The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

Josh Muir appears on the GDN Show podcast for the third time. This time Josh discusses leveraging RecallMax in a call center capacity. Minimizing burden on practices and maximizing patient contacts.

Josh discusses:

How patient outreach has changed in the past two years.
How groups are managing workload between call centers & practice admin teams.
How RecallMax is meeting the demands of patient engagement tactics.
Challenges of incorporating a call center.
Much more

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. And the team here at Group Dentistry Now, Kim Larson and myself, appreciate everybody for supporting us. RecallMax has been an incredible sponsor of ours throughout the years. They’re sponsoring this podcast. So not only do we want to thank Josh and the team at RecallMax, but also all you listeners out there and people watching us on YouTube. Without a great audience, we wouldn’t have the support from people like RecallMax and Josh. So Josh Muir, this is his third time on the podcast. He is the director of strategic partnership. So first off, welcome Josh. Glad to have you back.

Josh Muir:

Thanks, man. I’m glad to be back. It’s been a while.

Bill Neumann:

Well, it has… I was kind of going back through some of the previous podcasts that we had done together, and unfortunately they started in May of 2020, so we can all pretty much gather what the conversation was about then. And Josh being located and RecallMax being located in Canada, there was quite a long time before Josh was able to travel to the US, so it was great to see him in person this year.

But yeah, just going back through the conversations that we had these last two podcasts, the first one in May of 2020, we had you and Ron on. And so we were talking about just either coming out of the shutdown or a lot of states and provinces probably still having practices shut down and kind of how to handle that patient recall. And then of course 2021, I was looking at the show notes there. So we did one in almost a year, maybe a little longer than a year after. And then it was the new normal, so it was pandemic. We were in the new normal coming out of the pandemic. And now we’re going to talk about, I guess another new normal, which is some of the shifts in what’s happened post pandemic and what you’re seeing at RecallMax with your clients. But anyway, I thought it was just kind of good to recap the last two episodes that we had you on. I’m sure you recall them fondly.

Josh Muir:

I do, absolutely.

Bill Neumann:

So Josh, for the people that did not hear those two podcasts, can you give everybody a little bit about your background, what you were doing? You have a healthcare background, you have a long dental career. And then talk a little bit about RecallMax and what you and your team do there.

Josh Muir:

Yeah, for sure. So I’ve got about a decade in dental. Aside from the dental space, I’ve been in audiology and vision for about another decade. So I’ve been through pretty much every medical focus from the neck above. And when I came to RecallMax, really what I saw was a platform that empowers the dental space to really engage what is, from my perspective, a phenomenal opportunity. We’re all about tapping into the existing opportunities that a dental practice has or dental group has. I think we, from the competitive landscape, have a very unique product in that we’re not all about automation. We’re not just a software company. We’re about helping practices in groups establish processes that really help engage the investment that those practices have already made in their patient base. Protect it, lower attrition, really focus on personal engagement of their patient base.

When I brought that RecallMax into my previous group, I saw immediate gains. And when I left my previous role, I couldn’t help but come to RecallMax. It’s been seven years now. And man, the things that we’re doing, how we’re influencing the industry and helping practices understand what they need to do in terms of engaging their patient base is just phenomenal.

Bill Neumann:

Well, we’re not going to talk about the pandemic, so let’s focus on something that I think you’re seeing… Thank goodness, right? That you’re seeing at RecallMax now. And really what we’re going to focus on is how groups that you’re working with are leveraging RecallMax in a call center capacity. So we’re minimizing the burden on the practices that they operate and then also maximizing patient contacts. So let’s get into the call center phenomenon. Maybe broad view, how has that patient outreach changed in the past couple of years?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, loaded question. So we’re not going to talk about the pandemic, but we’re going to talk about it from one perspective. I think the pandemic shifted how practices and groups are engaging their patients. There’s been a workforce, a labor force issue since the pandemic. And I think moving to a call center format in terms of patient outreach has been probably the best strategy that a lot of groups have taken. Pre-pandemic, I didn’t hear of it all that often. It was more implementing patient outreach strategies at the practice level using the administrative teams of the practices to engage patients. And that was enough. But since that year that shall not be named, we’ve seen a very big shift in outsourcing that engagement.

Bill Neumann:

Okay, so outsourcing. So you’re saying in a lot of cases these call centers are being operated by somebody else or the people at the call centers aren’t employees of the DSL?

Josh Muir:

Correct. Well, I see two veins. One vein is that a true outsourced call center environment where they’re outsourcing to either an organization that runs a call center overseas or within the US and Canada, we see both formats. And I can’t tell you which one is more successful because we hear success stories on both strategies, whether it be out of country or in country.

But then the other vein is developing a call center within the organization, whether it be in-house in the corporate office or one of my favorites is a group based out of Texas. And I say it’s my favorite because I love this idea of setting up a call center environment, is they employ people from home to lever our platform and engage patients from their own home, which is a pretty impressive way of doing things because you don’t have the cost of a building of the managerial staff that it takes and you can literally put out an ad, hire folks to work from home five hours a day just engaging patients, give them the right scripts, give them the right training. Overnight you’re able to really set up a structure that allows you to engage patients far more effectively than you are if you depend solely on the staff that’s within your practice.

Bill Neumann:

You’re saying that with this Texas group that the actual… So these are employees and they’re taking calls and they’re working, and I’m going to ask you this question. Tell me how RecallMax kind of fits into this scenario because some people think of call centers as the headset going on. But then they’re also working with RecallMax in this case at home as employees of the dental group in order to communicate and touch those patients. So tell us a little bit about how that works.

Josh Muir:

Yeah. So because our platform is somewhat of a CRM and it’s able to be installed on any computer, they can work remotely from anywhere. So we’re pulling information from the server of that practice and we’re constantly updating who they need to engage, how overdue and late these patients are. Maybe they’ve got upcoming appointments that need to be confirmed, perhaps they’re from zero months to 24 months overdue for their hygiene appointment. All of that information we’re able to deliver directly to those people that are working from home because our application can be installed on their workstation. They have instant access to every patient that is available in that practice.

Bill Neumann:

And that seems to be you like that format. The different formats out there, that seems to be the one that’s… And is that pretty unique? I mean, have you seen that used elsewhere?

Josh Muir:

I have not seen that used often. I know that several groups do use us in that format. However, they employ people and have them in their corporate office. They’ve got a little call center, be it five or 10 individuals that work multiple practices at the same time. I just think for me, if I was running my own DSO, my own group and I’m thinking about how to reduce costs, how to increase my labor force, what an incentive that I can go and hire people to work from the comfort of their own home, we’ve got a cloud-based application that taps into their PMS. And really that’s all that it takes to engage with patients. We just need to provide them the information, the scripting when they call, everything is baked into our platform. So it’s been, from my perspective, a very successful format.

That group within the first four months, and they launched during the pandemic, within the first four months, added approximately 9,000 additional hygiene appointments to their books. So it’s worked well for them. They went from five remote employees. I think they’re up to about 10 or 15 remote employees, but it’s worked so well. So I’m trying to encourage groups as we come across these circumstances where folks are asking us how do we level the platform better, my first go-to is, “Listen, hire folks to work remotely and their sole task is to engage patients.”

Bill Neumann:

That’s a great tip. If you don’t take anything else away from this podcast, I think that is probably, when you think about it from the perspective of the potential employee, somebody that’s looking for an opportunity and they see one where it’s in a call center at the corporate office versus doing pretty much the same thing remotely at home, which are they going to choose? So it seems logical, it seems to be a trend the way people like to work. And again, the thing that happened three years ago really accelerated a lot of this work from home remote type, not need, but I guess the comfort of being able to do that, and in a lot of cases, expectations, that that would be the way that people would continue to work.

Josh Muir:

Absolutely. And if you think about the expediency in which you can launch a program like that without having to engage a company that has a call center company, if you will, without having to engage them or build one on your own, the cost reduction alone is enough to warrant going down that path. I mean, it’s just such a simple approach to increasing patient engagement by finding folks that are willing to work from home for five hours, seven hours a day, and that’s their own only task is to engage patients.

Bill Neumann:

So how are these groups managing the workload between the call center people and then the people at the practice, the practice administration team?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, great. You really have to have a defined playbook. Because our application can be used remotely or at the practice level, what we work through with our client success department is how to divide the workload and understand whose role is what. So typically when we see this happen in groups, what we say is the outreach on, let’s say overdue and late patients, that rests on the call center side. And when it comes to patient confirmations, missed and canceled appointments, any inbound communication that’s coming in through our application, that rests on the administrative side. But that being said, it’s not a one size fits all. Every situation is unique based on how that group operates. So we really do go to the nth degree to help customize and tailor a workflow and an SOP that playbook for that group that works the best for them.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, I think that’s important to understand that RecallMax isn’t just a cloud-based platform. You’re really providing assistance, strategy, customizing solutions based on the size of the group, the culture, the way things operate, the patient base. I mean, again, one of those, sometimes I think we kind of all get, “Okay, what does the cloud-based solution do?” And you don’t think about everything else that’s needed to make yourself and your team successful.

So let’s talk a little bit about RecallMax and patient engagement tactics. Give us some idea of what some of the current patient engagement tactics are today, and then how RecallMax assists these groups in that challenge.

Josh Muir:

So what I’m saying may be is somewhat controversial. And reason being, a lot of technology, a lot of software today in the patient engagement sphere is pointed towards automating everything, automate confirmations, automate due and late messaging. Automate, automate, automate, which is great. However, we monitor the success rate of that automation. And on the confirmation side, it’s great. We see 80 to 90% confirmation.

On the patient opportunity side, so re-engaging patients that have missed appointments, engaging patients that are overdue for hygiene recall or treatment, automation has a very low success rate, 7 to 10%. 10 at the very highest is what we see. So our tactic is provide the right toolbox for practices for call centers to be able to personally engage patients more effectively. We take all the heavy lifting out, we provide them automated lists that show them exactly who to call, when to call, and how often they need to call them and scripting to back that up. But really when you engage a patient, pick up the phone, call them, send a personal text message short and sweet, the success rate goes up to about 37 to 45% success rate on book backs, and that’s massive. So if I can take a practice that’s only getting 7% response on automated messaging, the 45% response when they’re being personally engaged, it’s a huge win.

Bill Neumann:

Let’s talk a little bit about some of the challenges, if somebody, a DSO, a small group is looking to incorporate a call center, they haven’t done it before, they’re going from handling the calls at the practice level to taking on a call center, whether it’s in the office or whether it’s remote.

Josh Muir:

Again, my preference is start slow, hire a few individuals, train them in engagement tactics that obviously we can provide that insight for practices and groups. But you start small. Even if it is a call center, you still start small. You maybe engage an outbound call team, hire a couple of people, give them the right contact strategies and see how it works. Whatever you do, you have to search somewhere. So I would say that if you’re struggling on the staffing side of the practice level, if the staff at your practice are overburdened with the work that they have in front of them, then you need to somehow engage either an outbound call company or hire a few folks to work from home. With RecallMax, I mean, we would train them. We would give them the right talk strategies. We would of course through our application, they would know who to call, when to call. But you have to, at some point, if you’re not able to engage patients within your current administrative team, you have to branch out and create some format of outbound call strategy.

Bill Neumann:

Do you have an idea for when a group as they’re scaling up should look to create a call center? I mean, is it a practice count that people have in mind? Or do they just kind of… You know working with them that, “Hey, you’re at a point where you should probably try and centralize this and either do it remotely or create a call center”?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, I think once you hit that mid-market mark, if you’re cresting 10 plus practices, it’s time to start looking at it. If you’re a mid-market, 30 to 75 practices and you don’t already have an outbound call team, you’re kind of late to the game. So I would start now. It really is one of the most powerful tools that you can use to increase your appointment rate.

Bill Neumann:

Do you have any sense of those mid-markets percentage if you had to estimate how many are doing that versus how many aren’t?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, based on my engagement now, I would say that over 50% of mid-markets are engaged in some type of outbound scenario. Whether it be an outbound team in-house or they’re outsourcing to a call center, I would think that more and more are adopting this philosophy of outreach because it is highly effective.

Bill Neumann:

So there’s still another 50% that need to make the shift, and you can certainly help them with the strategy behind that and provide the RecallMax tool to help make it easy.

Josh Muir:

Oh, for sure. And I think-

Bill Neumann:

So-

Josh Muir:

Let me add this, Bill. I think there’s a reluctancy at times because… I’ll use an illustration of a recent group that I shall not name, but they like to keep everything in-house. And to the extent that there are no regional managers, their expectation on the management team of every practice is that they manage that practice. When I shared a story with the owner, the CEO of the success of one of our other mid-market groups that employed this outbound philosophy, she really was kind of taken aback. My assumption is that she thought that the patient experience would deteriorate if you outsource that lead generation or that outreach program. When in reality, if you train them effectively, especially if it’s an in-house outbound team, if you train them effectively, the experience is no different than if someone from the practice was calling them directly.

So as long as the trainings behind it and the people that you have calling out to your patients understand your group, how you treat your patients, your philosophy of dentistry, it’s no different than if you had someone from the practice calling. So thankfully, she’ll be implementing a call center shortly, call center… Probably not a call center, but implementing that strategy of outbound, whether it be a team from home or in-house.

I think if you can get to that place where you’re not so concerned about the experience because you’re going to train them, you’re going to educate them on what your group is about and your philosophy of dentistry, as long as that training piece is in place and you set them up properly for success, the results are going to come.

Bill Neumann:

So how quickly can a group set up that infrastructure for a call center?

Josh Muir:

As fast as you can find people, right? And you said it. I think a lot of people got into this habit of working from home, so there are a ton of folks out there. There are a ton of people that even from the dental industry that maybe they’re no longer working in practice that wouldn’t mind picking up five hours a day or 20 hours a week. As fast as you can hire them, you can have it set up. I would say that it’s feasible to have up to five reps up and running within a month.

Bill Neumann:

Provided you can find them. And one of the easy ways to find them is let them work from home.

Josh Muir:

That’s right. It’s a great incentive.

Bill Neumann:

So we can get it set up pretty quickly once we find the people. And then let’s talk about expectations. So when would a DSO expect to start to see results from an appointment growth perspective after they get this call center in place?

Josh Muir:

I mean, a lot of skeptics would say I’m crazy, but immediately. If we look at the statistics of the number of due and late patients, it’s up to 50% of your entire patient database that can come back today for a hygiene appointment. So as soon as you have them on the phone, you’re going to start to see results. Our average group, when employing a strategy of outreach, typically sees 10 to 15% appointment growth within the first month.

Bill Neumann:

I’m going to get away from the call center a little bit here and we’ll come back to it, but I’m curious about from a perspective of what you see going on with patient recall, patient engagement. A lot of people out there are going, “Okay. Whether it’s appointments are down, we’re having more cancellations,” there’s maybe some trends out there, what do you see with your customers? What does the climate look like?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, great question. And again, we will go back to that famous year. Prior to 2020, let’s use missed and canceled as a good illustration of how it shifted. We saw missed and canceled appointments anywhere from 6 to 9% pre-pandemic. Post pandemic and it’s held, we see cancellation and missed appointment percentages of about 15%, and that’s probably a generous number. I was speaking with a group yesterday, and regionally they’re seeing cancellations of up to 40%. And that’s a huge shift.

So if you don’t have a team that’s engaging your patients to fill those gaps as they occur, you’re struggling. You’re going to have a lot of open appointment time on your books. That due and late percentage that I referred to that up to 50% due and late patients, that’s remained constant. That hasn’t changed. So there’s still a ton of opportunity across the board.

And if you think about it, I’m a solo practitioner. If I’ve got 2,000 patients in my database and I’ve got 50% of those patients that can come back today, that’s another thousand patients that I have access to. So if my schedule’s thin, I need to be tapping into that opportunity, especially if my missed and canceled percentage is up to 15%, or in one case I heard up to 40%. If I don’t have someone working my list, engage in those patients, that’s a very bare book.

Bill Neumann:

So that leads kind of full circle here. We started off talking about the pandemic and how things changed not just from the patient perspective but from also the employee perspective. And now we’re seeing economic pressures in a lot of cases I think are what’s causing some of these, some the issues you just talked about.

So sounds like if you’re 10 plus locations and you haven’t come up with some type of call center strategy, and if you haven’t, probably remote is the way to go because it’ll be easier to get employees to come in, you’re really missing out on a lot of opportunity and I would think that your appointments are down if you’re not, I kind of look at it as firing on all cylinders, taking advantage of who you have, running it more like a business instead of pre-pandemic when maybe it was a lot easier to get patients and maybe they weren’t canceling as much as they are now.

So again, takeaways here, 10 plus locations, look to a call center. Remote is the way to go right now. And then you’ll quickly see appointment growth once you start that call center process. RecallMax is offering not only the cloud solution, but also help you as a group with that strategy as you move from calls being taken at that practice level to a remote situation in a lot of cases.

So can you explain to the audience as we kind trying to button things up here, what does it look like? So I like what you’re saying. I am a group. I have over 10 locations. I’m at 20, 30, 50. When I reach out to you, what’s the process look like? How do you help me with my strategy?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, great. So we’re very agile with how we launch groups. Say you come to me with a group of 50, we would walk through the application that would show you exactly how we operate and we would have you up and running within a month. And that’s a group of 50. So that’s a pretty quick turnaround time. Implementation is simple. We do an installation on your server workstations. We do a training on our toolbar at the practice level. So the practice admin staff know how to lever us. Then we involve our client success department.

And by the way, I would estimate we’ve got over about a hundred years of dental experience within our organization. We’re not software people. We’re people that love software but come from the dental space or other medical fields. So it’s not foreign to us on how to train and educate practices and groups on how to engage patients. So our client success department takes that very seriously in that initial implementation process. We meet with the groups, with the regionals, with the managers, with the executives, and we walk them through what the process is going to look like from a patient engagement perspective. And then we hold them accountable to the results.

So we’ve got a dashboard of analytics that fuels that growth. We show you, “Okay, based on your current engagements, this is your success rate. If we’re not seeing the success rate that we know you can get, maybe it’s we’re not engaging enough or we’re not talking the right talk or we’re not focusing on the right lists.” So we really hold the hands of the leadership team and the folks that are responsible for overseeing the launch of our program. And that’s how we differentiate from everyone else. It’s not give you a software platform and let you run with it. We hold your hand the entire time to make sure that you’re getting everything you can get out of the platform.

Bill Neumann:

So that’s great information, Josh. Great conversation today. This really I think will be helpful for a lot of those, that 50% of those mid-markets that haven’t adopted a call center philosophy strategy, they don’t need to create the strategy. They can reach out to you and leverage all your knowledge and your team’s knowledge and find something that works with their specific group. Josh, if people want to find out more about RecallMax or they want to contact you or someone on your team directly, how do they do so?

Josh Muir:

Yeah, I think the best thing is just go to our website and fill out a submission form for someone to reach out to you. I mean, it’ll come to me. If you’re a group, I’ll reach out directly. If it’s solo practice, it’ll go to our SMB team and they’ll reach out. But there’s a lot of ways. I mean, I’ll give you my cell phone, but I don’t want everyone in the world sending me a text or calling me overnight. But you can reach out via email or websites. I’m sure you’re going to give my contact details on this podcast. So please reach out. That’s the first step, right? Just engage us. I mean, if anything, it’s going to be a great conversation. And if you don’t adopt us, at least you and I or whatever group reaches out and I can have a conversation about how they’re doing, what their pain points are, maybe I can provide some advice as to what direction they need to go, but the first step is just reaching out.

Bill Neumann:

Well, that sounds good. And Josh, we will make sure that we put your email address and the RecallMax URL in the show notes. And third time’s the charm. This was a great conversation. Hopefully we’ll have you back for a fourth. But this is great insight and I think a lot of the groups out there are going to be able to take advantage of RecallMax’s expertise when it comes to moving from having people handling patient recall in office to either having it remote or some type of call center situation.

So thanks everybody for listening in today or watching us on YouTube. The team here at Group Dentistry Now, Kim Larson and myself, thank you so much for being a part of this community. Until next time, I’m Bill Neumann.