How Dental Intel’s Suite of Products Grows Your Revenue

Dental software was supposed to set us free from getting bogged down in logistical nightmares. Instead, these programs made things more complicated than before.

But not anymore!

Join Whitney today as she interviews Jessica Lamers and Steve Jensen from Dental Intelligence.

In this episode, we’re discussing Dental Intelligence’s namesake: Dental Intelligence, the all-in-one toolkit to manage and grow your dental practice.

With this software, you’ll be able to:

• Automate morning huddles
• Simplify online scheduling
• Streamline patient communication, and
• Improve your overall team performance & patient care

Sounds like something you’d be interested in? Let’s go then!*

*Quick note: If you don’t need the entire toolkit and are only curious about specific services, feel free to skip ahead to watch these specific segments:

• Dental Intel demo: Starts at the beginning of the video
• LocalMed demo: Starts at (approximately) 28:50
• Modento demo: Starts at (approximately) 36:50

 

Whitney: Hi everyone. Welcome.

We are so happy to be joined today by Jessica Lamers and Steve Jensen. Steve is the vice president of business development at Dental Intelligence, and Jessica is the director of business development at Dental Intelligence.

We have a ton of questions about Dental Intelligence. We are so excited about this product, and we know our clients are going to be really excited about all that it can do for them too. So, the reason for our call today is to learn a little bit more from you both, so, thank you and welcome.

Tell us a little a bit about yourselves.

Jessica: Yeah, well, hi, I’m Jessica. As she said, I’m the director of business development.

It’s just a fancy word saying, basically, “we promote our company.” We’re kind of the face of it to be answering any questions that you may have, and we’re also the face of the company at events, so you may see us there. I have a background in the dental office of 10 years in dental ops.

So, I just wanted to join the Dental Intel team to enhance the products that we offer to different offices, as I saw that they were a great benefit to me when I was running dental ops.

Steve: And I’m Steve Jensen. I’m a total dental nerd. I’ve fallen in love with the industry. I was an economics and an MBA kind of a guy and came into dentistry mostly because, as a kid, I grew up wanting to be an orthodontist and then decided that I didn’t like chemistry.

So, I sought an opportunity to jump into the industry four years ago and took it happily. I’ve honestly loved every single minute of it, we live in a cool industry in great times.

It’s a good time to be a dentist. The industry’s changing for sure. There are some unique market forces from, you know, the pandemic, to an increased number of DSOs coming into this space.

Regardless, it really is an exciting time to be part of dentistry with so much cool innovation, both on the clinical side and on the business side, so I’m super excited to share how we’re helping to move that industry forward with what we’re doing over at Dental Intelligence today.

Whitney: I love that, and I could not agree more. Excuse me. It is an exciting time to be in dentistry and we are thrilled to have you both here with us. So, let’s chat about all things Dental Intel.

Jessica: Awesome. Well, we’re going to go into Dental Intel itself first, which is basically our growth platform, our first product that we ever offered and put on the table.

So, the highlight of Dental Intel is that there are some things that you can automate in your practice.

So, we automate morning huddles, and we pull those numbers for you overnight, while you’re sleeping, to give you insights into what happened yesterday, what’s happening today, what’s happening tomorrow, and where you could add value to your schedule.

The next thing is a Call Insight, which is a call pop, kind of like what most people may know as Weave. This is going to integrate with every phone call, and then generate actionable follow-ups that are given to you in bite sizes for each day.

It also collects payments digitally through texts and email, so that’s awesome. That way, your patients aren’t having to try to find time between the eight-to-five that you’re open. They can actually pay after hours while you’re closed.

Steve: Jessica, one thing I want to say is, you can think of Dental Intel as being kind of like your co-office manager, right? Just like Jessica said, it’s someone who, when you leave the practice and go to sleep, will jump into your practice management software in Eaglesoft and Dentrix, analyze all your data and say, “okay, how did things go yesterday? How are things looking today? Are there opportunities that we need to take advantage of? Are there people we need to follow up with? Are there people we need to schedule for today, or treatments we need to complete, or balances to collect?”

Really, as you come in every day:

What Dental Intel is trying to do is to help you basically co-manage the office and bring those things to the surface for you.

Like Jessica said. A morning huddle is going to be one of the best things that’ll help co-manage in the practice.

Jessica: Absolutely, I love that. Thanks for putting that little piece in there. Sometimes I forget how often it can be helpful with the automation of it. So, for a morning huddle, I just have, you know, a quick little look, an outlook of what that looks like for the day.

Like Steve was saying, it does pull a lot of data while you’re sleeping at night in order to give you a “what did you do?” overview.

It’s also looking at your schedule to find things you can take in to add value, to hit your goal, even if that’s not today, because maybe you’re below your daily goal.

And hey, you have this person, that person, and this person, all of whom have unscheduled treatments. You have a few family members who need to get rescheduled, so you have a few openings coming up in your schedule. That’s a great way to help fill your schedule and stay on top of that, even while your patients are in your practice already and have committed to coming in that day.

So, we do two nightly syncs: month-to-date production, and a forecast as far as what’s on your schedule. That’s based on what’s in your appointments, but also on customizable metrics.

You can customize to say, “hey, I only want to look at hygiene re-appointment, production per visit, and doctor production.” Then, if you want to just focus on those, you can select those as your highlights in the morning huddle.

A lot of it is customizable. It also provides principal stats, by provider, and takeaways. So, I know with many hygienists, when they see their patients back-to-back-to-back, they forget that so-and-so had a family member who needs to be scheduled for an upcoming hygiene appointment because they’re overdue. They can basically print that, and it prints by their patients, and they can take that to their operatory to have as a highlight, almost like a post-it note.

The next thing is that this, again, is all within DI, so we’re combining multiple things which other products may only individually offer. Take something like Weave – they do a call pop, while DI growth offers a call pop within the product itself, bundled with these other things like the morning huddle that we’re talking about.

It also creates actionable tasks with every phone call if a patient is on your platform. It’s going to tell you with a little view on the side, “Hey, this was when the patient’s last visit was, this is the what the type of appointment was… hey, this is in the red, their hygiene is overdue, we need to get them scheduled.”

It’s common for a patient to be calling us when they don’t actually have a proper balance, but they may end up calling us about some other scenario, and we oftentimes just get on the phone, answer that question, and then hang up. We forget to take action on the opportunities while we have them on the phone and they’ve called us, so, here, you could take that opportunity and say, “Hey, let’s get you scheduled for your next cleaning,” and if they had any family members, we would suggest they get scheduled here as well.

It’ll tell you any outstanding balances, outstanding treatments, and you can even read the chart notes without having to go into the practice management system, hitting that search button, and going through five screens just to get to that information.

Again, like I said, I’ve been in dental ops for 10 years, and we still use dinosaur ways of going about things. That means printing call lists that may be 40 pages long, like 10 to 12 patients per page. You get through about five or six and you feel really good, but then the other, you know, 30, get overlooked, and we keep dropping the ball because we only started with A, or we only started with Z. What’s nice about Dental Intel is that we will digest your information on actionable data by day and by role.

So, let’s say your hygienist takes advantage of their downtime to reschedule patients who fell off their books. They would like to take that opportunity to call those patients who may have called in and canceled at some point and are no longer on their re-care. So, you can configure settings for your hygienist to gauge who needs to be called on what day.

That way, you’re breaking the job down into bite-sized, actionable tasks, versus it being this 40-page list. What’s especially neat about that is that you can log if a patient picks the phone up or if they didn’t pick up, if they scheduled or didn’t schedule, and all of those notes are going right back into the practice management system and onto the patient’s file.

Similarly, if the patient did schedule, it’s going to tell you, “Hey, here’s how many attempts you made on phone calls, here’s how many times you were successful, and here’s your dollar value per attempt that you got on the phone today.”

I think that’s really great because we tend to see things like, “Oh, you know, we made 10 calls and only four of those scheduled, but it’s good to see at the end of the day that that was still $150 worth per phone call because of what I got scheduled in the books, so it was valuable.”

Another nice thing is that you can get unscheduled treatments, and you can work your collections from here as well… stop me at any time if you think I’m overlooking something that we need to highlight here.

Steve: This is great honestly, you know. I think as she’s talking, I’m just picturing –I don’t know if you guys can picture this – but I’m picturing in my mind, all the things that people have to do every day in a dental practice, and it can just become so chaotic.

I hope you’re noticing the pattern.

We’ve tried to look for these small little pain points you’re experiencing throughout the day and simplify them.

We want to make it so that you don’t have to think, “Oh crap, where’d I put that,” like she said, “where’d I put that piece of paper that has all my call lists on it? I forgot to write a note on this.”

We just automatically track that for you. Same with the morning huddle, we’re automating notes on the schedule, so, you don’t have to print it off and write your own notes. It’s already all there.

Then – I don’t know if you want me to talk about payments – the same thing happens here as we approach our collections, right? So that’s another thing where, every day in a practice right now, most practices are still printing out physical statements, and then they’re making little notes on that statement and they’re folding it up, putting it in an envelope, putting a postage stamp on it, and then they’re dropping those off at the mailbox to send off to all these patients. Then they wait a few weeks and some of them call back, right?

If we’re talking about effective conversion, not many people are going to open their mail. You know, maybe your more senior population is going to do it, but honestly, for me, I’m in my mid-thirties and I don’t open almost anything that gets sent to me anymore, right?

I’ll see text messages and emails, but it’s kind of getting to the point where I don’t even see a lot of my emails either. They just get filtered out into promotional tabs or whatever else in my Gmail, and I just don’t see them.

So, what we’ve done with DI payments, is we wanted to have a modern way for you to begin connecting with your patients on the payment side of things.

Here’s where you can manage all of your AR, so you can go request payments from anyone who has a balance. You’re in control of who these messages go to and how you structure your request, and the cool thing about it is that you get insight into the whole process.

When you send out a normal mailer, you have no idea if they opened it, you have no idea if they saw the invoice, and so you only know if it was effective if they call you.

On the other hand, here’s what’s cool with text messages. You can see if they opened up the text message, you can see if they opened up the invoice, and that can change the way you’re going to interact with someone moving forward. This is going to help you be far more effective and intelligent about the way that you engage with your clients and the balances that they owe.

The one other thing I’ll mention here as well is that you can customize the scripts in here, and you can even customize a series of messages that get sent out. So, instead of just sending one piece of mail, you can actually send out one text message and then say, hey, if they haven’t paid this in seven days, then automatically send another message to remind them, “Hey, you know, we noticed that you still haven’t been able to take care of this. If you have questions, please call us at this phone number or pay your balance here.”

From there, you can even go up to two or three of those messages, and then once you’ve hit a certain amount, you can say, hey, if they haven’t paid after two text messages, create a reminder for your front office team member, office manager, or someone else that’s doing collections for the practice. You can assign a follow-up to that person to follow up with the patient and make an actual phone call, because the text message clearly isn’t getting them to pay their balance.

The idea here is to make sure that those things don’t slip through the cracks, so we’re giving you solutions that are going to simplify your day, and like I said earlier, kind of co-manage what you’re doing in the business.

Jessica: Yeah, it’s really awesome to know that, you know, most of your patients aren’t getting to phone calls or emails in the middle of their workday.

I mean, they have jobs. They’re business owners, or they’re working for a business that’s eight-to-five, just like you guys are eight-to-five. This way, they’re allowed to take action on this after hours and you don’t have to pay a team member to stay late or make phone calls and blindly hope that that money comes in.

Just, for example, you may see that you collected $800 overnight just by sending out those messages. Again, you’re given actionable data on a daily basis, so as patients hit the parameters that you’ve set, you can split it into digestible sizes.

So, if you configure things to say, “If they’re over 30 days and they’re over a balance of $20, then after the 30-day mark, they’re going to show up on that list.” That way, this list isn’t going to be 500 patients even if 500 patients have outstanding balances right now. It’s going to be bite-sized based on the parameters that you’ve set for your office.

Another great thing that we offer is accessibility. We do offer a lot of these stats on top of the website page, and we know it was really great for our front desk team members, but, again, I’ve worked in dental ops for multiple years and I know it’s hard to get a hygienist and a doctor who are key providers in the practice to get on a computer to look at information.

We do have the option to view the info on their phone, and that way, when they log in with their personal login information, it’s automatically going to bring up their own stats.

Then they can even filter it out and say, “Hey I want to look at the whole office instead.”

Alternatively, I had a hygienist I worked with who has the app, and she’s very competitive. She was our top producing hygienist in the company and she liked to go and look at her stats, and then she’d look at her buddies and say, “Oh, okay she’s this far away from me, and I have to make sure I’m doing this much.”

Then she’d also use it as a tool to connect with other providers and say, “Hey, how are you getting this high acceptance rate? You know, what can I do differently that I may not be doing right now.” It’s really just a great comparison tool, not only for friendly competition within the practice, but also to say, “What are you doing differently? How are your conversations going? I see that you’re getting higher acceptance. It’s not that I’m avoiding conversation, but it’s just not going well for me, and I see you’re doing really well.”

Steve: Yeah. I’ll share one thing… oh, I need to shut my mouth more often, but one of the things I’ll share with the mobile app, and I’ll hum a few bars on it, is provider empowerment.

My wife’s a hygienist, and in any job –not just dentistry –but in any job, if you don’t know how to measure your performance and you don’t know what success looks like from a measurement standpoint, that can be a frustrating place to live as a team member. You never know exactly whether or not you’re doing great now. Obviously, in hygiene, we can say “produce this much,” but a lot of times people don’t know what leads to that number, right?

So how am I going to hit those, you know, several thousand-dollar days or whatever they’re trying to hit, as a team or as an individual?

The mobile app allows people to see the path they have to take to get to that bigger production number, based on what we call leading indicators.

So, for my wife, just like Jessica said, she loves being able to look at her schedule and see all the patients coming in. There’s that element, but then she also loves being able to see what she needs to do to really elevate herself as a hygienist. It really empowers her to be better in her job, and she doesn’t have to rely on the doctor to tell her how she’s doing, or the office manager to tell her what her performance is like. She can just know it all on her own and take action, so I’m a big fan of getting that information in front of team members.

Jessica: Yeah. It’s a total game-changer because most products don’t offer an app when it comes to stats. I did want to highlight a few things which other competitors may not allow, especially if you have multiple practices.

Even non-DSOs or groups may have one or two practices, and they maybe have one person managing and overseeing both of those. So, if you do have multiple practices, then you have remote access to multi-office level reporting that syncs daily. That means you log on to the website and you can do the app.

This is really a good key resource for people who are in the field and going from practice to practice, or for a doctor who may own two locations and has been for going from one to another. That way they can kind of keep up with whether their associate is doing really well or not, and they can coach them from afar to keep both practices profitable.

Overall, it’s especially great seeing performance stats for your annual performance reviews for your team members, because we do track the dollar value that they’re bringing based on their attempts that they’re logging from phone calls, their actionable follow-ups, and when they collect payments.

You can track those metrics and see, “Hey, who’s adding a lot of value to my team?” and you can use that in your annual performance reviews.

So, now that we’ve kind of highlighted a big portion of DI itself, because this is again one of our first products and we did invest a lot of time into it, I’m going to go in and show you just a brief view of what that product looks like outside of the PowerPoint here.

Let’s see. So here, I have the dashboard of an office that I used to work at. We have patient information in here, however, it is blurred out. When you are the customer, you will have that information. The blurring is just for HIPAA policies at this point.

So, this is a performance dashboard. Usually, this is what you’ll see, when you first log in. It’s going to give you all your performance indicators as far as what’s adding production to your schedule. For a quick, quick view, these little arrows that you see over each tile listed here is going to give you a 13-week trend, basically saying, are you trending up or are you trending down in each of these tiles?

There’s also going to be more data within that. So, right now, we’re looking at a week view, and again, the patient and provider information are blurred out, but you can see the stats of whether they were scheduled, when their visit is, what procedures they may have, and whether they’re new patients or not, just to break some things down to see what’s in that category.

We also have some little filters of, “Hey, I just want to look at my restorative. Is my doctor trending up or down, or is my hygiene trending up or down? These are unscheduled patients.”

Again, everything is clickable on the performance dashboard. So, I could click this pie graph and say, hey, I want to look at the zero-to-six-month range of overdue patients. It’s going to pull those patients up for me, but let’s say I want to sort it by the hygiene due date. You can filter it by that, and same thing with all of these other categories, where you can easily go into the 18-to-36-month range. From there… I guess I should have highlighted this just because you can’t see the patient’s name, but when you pull up the patient card, it’s going to have those ups that we were talking about.

So, when they call or when you go through a follow-up, which I’ll show you here in just a few minutes, this is where you’re logging that information. That’s going to track your overall performance for this patient. So, say I called and talked to them about unscheduled treatment… and it looks like they may have two family members that have unscheduled treatments too, because they have it on here twice. I just can’t see the names.

I could call that patient. I’m going to say I contacted or did not schedule, or that I did not reach a decision-maker, or I’ll say that I scheduled the patient. Then the product is going to track my ROI from that call. Then, I could talk to the patient and say, “Hey, you know Tom, your brother, looks like he needs to come too. Can we get him scheduled?”

If I get them scheduled on that same call, I’m easily able to go right here and log that, versus having to go into Tom’s patient binder just to log his information that I got on that same call. So, I’ll get double credit on the same call, which is awesome. Through things like how much money we’ve requested, how much money we’ve seen, and how many payments have been made in a certain timeframe.

So, you can adjust the timeframe that you’re trying to look at to see what your overall value is. There are a few different options as well, like requesting a payment manually: say the patient forgot their card while they’re in the office, and they say, “Oh, can I do it as soon as I get home?” You can choose to send the payment requests right then, versus having to wait the default 30 days that you have the parameter set to for payment requests.

I’m trying to think here… if you do have LocalMed, we were talking about how things like that integrate. We haven’t got into LocalMed in much detail, which I’ll get back to in just a minute.

What’s great about this is that all your LocalMed appointments that are made via online scheduling are also going to come through here on the DI growth platform to give you some information about the patient, who they scheduled with, whether or not they scheduled, and if it’s completed.

Then, if you’re adding procedures to appointments, it will track the value here, and that’s based on what you have in your practice management system. So, it’s nice to see that you can also send text messages to patients that are overdue for something, by using that scheduling system.

So, it looks like this office is taking advantage of that and sending those texts out to fill their schedule. That’s how these two platforms kind of integrate with one another and help each other out. All right. So, like I said… go ahead…

Whitney: If I can just jump in really quick and add, you know, that Angela and I have been so impressed by Dental Intelligence.

I think one of the things that we love the most is, related to what you brought out Steve, is that data’s great, but we need to be able to do something with it. I think I love how bite-sized and actionable Dental Intel really makes that for the office.

It’s not like they have to spend a ton of time trying to dig down and find the exact report with the exact information that they’re looking for; it just gives them that data right away and they can take action on it right away.

Jessica: Absolutely. I’m going to go into LocalMed now and just kind of go back to the PowerPoint here, just for a second, to give you some highlights before we get into LocalMed.

So LocalMed is going to work for your practice when you’re closed. Maybe you have a holiday. I think we recently were working with a partner of ours that had quite a few days closed during the holidays, and he booked nine appointments while his team was visiting their families. That’s always great to hear, because you’re basically paying this “person” potentially 35 cents an hour, for 24/7 scheduling with no hassle. They don’t complain about weekends, and they’ll work long hours on holidays.

So, you can put this on your website, your Google, your social media, and some insurance partners –at least the major insurance partners we have a partnership with.

They’ll put that schedule link on your directory for your patients to find you and book an appointment right there, versus forcing them to call your team and distract them from the patients that are within the practice at that time.

We know it’s a lot and we, again, try to take everything we can off of your team’s hands to make it more automated. That way, you can focus on what’s in front of you because we know that that’s what’s most important for your value.

So, I just wanted to go through and show you how you can book an appointment. So, say there’s a Book an Appointment button on your website, and you click the link to book an appointment.

It’s going to bring your patient to this option. “Are you a new patient? Are you returning?” Let’s just say I’m a new patient; in this case, it’s going to give me a dropdown option of everything that I can book. Note that these are customizable based on what you guys want to offer.

You know, a lot of practices will start by listings things like new patient cleanings, adult and child, and then an emergency appointment. And then they may expand from there once everything’s starting to go well – ortho consults are another good one to add.

So, let’s say I’m a new patient, and I select adult. What it’s going to do is say, hey, we have Dr. Andrew, we have Dr. Online Scheduling, and we have Dr. LocalMed Demo, and here’s who’s available. Here are the different days and times that they’re available, do one of these quickly work with your schedule? If not, then you can go and look at View All Openings, and then you can look by day, and then it will give you a breakdown of times.

So, everything that’s in blue here is available, of course, just for the demo. That’s probably not what it’ll look like for your office, and your scheduling may have one or two openings potentially, every other day, but this is what your patients are going to get. Once they click and say, hey, I want this time, this will ask, “How would like to pay?” They can put their insurance straight in there.

If I say I have Aetna, it’s going to give me a heads up, “Hey, great news, this doctor does take Aetna,” if they’ve indicated that on their platform. It’s going to ask me for my information too, so that way, we’re already gathering information for you prior to this new patient walking through your doors.

That way, you’re not having to call them and touch base with them and say, “Hey, I need to get this, this, and this.” We’re trying to take all of those pieces off of your plate, so that when they walk in the door, you already have everything that you need to see them that day.

Did I miss anything on here that you can think of, Steve, to highlight for LocalMed? It’s really a set it and forget it. Easy, easy, no-brainer.

Steve: Yeah, I think what I would add is just that, you know, it’s 2022. I can go spend thousands of dollars on an airplane flight, right? And I can book a seat there where, if I don’t go, they could lose the money. I can also go buy lots of things on Amazon with an easy click of a button.

Yet for some reason, dentistry has been really slow to get to the point where I can go and schedule an appointment online.

This is definitely where dentistry is going. You know, if you’re not ready to go there yet yourself, I would definitely suggest checking this out. You’re in full control with LocalMed.

You know, one of the things that I get asked all the time is, “Hey, you know, I don’t want patients to schedule in the wrong spot. Can I control where they go?” Even when Jessica was first showing us that, you saw there was a big list of appointment types, and you can even create a customized link where you just send out one appointment type.

So, let’s say you don’t want them to see the other stuff. You can make it so people don’t see other appointment types, so they don’t see your restorative chairs if you want to have some control there. You are in full control of what patients do and don’t see. It’s not like we sync with Eaglesoft, or Dentrix, or open dental, and then we just show them everything. I think that’s important for people to know; you are still in control with online scheduling.

I’ll just reiterate, 37% of the appointments scheduled on LocalMed last year were done after hours. So, after the practice was closed, when no one was there to answer the phone call, that was when someone wanted an appointment.

So, I think that’s important to realize that that’s a lot, that’s nearly 40% of patients who want to make an appointment when you’re closed.

So, we’re also missing out on a lot of opportunities, for our current patients as well as new ones, if we don’t open up options like that for them.

So, this is definitely something worth checking out, but then I’ll make one more comment. We were trying to figure out, once again how to take data and get it to action. One of our –maybe I shouldn’t admit this –but one of our frustrations was we would serve up all of these requests, like “you need to call these patients, call these patients to get them scheduled.” We realized, man, this could be so much easier than just simply calling the patients.

So, Jessica showed you that in Dental Intel, you can actually send a bulk message to patients with a scheduling link, so that they don’t even have to call you back if they want to get scheduled from there.

We see a lot of success with using that tool to supplement some of the team member efforts.

Younger generations, whether we like it or not, have a genuine fear of making phone calls, so, this is a great way to bridge that gap between the fears of our patients and their desire to get their oral health care in check.

So, I’m a big fan of LocalMed, and I think that’s it.

Whitney: I just wanted to add, I’m really glad that you touched on the fact that the practice can control all that, because that’s a question that we get asked all the time is, you know, “I don’t want patients to be able to just go in and book anything anytime,” there’s a real concern there.

I love that the practice can very easily be the one in control of that.

Jessica: Absolutely Whitney. I face that myself, you know. On my cell phone, we set 27 locations up, that was the biggest thing, was, “oh my gosh, people are just going to blow us up…” and we never had that issue with our locations, and it takes about 15 minutes to set up for each location.

So that’s great news again, it’s a set it and forget it unless you want to add more options later down the road, such as if you did a lot and now, you’re thinking, “Okay, this is working really well. Let’s add some more appointment types in there.”

But Whitney, I think what your team also is going to offer is campaigns that are going to help build their schedule, and we can provide those scheduling links for those campaigns that will help fill their schedule without any action on their end.

This isn’t one of those Booker requests where you have to find time to call them and read the email and then play phone tag. It’s all done in the patient’s hands.

Whitney: Yeah, our team loves that. We’re really excited about this.

Jessica: All right, so let’s get to Modento, which is our third product that we offer. Again, we’re just trying to become an all-in-one, and really, with the partnership that we have with Roadside, we already are an all-in-one. I mean, from what I’ve experienced at least, with my 10 years in dental ops, is that you know, you had a patient communication login, you had your schedule login, you had your data analytics login. So, you had five or six different logins that you basically have open at all times on different tabs. What we’re trying to do is kind of combine them all so that they’re all working together.

So, this is what’s going to kind of loop in that last piece with Roadside. Roadside’s going to be helping you with your website management, and that’s one thing that we just don’t do because we’re not experts at that. So, let’s leave it in the hands of the experts.

So, with Modento, we like to call it a feature of patient communication. It does have patient communication opportunities for two-way conversations, but also for reminders and those sorts of things where they don’t have to get back to us. It also helps with team communication, so you can have that one-on-one with a team member within the practice.

What’s awesome about that is that if you use Apple watches, it does communicate through a notification on Apple watches. Our clinical members aren’t often by their computers, and if they are, it’s hard for them to get away from their patients to go look at their screens and see what messages they may have.

Apple integration has been a game-changer there for team communication. There’s also instant sync timing on certain things.

We also offer digital forms, which, you know, with COVID, I think that was a really big thing for us. When we had patients worrying about their safety, they had to pick up a pen, they had to pick up a clipboard, and they had to come in and fill out paperwork for 15 minutes. You know, that was a time when they were going to be exposed to others.

We now offer digital forms through Modento, so this can be all sent to the patient prior to them coming to the practice. A lot of it can be integrated through their cell phone, which is going to be really helpful. They can pick up their cell phone, take a few pictures of their insurance card from the front and back, and get you all the information that you need for the front desk.

The best part about this is that they’re not coming back in with a piece of paper. You don’t have a printed email to scan into their smart docs. It integrates with your practice management system and automatically saves it into their patient documents center. If they indicated allergies or updated their phone number, that will all change in your practice management system without you having to move a finger.

So, that would all be doing it based on prompts that you customize with patients within your schedule. If you’re trying to send things outside of those customizations and those parameters, you can manually override that push to get that specific information from that patient, which obviously is really helpful.

So, let me get into the actual product itself…

Steve: As you’re getting there, I’ll say, this was the natural next step for us, right? I mentioned that we were finding all these opportunities in Dental Intel with the data and presenting, you know, follow-ups, and the morning huddle, and these cool reports that we have, and we started to do online scheduling.

So, we would send this one-way message for someone to click on a link and schedule an appointment, but then we realized, well, sometimes they might want to text back and be like, “Hey, I’ve got a question about something.” Or, you know, we might send a payment request where they might have questions about it. We wanted to add a solution that closes that loop, and we looked at options to build our own or to go buy a company.

The honest truth is that when we found Modento, it was a diamond in the rough. They have done some amazing things to really make improvements on the standard patient communication platforms to make it easier for you.

So, it’s been one of the best things that we’ve done. We acquired them this last year, and I’m excited for Jessica to show you what we’ve got here.

Whitney: Yeah. And like they were saying, you know, about the data and bringing things to the surface, we like to make it as easy as possible because you have so many things that you’re doing in your office.

You may even have paper charts, which you know is a headache. It’s hard to go through each of these patient charts and find them in the filing cabinet and pull it down to get their information. We’re just trying to put it right there for you. So, what this is going to do is this: when you first log into Modento, it’s going to bring you to your notifications board, which is basically telling you what actions have been completed, what messages may be there, and other things that you might want to just double-check.

You can obviously clear this out and say you don’t want to see this because you’ve already taken action on this one. Same with this one. That way, you can clear this out. This is our demo, so, we don’t often tend to clean it out, so it’s not as clean as you may want to have it to be manageable.

You can see that somebody submitted a form here. You can download it, and you can show the details. In this case, you may just want to preview it, just because it’s already going into the practice management system. You just want to double-check, was there anything that the patient missed? Then you can make a note on it.

Again, this is going to be where all of your notifications generally push to, so that way you can see things quick and easy. If we have this integrated into your practice management system like we normally would, we would have live ops, which basically just shows you your schedule, who’s expected, who’s arrived, who’s seated, and the checkout area. Since this is a demo, I don’t have patients actually in here to show you anything like that, but it’s nice to see where your patients are at within your practice. Also, everybody has access to this within your office to be able to see that.

As far as the patients, you can say, “I want to see who’s coming today.” So let me go through these filters. I can say I want to see who’s not confirmed today, or not confirmed tomorrow, or I want to look at today’s schedule. It looks like we’ll just look at today’s schedule to have some options for us here.

These are going to show you all the patients that are here and those who are on our schedule. Then you can see, are they an app user or are they not? So, some quick information, are they a digital person? Maybe they’re not an app user because we have the wrong number in the wrong spot in the practice management system. So, a great question to ask them can be, “Hey, do you like using the app? Do you not like using the app? Do you like to, you know, get your information just through texts?”

Say I want to send this specific patient a form. I can go through the three dots, which will be on every screen integrated here in Modento, and say I want to prepare a consent form, or maybe a treatment plan or, I want to send out patient forms.

So, say I want to send patient forms through from the kiosk because they’re already in-office. I want to send it to the patient through text or email, and then you can indicate which things you want to add to that text.

It does give you the option to choose English and Spanish on all of these forms, which is also very nice and convenient for most practices because we don’t have printable Spanish forms in our office.

So, as the patients add pictures to themselves, it will show up here. It’s nice that they get to add their own personal picture. Then, here’s going to be your texting screen. So, this is less so reminders, and more so for when somebody has had a two-way conversation with us.

So, we can see where that conversation is. It will indicate things with a one, like these two, if something hasn’t been opened up. So, these are new, nobody’s opened these up. Then we can see what action has been taken on what.

Of course, Swell, we do integrate with them. So, if you have them, then you can definitely, you know, use their login and have that here versus having to have two different websites up.

Campaigns –this is where, you know, Roadside’s going to really come and be helpful for you. It’s creating automated communication and campaigns. We can even push payment requests out to patients and manage your treatment plans from here.

Treatment plans are an option to do in the kiosk, in the office, and we’re not particular to one brand over another. We can do Apple, we can do Kindle fires, we can do Android tablets.

Whatever works for your practice, you can have that set up as your kiosk for your patients to utilize for treatment plans, any patient paperwork, and for updating that information.

Then we also offer rewards, which is nice. You can set up rewards within the practice so you can reward your patients for coming in, filling out forms, and using the app itself. That way, you know, you’re encouraging good behavior and getting them to do a piece of the pie versus it all being on your front desk team, and you can choose what those referrals or those rewards are.

Say you push Oral-B toothbrushes and you want to provide Oral-B heads, where it needs to be this many points. You can create the reward, choose how many points it takes to get there, and set what the overall point value needs to be to have that reward.

As the last thing I’m thinking I’m going to go over –and then I’ll see if Steve has anything that he wants to highlight that I didn’t get to – everything is customizable, so you can customize the prompts. You can customize forms. You can customize the verbiage and everything that’s going to be going out to your patient.

We have automated templates that we’ve already pre-created for you too. You can even go in there and customize it from there and say “Hey, I liked most of it, but let me just change a little thing here and there.” It’s nice to have those options that we’ve already put together for you based on other industry leaders and what they had set up, but we can always, put in what you may have already created within your practice.

Whitney: That’s something that we’re excited to help with too, for any of our practices that want the templates customized a little bit, our team can get in there and customize those as well, and include specific links to specific landing pages. We’re excited about that as well.

Jessica: Yeah. Steve, do you think I missed anything that you’d highlight on Modento?

Steve: Oh, that’s great. I think what I’ll highlight is, right now, if you haven’t caught on, we’ve got these three solutions: Dental Intelligence growth platform, LocalMed, and Modento. And there are some really cool ways that they’ve been integrated already. And, spoiler alert, there’s a really cool way that they’ll continue to be integrated here throughout the rest of this year, and ongoing from there as well.

So, as of today, I mentioned, and Jessica mentioned, that you can send a message out of Dental Intel, and it’ll have a scheduling link. You can also go, if you want, to send some bulk messages here in Modento, especially if you want to have a two-way conversation.

You can actually save a list here called Patient Finder. So, you can go find… let’s say you want to find anyone who you’ve diagnosed a crown on, but who hasn’t completed their treatment, and you want to start communicating with them and shoot them a text message. If you save that list in your patient finder, it will actually show up, inside of Modento, as Jessica is navigating.

So, this is what it looks like here in Dental Intel. Any list that you create and save here will show up in that bulk message area in Modento, so, you can start communicating with them, right there in this little filter library.

Those work back and forth, and you’ll see even more to come. So, right now, you know, you can’t yet see the two-way text messages inside of DI. You’ll start to see some of those things start to show up, so you don’t have to navigate back and forth as much. There’s more to come, but right now they’re functionally working very well. You’re able to do very cool things with them. I would just share that the future is bright. Like I said earlier, we live in a cool industry, and we’re headed in cool directions.

I promise, if you jump on board with us over here at Dental Intelligence, you’re going to be at the front of those exciting things that are coming into this space. We’re always innovating. We’re always trying to make this thing better.

Jessica: Yeah, a hundred percent. One thing I forgot to highlight, is everything, as far as the admin page going on LocalMed, everything we just showed you was the patient-facing side, but we have this little chat bubble on every screen.

This is nice, and it’s included within your services. This is where we want you to go if you have questions about, “What does that mean? How does this work? How do I get that updated?” That way, we have a support team which is designed to help with this specific product and help you get that action taken care of in a timely manner.

Most of our chat members are going to be available within five minutes, and it will give you a notification once we have an estimate for your wait, but it’s pretty quick and fast. I’ve always had friendly services when I was a customer myself using the live chat.

Whitney: I just love everything that you guys have shared with us today. I think one of the reasons that we’re so excited to partner with Dental Intel is that there’s a tremendous opportunity for us to find data that we can use.

You know, the office is using the data and taking action on it, and we simultaneously can find really great information that can help support the practice’s marketing. We can help find the groups of patients that might need reactivation. We can be looking for unscheduled treatment, finding the low-hanging fruit within the practice, and then making recommendations for campaigns, specifically targeting those patients.

And so, we, as a marketing agency, we’re just thrilled to be partnering with Dental Intel, LocalMed, and Modento.

We’re really, really excited. And, for any practices that haven’t actually gotten to see a snapshot yet, talk to Angela, because we can actually put you into Dental Intel, run a snapshot of your actual practice numbers, and then walk through that with you so that you can see, you know, what is the data here that your team can take action on, and how can you all benefit from it.

We love doing snapshots, so if you haven’t done that with us yet, I would invite any of you watching to do that with us.

Jessica, Steve, this has just been such a pleasure. I don’t know if there’s anything else that you want to share before we stop recording?

Jessica: I would just say that, you know, if you’re interested after the snapshot and want to get started with just one of the products (though we do encourage using all three), we understand that some people like to just dip their toes into some things.

If you’re interested in one of those products, feel free to reach out to Angela or your account manager, and we’ll make sure that they have the proper links to get you set up with the right people for demos on those products to go a little bit further than we did today, and then we’ll see what they can do for you as far as pricing and what your specific needs are.

Whitney: Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, Jessica and Steve, this was great, and we really appreciate you coming on to help our clients learn more.

Jessica: You’re welcome. Have a great day. Thanks.

Well, that certainly was a productive talk.

So, do you feel like Dental Intelligence software might just be what your practice desperately needs?

Don’t hesitate to learn more (or request a demo right away) about any or all Dental Intel products:

Dental Intel: https://www.roadsidedentalmarketing.com/resources/snapshot/
LocalMed: https://getlocalmed.com/roadside-dental-os
Modento: https://get.dentalintel.net/roadside-dental-modento

 

About our guests:

Jessica Lamers

Director, Enterprise Business Development
Dental Intelligence Inc.

Jessica is the Dire has been in the dental industry for over 10 years serving in various roles within the industry, ranging from being that right-hand man to the dentist to helping lead regions and companies to a successful business model.

Her passion is helping others succeed by way of education, training, and team/personal development. Although current dental operations continue to lay the foundation for success in the dental enterprise, Jessica recognizes the necessity to pioneer innovation in our practices.

This drive to engineer innovation has culminated in her accepting a role as the Director of Enterprise Business Development for the world’s #1 software for managing and growing dental practices, Dental Intelligence.

 

Steve Jensen

Steve Jensen confidently helps people and teams to achieve their potential. He has a love and passion for the dental industry, 9 years of experience as an educator, and is well versed in sound principles of business growth.

He has presented to audiences large and small and brings high energy and actionable insights into his workshops.

As Vice President of Business Development at Dental Intelligence (recently ranked #189 in Deloitte’s Fast 500), Steve brings data-backed solutions to the table that are employed by over 8,500 practices nationwide.

Steve is married to Abby, the world’s BEST hygienist. Together they have 2 boys and currently live in Utah.