212: Unlock Practice Growth with An All-in-One Technology Solution

I teach some of the doctors all the time. I'm like, you guys are probably, you know, carrying around in your back pocket a computer that's better than what's running your multimillion dollar business.

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 and podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I'm Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO, the dentist entrepreneur organization. And today I have a special guest here. This is something new to dentistry. A lot of new technology coming out right now and it's very exciting. If you're in the dental world and a dental leader, you know, fortunately, unfortunately, this is something you got to pay attention to it. What's the new software? Is the new tech, the new tools coming out to you? And so there's a big one that is coming out right now. With me is April Lowry, general manager of Aura Dental. And Aura is the latest, greatest practice management software to kind of enter the dental industry. So, April, do you want to give yourself an introduction and really tell people a little bit about Aura?

Sure. And thank you for having me today and I appreciate you guys talking to us. So in terms of Aura, Aura is a brand new practice management system and I was telling you earlier that it's sort of the oldest, newest platform on the market. It's been in development now for more than a decade and we've recently launched it to the commercial dental marketplace this year and are excited to get it out. It's really taking a new approach to practice management so that everything is unified all in one platform, everything that you need to run a dental organization. And it's been designed from the ground up to work with multi locations, multi specialty and DSOs as well as single providers. So we took a somewhat of a unique approach in getting this ready. We're excited that she Aura is finally out in the market and that we're getting some great success with some of our earlier adopters and expanding our client base this year.

Thank you to whatever. DSo put all R and D into this. And also, you know, great for you guys that you kind of built this with having it expanding into the rest of the marketplace in mind. You know, technology like kind of competing with each other is what innovates and what makes the tools better for all of us end users. So it's a really good thing. So maybe walk through this idea of all in one. You know what, what is different about Aura? We know that the practice management landscape has been around for a while. A lot of people have been using the same ones for the past five, ten, sometimes longer years. So what is, what is different?

We took an approach that's a little unique in that we wanted to be able to help dental organizations with their entire practice life cycle. So everything that's gone into creating Aura was about helping a practice get and engage patients, helping a practice treat their patients, and then of course helping you get paid. So we've looked at automating a lot of this processes that drive those three tenants of the practice life cycle so that there's less manual details. And, and this all in one concept is that everything is, is truly in the one platform. So your reminders, your two way texting, your electronic forms, your online scheduling, your practice management piece, your electronic health record, your claims processing, your imaging processing, your AI imaging is built in. Your electronic prescriptions are built in. So truly everything that you need to effectively manage a dental organization is in existing in one platform. So you have one support team to call, one bill to get and pay, one place to go and look for answers. And you don't have to worry about some of the vendor fatigue that a lot of us are experiencing because we're dealing with 5, 6, 7. We even have one office in Georgia that we count up. They have 14 different software vendors that they're paying every month to do everything that Aura does in one platform. Yeah.

You know, when, when you kind of duct tape all these softwares together, I think we all have the same thought, which is like, why don't these all talk to each other? Or aren't they in one spot? So it's kind of like the holy grail to have it all working. And I can tell you in other parts of just online businesses, it's starting to happen as well. Like you're starting to see the technology reach a spot where it can actually be all in one. Before it was like shoehorning it all in and duct taping it together. So yeah, I mean, I guess what's like, what's making this possible? It almost sounds a little too good to be true, you know, but it sounds like you guys did 10 years. How is this possible? Maybe give us a little Bit into like this idea that we're finally there or we can include everything.

Well, I think a lot of it is you have to begin with the end in mind. So when we started this development 10 years ago, we knew we wanted an interoperable system. We knew we wanted APIs that can be easily accessible to connect any third party or partner system that we needed to. We knew we wanted it to work for a single office as just as well as it does a small group and even the biggest of the biggest DSOs. So all of those things went into the initial design and planning of this from the ground up so that it wasn't an afterthought where we tried to take a single office system and turn it into a group or you know, we tried to reverse engineer it. So we did all of this with intent and purpose in how we built this from the beginning so that it would accomplish all the objectives that we needed. Plus we needed it to be easy to learn. And then with the advancements that we've had in artificial intelligence, AI and some of the automation that exists because of our underlying technology stack and base platform capabilities, we are now able to automate more and more of the daily manual tasks than ever before. So this is a plus for the offices, especially in a market where we're trying to do more with less every day. And our dental practices are trying to have same store growth. They're trying to engage with patients, they're trying to treat them, they're trying to make sure that their revenue cycle management is on time. And taking one, you know, one of those worries off the plate with having everything in one unified platform with accurate data and the details that are needed makes it a little simpler for them to get the job done and get access to their data. Training treat their patients wherever they may be, because being cloud based gives you that 24,7 access so you don't have to miss, you know, your child's soccer game because you need to go take care of an electronic prescription for a patient that has an abscess. So we're trying to make today's technology work for the dentist where they are in their life cycle, as well as make it easier for your staff to learn and easier for your patients to engage with you.

If somebody was working with you all on this software platform, what becomes unneeded? So text patient text reminders. What, what's called.

Yeah, so everything that's built in includes your automatic reminders, your automatic missed appointments, automatic recalls. If you're paying extra for two way texting A lot of companies pay extra for online scheduling. Your electronic prescription software is built in. Your in insurance verification, the real time insurance verification eligibility processes are built in. Your electronic claims are built in. Electronic forms is another one that's often paid extra. And pretty extensive analytics and reporting so you don't have to pay for third party analytics. That's all built in. And we're giving you the power of analytics for production. So we have your doctor production, your hygiene production, your net production, your gross production, your insurance ar, your patient ar, everything you need to get real time data decisions. And these are like you're not waiting a day to put reports together and bring them in from disperse systems. You can click a button and run a report anytime in Aura and it gives you accurate, up to the minute data for what you need so that you can make those mission critical decisions. And if you're looking at trends that you're trying to spot, maybe you're wanting to determine if you have enough appointments to add a second hygienist to your location or to look at assisted hygiene. So those datas and that productivity by hygienist, that productivity by payer is also included in all of this at no additional charge.

How much are they able to save, you think? At the end of the day, typically

we're seeing between 30 to 35% over what they're paying with all of this, all of the different systems. And because we do have the APIs, we recognize that there are some partners that you guys are going to love. And so we are not closing our system off. We still allow you to work with some of the other partners that you'd like to work with and take advantage of the fact that we want that interoperability between systems and other partners that we, we may choose to work with in the future.

So it's not, you know, like ample where you know, you close it off the closed wall where nothing can talk to it. You guys have opened up a lot of this where if I wanted to keep, I like, I love my text reminder system. Everything else I'm going to consolidate in, but this one that I love, you actually have it where you can still do that.

Yeah. So we do have APIs available for that. There may be some, you know, custom integration work that we have to do for our client, but we, we do have those processes and opportunities available for customers that want to stick with another vendor of their choice. We also have payment processing built in, so that is also automated with us. So every payment that you run through the AURA Integrated Payment Solution automatically posts and automatically runs to the patient ledger, including auto payment plans. So that also eliminates some of those manual tasks that offices are often doing. You don't have to scan and upload forms. If you fill out one of our electronic forms, they automatically upload to the patient document tab. So there's a lot of things that we're trying to do to really alleviate some of those manual tasks that your office might be doing today and have it all in one convenient system to learn. So it's one system to train, one, one system to learn, one system to operate with and you know, one phone call if you do have something you need help with.

Beautiful. So you got the cost savings on potential other softwares that you don't need. You've got the labor, you're saving a lot of time because the systems are more efficient. You have easier access to the information. You've integrated it. Right. The training, you're saving time on training. It sounds like you're able to get really easy in reporting because all the data lives in one spot. You don't need to combo it in anything else. This is kind of like an all in one benefits package. But like what, you know, anything else that doing this type of system does versus the other one.

Yeah, I mean I think in terms of just we live in a modern world where a lot of times in the dental industry there's, there's definitely a labor shortage especially for assistants and hygienists and front desk people in a lot of the markets that the practices exist in. And so you do need something that's easy to learn. And being that we're browser based, I think that's another advantage is that, you know, if you're hiring these 20 something assistants and front desk people, they're going to be more used to that browser based workflow where it's just point and click. And you can also customize your bundles and your clinical and treatment planning for those that may or may not already know some of the CDT codes as well as just, you know, using the AI and some of the automated processes to streamline administrative tasks. So billing verification for insurances, scheduling, we take a lot of that front desk scheduling training off their plate because in Aura we set up your custom schedule templates for your organization and what your scheduling rules are. So in our scheduling AI image engine, excuse me, you would say, okay, I only want to do one sedation appointment an hour because I have a limit to a sedation machine or if I'm doing three chairs of hygiene and I'm doing an sdrp. I only want to schedule one other chair and I'm going to automatically block my third. So the system creates this engine for you that we set up an implementation and all of those rules so the system finds the next appointment for you based on that, so that you can meet your revenue goals for the day and you don't have to constantly train your front desk as the staff turns over on why you can't schedule two sedation appointments at the same time, or why you don't want a day where all you do is 15 carries appointments because you're not going to meet your revenue goal for the day. So we have a lot of that sort of logic built in to make both training and administrative task and help you meet your revenue goals all work together. That's built into that logic in the back end of the system.

That's incredibly smart. Another one where sometimes in dentistry, you know, all of us feel the same. We're like, man, it should be easier, right? Like, like, I shouldn't have the ability to, if I can't, if I can't schedule in a third column, I shouldn't have that ability to do it, rather than just like remembering and training somebody to remember. And so it sounds like what you all have done is build a lot of that into the software, all that, you know, toggles and settings and whatnot. I think it's important also to come back to, you built this with one of the larger DSOs in the country, and so this is what they needed. Right. It's like you've built what essentially a very large CSO needed and so all of everything's been thought of, essentially, if that makes sense.

Yeah, and there's, there's always something to learn and there's always something we can improve on. And so we're continuing to look for ways to innovate and to add because especially right now, we are living in an age in the dental world where the impact of AI we are just beginning to grasp. And so we are going to continue to modernize and to add these new tools as they become available and, and improve our own technology roadmap. But that's something I'm very passionate about, is, you know, bringing the dental practices into the future and making sure that they're taking advantage of all these things that can help them meet their practice life cycle objectives. But then also, you know, I tease, I tease some of the doctors all the time. I'm like, you guys are probably, you know, carrying around in your back pocket a computer that's better than what's running your multimillion dollar business. And so this is something that we all need to take a look at and you know, in a. And how we can basically make better business decisions. And one of those is looking for the ways to streamline your technology and take advantage of some of the new things that are out in the marketplace today. And we're, you know, proud of the fact that we think Aura fills a lot of those check, check boxes that you may be looking at as you make decisions about your future system.

Yeah. Speaking of automation and AI, how else, how else are you guys thinking about AI? I know it's really a big part of this software here. It's. And it's almost like you built it in a way that can continue to harness artificial intelligence. So anything you want to say or can share with us about AI and orup?

Yeah, so there's a couple things we've done. One of those is we are already integrated with a partner, our friends at Pearl AI. And so Pearl comes built into Aura for those of the offices that would like to use AI imaging. I'm a big fan of AI imaging and some of the ROI that it can return to the practices just in helping them. You know, we see it getting used a lot by hygienists who want to make sure their measurements are correct and then of course doctors who are using it to say, okay, is there anything that I'm not seeing in the images that I might be missing? So there's some great things that are happening in just the whole world of AI imaging. We also have a partnership with Soda Cloud, so we are using them as our imaging system that's built into Aura called auraview. And they've recently launched an AI generated patient referral letter so that if you are a multi specialty practice and are group general dentist and you need to refer a patient to an ortho or an endo, you can easily create a letter for the reason for the referral. AI writes the letter for you and you put in the images that you've taken in Aura and you can send it directly from the system in a secure, secure fashion. So there's some things like that that we're already capitalizing on that we love. We've talked a little bit about the partnership on the Clearinghouse. So we work with Dental Exchange and some others on just how we're processing those things. We're doing eligibility verifications automatically. We're processing claims without a person having to touch it. So Aura has logic where we work with the payers and we go and grab the claim, we grab the notes, we grab the image and we put all of that together and send that claim off without a person in your office having to touch it. And so the system is doing that. And then when the eras come back from the clearinghouse, we are automatically posting those to the line item. We're automatically putting in the adjustments where we can. And we're also attaching the EOB right to the code so that you know why that code got paid, the amount that it got paid versus not. So there's a lot of RCM automation that we're spending time on because that's an area where we see the most bang for the buck and where the, the practices need additional help and guidance. And we have a whole RC and professional services team at Aura that we're able to, to further provide services along those lines. Some of the things in the roadmap that we're looking at that I think is important. I'm really liking some of the work that companies like Patient Prism is doing for their AI in terms of helping you capture those phone calls and reasons and making sure that that gets integrated. Our friends at Doctable are doing a great job on AI automation around forms and scheduling and reminders and whatnot. And then we're also working on some additional AI eligibility work and moving towards investing quite a bit next year in what we call revenue intelligence so that we can take all this claims data and all this fee schedule data and use that AI engine to really say, what are my predictive analytics? What do we actually think this doctor is going to get paid? Are your fees in your market fee schedule and where they need to be? Could you negotiate more? So down the road, as we continue to learn and the technology learns and improves, we expect to be adding these additional improvements to Aura in the, in the next several months as, as these items progress. So we have a, a very Busy roadmap for 2025 and a lot planned that we're excited about.

Yeah, I mean once you have the foundation where the software is kind of malleable and can, it can adapt and be molded and then these changes are, you know, they're a heavy lift, but like they're very possible. It's kind of like Tesla, like Tesla. If anyone has a Tesla car, they download the software update and because the way it's made, you can keep upgrading the software over and over again. And because what you guys do is all integrated and talking to each other, I imagine it makes this A little bit easier to update. So that's amazing. I think this is music to people's ears. Last thing maybe touch on is, you know, changing practice management software is a huge deal. It's a lot of transition costs. I know that's immediately the first objection, really, to doing something like this. How do you guys help it out? How do you make it, you know, as easy as possible on those changing.

Great question, and one that we spent a lot of time trying to answer as we got ready to bring Aura to market this year because we really wanted our practices to have sort of that white glove service. We also recognize that the more we help you set up your fee schedules and group plans and payer plans, the more likely or less likely, I should say, you are to have to have a support call need, because a lot of the support calls are generated because those plans didn't get set up correctly, because the revenue cycle is not capturing like what we thought because it missed an exclusion rule. So our team of experts will walk you through how to do that. We also make data migration very easy and have great data transfer practices put in place so that you can migrate your appointments, you can migrate your patients in a seamless fashion. And because we know that a lot of the practice management systems don't stop you from making or entering duplicate patients, or it actually has a module built in to automatically merge patients for you inside the system when you find duplicates. So there's some little things like that that we've done along the way, just recognizing some of the pieces that we have and even making that process easier so that you have an internal champion. Our groups go through one process to onboard, where they have a dedicated person during the onboarding pieces. And then we have a separate team that handles our small business customers. And so that everybody gets the sort of individualized attention that you need. And then we create a project plan that everybody's agreeable to. We do pilots. So we try to make it as pain free as possible because we know it's a big decision. But we also know that as soon as your team starts seeing some of the benefits and some of the things, you know, even little things like just not having to scan forms anymore, or just not having to call people to do their reminders, or having to worry about double data entry because one system used doesn't talk to your practice management system, and then, you know, minimizing all the errors and you even just think about how much time a person in your practice might spend trying to figure out what their password is. For the seven different systems they're using, how much time are you losing in an organization, especially larger ones, where that's happening every single day to a handful of people and how much time that takes to figure out. So just little things. It's what I call the hidden costs of not changing. And those things really start to add up. And we have a checklist that people can request and that kind of helps walk them through. It's a free download, and it helps walk you through. You can scan it with a QR code, but it helps walk you through, like, some of those things about how to do an implementation and how to determine what your hidden costs are that you're paying today that you may not realize. And so it really gives you a look at, like, how that ROI can pay for itself in just a short time.

Exactly. So at the end of the day, I mean, you guys recognize how this could be a big decision, and then you've got a lot in place to make sure it goes right. This also does have. I mean, there are, this has been happening for the past 20 years. Folks have to kind of change softwares and change things. And, you know, it's part, it's part of the game, really. Like, you have to kind of stay up on this. And so I think a lot of people are going to be excited to see that you all are now in, in the race here and that there's another, another choice when it comes to practice management softwares. The DEO side, you know, we work with a lot of people and it's been pretty quiet for about five or seven years. You know, I mean, some, some stuff going on, but it's, I think it's really exciting to have a new option and one that is like, you know, it seems to be on the, like, the leading edge of the way technology should be built. Like, you know, we're all using softwares every day in other parts of our lives, and we want the dental software to be as easily usable as talking to each other. And it sounds like you guys have gotten us to that spot.

Yeah. Now we're, we're super excited for, I think, the change that the industry is ready for. And I think now's a good time, especially with the focus on, you know, everybody's worried about same store growth and their EBITDA and their numbers. And like, one of the benefits too, this sort of a hidden benefit, is that when you're, when you're dealing with a group, let's say you're even a small group, but you could still have three or four different practice management systems. Just consolidating those and looking at how much that improves your valuation over time. Because now you can prove what your numbers are. You've got one single source of truth for the data. So there's just so many different benefits with moving to that unified platform and having one that's actually all in one. I've been in the dental industry for 14 years now and I feel like it's the right product at the right time and we're super excited to get it in front of everybody and get it out there.

Awesome. Well, April Lowry or a dental thanks so much for talking to us. And I almost feel like, you know, you've been around for 10 years, but it's like you heard it here first and you're kind of relaunched. I know you guys are been out and about, but we look forward to getting the word out for you all and excited to see as you bring on more and more folks, kind of the difference you are making in their locations.

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