's the feature. It's not a product. So there's going to be all these companies that are going to come in board, you got large language models and all these things coming in and they're going to launch companies, raise tons of capital with lots of money coming in and build features, come up with a thing that will just be included, part of your $20 a month feature. So it can't be that. So that's what I've learned is like, you know, you've got to really understand what your customers want and you have to really have them continuous conversations with your customers, your best customers, your biggest customers, and continuously ask them, what can I do to solve your pain? What can I do? And how can I make my product feature rich? Not just make my feature, not just call my feature. Because you know, we had OCR people that come in long term, you don't need OCR anymore. GPT can do that, right? Or you can launch again. There's the new hype about AI receptionist. Wonderful. Guess what? Anybody can build an AI receptionist tomorrow. You need the functions API from Open API and go get it done. How do you get it done? Make sure it's HIPAA compliant. How do you make sure there is, there is the, the process.

Well, and how do you know, like how the patient or the human who's calling the AI, what they're saying, how they're reacting, what words they're saying. The problem still remains, right? You have to know how your company is interacting with the customer. And if it's AI or a front desk, Susie at the front desk, it doesn't matter. That part is all getting automated. What's not getting automated is this conversation that happens and we need to know what's happening so we can draw insights to make changes.

I think personally Jake is we will never ever AI will never ever in my view diminish the value of a human connection. Our job is to just identify issues in the human facilitate so that humans can spend more time with other humans. You can have all the things in the world. But in my view, I have a more different view of AI than most AI. Oh, AI is going to rule the world. Great. I personally Think we use AI to really understand things that were hidden from us. Like you said earlier, the conversations were happening throughout millennia. How do we find all the signal from the noise? How do we find AI allows us to find, allows me to find so many needles every day from this haystack of conversations that we're doing 10,000 calls an hour that and I'm finding a hundred needles out of that every day.

It's crazy.

And those needles are actually moving the needle.

That's right. That's right. I mean I think the lesson here as a business leader is just stay focused on the problem that you're solving. The way that the problem arises can change. I mean I'm, I'm just kind of thinking onto the future and crazy future which is like you have a AI kind of answering the call on Abdel end and everyone's very excited about these bots that can work on their behalf. Right. Go through my email schedule. So even let's say I'm all that there's two bots talking to each other, we still need to know as the business owners what those bots are like, how that interaction between the two bots is happening. Right. So that they can become patients. So like that the problem, what you're saying is like as business leaders, because a lot of these leaders have the same thing. They got AI coming everywhere. We're all people are worried, they're not sure where the business fits into the stack. All that focus on the problem, stay in super tight with your customer and just keep iterating 100%.

And then really is part of what we do a lot is we look at leadership. I think leadership is where organizations don't really because it's everybody thinks about okay, let me just chase the next bright shiny object. It really is not about that. It's about the organizations that have better leadership are going to do better period with anything. Adoption, change management and everything else. Right. It's what the biggest vacuum that you guys solve frankly in the dental group dentistry world is the leadership vacuum. Like are you self aware? Do you, do you know your self limiting beliefs? Are you willing to let go? Are you willing to delegate? Are you willing to bring in more leaders? Are you going to invest in things that are going to make the organization move forward especially for founder doctors. Like are you going to get out of the way to pave the way for future growth? That is where the fun is, is, is, is I think if AI AI can help in doing certain routine, mundane tasks. But the challenge really is that I see in organizations that are super successful versus not is really about leadership. And then it starts and ends there.

Yeah, I love it. So the main takeaways here are focus on the problem and focus on your leadership and developing leaders and finding leaders. That's what's going to continue to win. I love hearing it from you, Amal, because, yeah, you've just been on the forefront of this since day one. Yeah, you've really led through this massive change to the point now where we're at this AI inflection point. And you've really had to really live that, I think, for seven or eight years. And just so everyone knows, patient Prism expanding into other verticals, the medical industry expanding over into Europe potentially, and, you know, blue skies ahead for you in patient prison. So thanks so much, Amal. I love this conversation. I love hearing how you think about your business.

Thank you. And anything you need from the deo. You guys were one of the first with the grounds on which we launched, and you paved the way for us when we started the business. And I always have deep appreciation for the organization that provided me the groundwork to build what we have been built today. So thank you again for what you guys have done for us in the past.

I appreciate that, Amal. All right, we'll keep in touch. Thank you so much.

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