The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry

DSO Podcast

Eric Gallegos, Vice President of Revenue at InsideDesk and Jackie Holloway, Director of RCM at Gen4 Dental Partners discuss RCM technology and automation in the dental industry. The duo shares their RCM thoughts on:

Manual payer call challenges
Strategies to handling RCM
Incorporating AI solutions like InsideDial
Much More

To learn more about InsideDesk and InsideDial visit www.InsideDesk.com

You can also schedule a demo at https://www.insidedesk.com/request-a-demo/

Listen to a sample InsideDial payer call – https://dso.pub/AIPayerCall

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DSO Podcast transcript – Eric Gallegos, VP of Revenue of InsideDesk and Jackie Holloway, Director of RCM at Gen4 Dental Partners discuss RCM: The Benefits of Technology & Automation for Dental Groups & DSOs

Bill Neumann: Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate you watching us or listening in, whether you’re watching us on YouTube or on groupdentistrynow.com or listening to us on Apple, Spotify, Google. Without a great audience like you, we wouldn’t have the guests we have on today. One is a returning guest. You’re pretty familiar with him, I would think. We have Eric Gallegos. He is the Vice President of Revenue with InsideDesk. And we’re going to talk about RCM today. It’s Really huge, seems like it’s been like this giant topic for the past year and a half. It’s not like we didn’t have revenue cycle management, you know, pre-2023, but it’s become a real focus for the industry as you try and look at ways to become more efficient. We deal with issues with staffing. So, Eric, first off, thanks for being back on the show. Appreciate it.

Eric Gallegos: Thanks for having us, Bill. Appreciate you.

Bill Neumann: It’s good to see you. And for the first time on the show, we have Jackie Holloway. She is the Director of Revenue Cycle Management for Gen4 Dental Partners. So, Jackie, thanks for being here.

Jackie Holloway: Thank you for having me.

Bill Neumann: So why don’t we start with you, Jackie? You’re new to our audience, and maybe a little bit about your background, your role at Gen4, and then tell us, we’ve done a bunch of articles on Gen4 on Group Dentistry now, but maybe for the folks that don’t know much about the organization, just give us a little bit of an idea of what the model’s like and number of locations, things like that.

Jackie Holloway: Sure. So I’ll start with myself. I’ve been in dental for over 20 years now. Done clinical, office management, operations, everything pretty much. For the past 11 years now has been my focus on operations and revenue cycle management. With Gen4, I came on board about a year ago. We have over 100 locations and just constantly growing. We have the doctor partner model. So, our doctors do have buy-in with the organization and they do have a say. So, they are not forced to come to a centralized team. Obviously, I would prefer it because it means my team is growing, you know, but we do still partner and support them.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Jackie. Eric, for the two people in the audience that maybe don’t know who you are, a little bit about your background and also a little bit of background on InsideDesk.

Eric Gallegos: Yeah, I’m the VP of Revenue for InsideDesk. We’re a revenue cycle platform. We really focus on post submission, right? So really claims management, denial management, follow up, and analytics. And, you know, the big focus that we’re really trying to achieve is are trying to reduce the cost, right, collect dollars faster, and really reduce the problem with aged AR, specifically 90 day claim. It’s a big issue with ESOs. And by using automation, AI, and a bunch of different tools, we’re really able to help groups like Gen 4 collect dollars a lot faster.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Eric. So as we kind of get into things here, I’ll let Jackie kind of kick things off. Discuss some of the challenges you’re having, especially when it comes to manual payer calls. Maybe we’ll focus on that at the beginning.

Jackie Holloway: Yeah, you know, as I would say probably since 2020 with the pandemic and everyone kind of going remote, you know, the hold times for insurances has just considerably grown. You know, I myself, I’ve, you know, stepped in and helped out. I’ve sat on hold for two hours, you know, just trying to get a representative on the phone. And, you know, trying to make sure that you’re touching all of your claims, touching them timely. And, you know, the whole times alone is killing our teams, you know. So you have to find ways around it. And what we’ve done is back in, I think it was September, you know, we partnered with, with Eric, uh, and we’ve been partners prior. Uh, we’ve, we’ve all, we’ve used their services, but they released an AI tool to help us alleviate some of those hold times. So that way we could get our claims work faster. and not have our team tied up on the phone, being on hold, you know, and multitasking, right? That’s what we all do is what we, you know, as revenue cycle managers, we figure out ways around it. So you’re sitting on hold, you start working on something else. And by the time the person answers, you forget who you were calling on, you know, or as soon as they answer, the call gets disconnected and then you start a cycle all over again. You know, it can be frustrating and very time consuming for sure.

Bill Neumann: Would you mind maybe painting the picture a little bit about just how you were handling things? You talked about being on hold for, you know, hours potentially. So what, what did that all look like? Like what, what did a day look like for, for you and your team if you were, um, long, long holds? I mean, were you able to multitask? Like what, what were you doing?

Jackie Holloway: Yeah, absolutely. You know, the team, they would sit on hold waiting to talk to a peer or get a representative if it was something that they could not gather from either a fax back, something on the portal. So while they were doing that, you know, our team also, you know, gets the payments in the system. They also submit claims. So while they’re sitting on hold, they’re utilizing that time to either check other portals on different claims, you know, or they’re posting payments, they’re getting their claims submitted. So that way, We’re still being active in what we need to get done. But being able to work the claims effectively and efficiently, it just wasn’t there due to the hold times. You know, if you had a way to magically get that to go away, you know, you could go from working 10 claims a day to potentially, you know, 100 plus claims a day on one account. So, our team did the best they could, you know, obviously managing their time, but there wasn’t enough hours in the day to get through, you know, more than 10 phone calls a day due to the hold times.

Bill Neumann: Wow. Okay. Yeah. So I’m super inefficient. So Eric, I mean, does this scenario, I mean, is this relatively common? You work with a lot of group practices, merging groups. You work with some more established DSOs like Gen 4. I mean, what are you seeing with some of the customers that you talk to?

Eric Gallegos: Yeah. I mean, it’s, Unfortunately, it’s up until recently, right, it’s the way business was done, right? When you’re at scale, especially with a group like Gen 4, right, Peak, MB2, all of a sudden, you’re not talking about hundreds of claims, you’re talking about thousands of claims, and in some instances, tens of thousands of claims, right? And as I mentioned earlier, one of the things that we’re finding is DSOs on board with us is that their 90 day claims, about 30% of their claims live in that bucket. That’s a ton of dollars. Right. And so what ends up happening is as they’re scaling, the only way to get ahead of that is to hire more people. They’re not typically trained very well. Right. And what I mean by that is they’re coming from a different, um, area or function and they’re having to learn, right. Who to call, what questions to ask. And that’s a high administrative costs for people because as Jackie kind of spoke to it. They’re sitting on hold, right? They’re going to try to multitask. They’re going to try to do stuff. But you made some good points, right? Calls get disconnected. The person on the other end might be new. That information might not be great. And so all of a sudden, if you have a bucket of these claims that you have to call, you’re actually increasing the risk of human error on both sides. But how can we help minimize, right, our DSOs? How can we help reduce their administrative costs? Because their employees, right? That’s burnout, right? They’re they’re sitting on hold. They’re having the same conversation over and over and over again. And now you’re depending on them to write everything down correctly, to ask the right questions, to stay on script. And that can be difficult to do. And so you see that everywhere. I don’t think there is a DSO out there that isn’t dealing with payer and lack of payer tech stack in some instances where you have to make phone calls.

Bill Neumann: So as we jump from the challenge to the solution, there is a product that you recently launched called InsideDial. And this is really addressing this issue that Jackie and sounds like just about every DSO were having. So he had discussed how InsideDial really addresses these issues.

Eric Gallegos: Yeah, I mean, look, InsideDial has been really effective for our groups, specifically, you know, Jackie and Gen 4. There’s a couple of ways that we help out quickly. The first one is the easiest one. It’s just increased capacity, right? All of a sudden, our AI, the bots, right? We’ve partnered with a great group at SuperDial to be able to create this technology. And we’ve worked with our partners like Jackie to help make sure the scripts are great, that we’re asking the right questions, we’re getting the right information. So all of a sudden you have increased capacity, right? You have, the AI doesn’t care to wait on hold. It doesn’t have a problem hitting there. And so all of a sudden we can make hundreds, if not thousands of calls at the same time, right? There’s hundreds of payers across the country and all of them, not all of them, but a lot of them you have to make phone calls into. And so all of a sudden, we’re helping groups like Jack in Gen 4 in really some specific ways. One, the efficiency of the resource, right? You’re not hiring a ton of people to make these phone calls. Her team, which is an excellent team, isn’t doing, in some instances, kind of some mind-numbing work, menial work. They can get that information very quickly and all of a sudden they’re doing the work that challenges them in the right way, which is they’re trying to figure out why it didn’t get paid, how it can get paid faster. But probably one of the most important things that we do is we’re minimizing the rework. Right. If you have a new person that’s making these calls for the first time, they could do it wrong. They can do it incorrectly. They don’t follow the right script. They don’t ask the right questions. The A.I. will never make that mistake. It knows what to ask. It asks it every time it generates and gathers all that information. And we give that right back to groups like Gen 4 and Jackie’s team who can take that information and use it effectively and quickly.

Bill Neumann: Eric, with InsideDial, I mean, are there some features that it has? I mean, I know there’s some common concerns that people have when it comes to using AI. Can you talk a little bit about InsideDial and maybe some of those concerns?

Eric Gallegos: Look, I think when we launched InsideDial, I was naive to think that Everybody would just jump on board and go oh this is the greatest thing. I think the first conversation I had with Jackie she said to me you cannot do this. This cannot be done. One of the great things about using AI or using us to do this work for our clients is that there’s a lot. When you hire a person to do this work you’re hoping that they do it. You hope that they have enough time. You hope that they make time. And if it’s a tough payer, you hope that they’re still going to prioritize it over easier work for them to do. But the analytics and the reporting that we can provide groups like Gen 4 is really something they’ve never been able to do before. We can tell Jackie exactly how many claims they have 90 day plus. We can break that down by payer. We can actually tell them on average over the last six months how many claims tend to roll into 60 days, tend to roll into 90 days, tend to roll into 180 days. And all of a sudden, you tend to find who are your problem payers. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean that the payer isn’t paying on time. A lot of times, some of these payers don’t have portals. Portals aren’t easy to use, and so by default, the user has to make the phone call. Jackie made two great points earlier, but. When COVID happened, uh, the phone lines lit up, right? That’s a ton of, of whole time. But during the change health care, um, hack that happened earlier this year, whole times went up again, right? You had to call into payers, a lot of payers, the only way you could speak to them, uh, was through the phone. And so all of a sudden the AI could do that work for our clients and they have been doing that work. Um, they’ve been doing, I’ve been doing a really great job.

Bill Neumann: So Jackie, how long have you and your team been using this inside dial solution? And I’m curious from your perspective, how has your team handled using the A.I.? I mean, were they apprehensive at first? Sounds like you were a little apprehensive for what Eric said. Can’t be done. So I’d love to talk about that because I think that’s a lot of there’s still a lot of concern about that. When I bring in a solution like this, people are like, oh, my gosh, I’m going to lose my job or, you know, this is too complicated or it’s, it’s going to interrupt our workflow, even though it’s mind numbing work, you know, we’re used to it. So I’m sure you kind of get a lot of those concerns where, you know, people’s routines are going to change.

Jackie Holloway: Yeah, so as Eric mentioned, you know, I will admit I was very skeptical. Our very first conversation, we started talking about payers that I know are consistently giving pushback with third parties. And, you know, even myself, I have called on some claims, you know, for a California office. And, you know, I’ve I have a California area code on my cell phone so I was like, well, I’m in the break room so, you know, I don’t want to tie up the phone lines and so I got them to talk to me. But I was very skeptical. We started in September. We started with a small number of claims. We started with just a little over 600 just so that I could test it, see what it’s like, what we’re getting back. My team as well, you know, they were skeptical, you know, is this gonna work? Are we gonna get the information that we need? So once I started getting the data back from the claims in September on those first ones I didn’t waste any time. I took the feedback from my team. I was giving it to Eric We were discussing it. We were getting the results that we needed and so, you know the very next month I believe I dropped like 5,000 plus dials to have done. And so we had those calls done and we were able to actually get claims work to the finish line. And so our team being able to have the information from the insurance of either the claims not on file, additional information, primary EOB needed, You know, whatever it was, we were, we was getting that right back from Inside Dial and it helped us reduce our AR by over $700,000 in just a short period of time. We have added more offices recently. And I can say, you know, within two weeks, we’ve reduced our over 60 clean count by over 1,300, you know, just using these resources. And, you know, normally in a two week period, I wouldn’t see a reduction that high. because my team’s just not able to touch that many claims because they are doing full cycle. They’re posting payment, sending claims, you know, trying to work that AR, but when they’re having the information given to them as if they had the EOB, they’re able to get that claim to the finish line.

Bill Neumann: See, shared some, a lot of examples there, some data. Any thoughts on time saved? And then I would also, the manual work, do you have any, I mean, do you have some data points on this yet? Have you been monitoring that?

Jackie Holloway: I can say it has saved probably a month’s worth of work for my team, if not more. And that would be if they were just sitting at their desk working nothing but AR, calling on claims. You know, it has really freed up the team from having to be tied to that phone line. and being able to get that done. You know, the work with that Inside Dial has done with the 600. You know, if my team is doing that, you know, 10 claims a day, obviously it’s going to take them a while to get through those 600. And I believe that Inside Dial had it done within 2 days.

Bill Neumann: And how does the team feel about this solution?

Jackie Holloway: Uh, you know, the team’s actually enjoying it, you know, at first, just like myself, you know, uh, we were all skeptical and how is this going to work? Um, you know, we have partnered with Eric, you know, with anything that’s new, uh, you have to work through, you know, any kind of bumps that you may have and, and making sure the scripting is right. And so Eric’s been phenomenal with that, working through taking our feedback. Um, and so my team’s all on board. Um, I’ve got team members that, you know, their software does not sync with inside desk. And, you know, every time I meet with Eric, I’m like, Hey, where’s this ad on your list? Are you going to start offering it? Because my team members want the service.

Bill Neumann: Eric, how about implementation for things like this? I mean, do you have any best practice solutions? You know, you’ve got, whether they’re a new existing customer of InsideDesk or maybe somebody that is new to InsideDesk, is bring on AI. Do you have any just thoughts on implementing AI?

Eric Gallegos: Yeah, I mean, I think AI is almost, Jackie said, they’re almost like an employee, right? You’re kind of, The proof is in the pudding, right? You have to test the AI to make sure that it can do the things that you said. So one of the things that we do with almost all our clients is we like to do a small test with them. It might be 100 dials, it might be 200 dials. As I mentioned, one of the benefits of it is the consistent data capture. But we can show you in reporting, hey, here are all the dials we made. Here’s all the dials that were completed. Here are the responses. Here’s the information that you need. And it doesn’t take very long for someone like uh jackie or one of her employees who’ve done this job for a long time to validate that data and say wow this works really quickly so it’s not one of those things from a best practice standpoint we’re like oh you have you know you have 5 000 dials and let’s get it let’s run it up we really believe in in showing you that this is something that we can do And so we always do a small little test. Almost every group, you know, they’ll do 100 or 200. Then the next order is 600 or 1000. And almost inevitably, that third order is a pretty sizable chunk because they have a lot of backed up AR. And as Jackie pointed out, each group’s a little bit different. Some people just manage AR. Gen four is a little bit different. They submit, they post, they do everything right. So something like this really generates a lot of value for them very, very, very quickly. Um, and so the best practice is really be patient, right? Validate it. Don’t, don’t, don’t just assume it’s going to work. Let us prove to you that it’s going to work. We’re here to partner with you. We want to listen to your advice, right? Things that we can do better. Um, we’re always working with our groups to make sure that, um, the AI is providing, um, as much value as we possibly can. So we’re always iterating.

Bill Neumann: We start to wrap things up here, looking at some final thoughts that you have. How do you see, Eric, InsideDesk continuing to make a difference in RCM? It just seems like it’s for the industry and maybe the dental industry has been lagging behind in RCM, but it seems like we’re getting caught up as an industry and we’re catching up quickly. So maybe talk a little bit about what you see. as the future of our cm and specifically how inside dial can contribute to that future.

Eric Gallegos: Yeah look it’s unbelievable the amount of strides. The dental tech has made in the lab really three to four years right you’re staying a ton of great a i. From pearl right air pay right pre submission post submission right a bunch of different ways to use a i submission. We’re doing it here in claim management. Some of the things that we’re doing is doing dials like this. And so what ends up happening is when you start generating data from everywhere, right? At first, you’re providing data. Hey, look, here’s data, here’s things that you can see. And then we’re providing automation. And then all of a sudden, we’re able to say, hey, look, here’s what you should be doing. And then as we start doing analysis, we’re like, hey, these are all the things that you’re doing incorrectly, and here’s how to do it right. And so you’re seeing the evolution of the data set, be able to really help. Groups like gen four, not just automate tasks, but all of a sudden do predictive modeling in terms of, uh, things that they can do at the claim level, payer level, payer code level, in terms of how we can maximize, uh, some of the opportunities that are, that are out there. If you ask me what my dream is, what the future is my dream. is that payers take advantage of the technology, right? Today, they are also dependent on human. They’re dependent on that data being incorrect, and you’re starting to see payers, like Edna, who are doing AI chats and things of that nature, right? They’re dipping their toes into some of this technology. But if you’re in this place where you can, as a payer, take advantage of this tech, You’re reducing administrative costs on your side. I think that’s something that everybody wants to do. But all of a sudden, if you have AI speaking to AI, then those call banks can run 24-7. And I think that helps everybody ultimately, right? The data is being exchanged back and forth more cleanly. There’s less error. And all of a sudden, on both sides, both the payer side and the DSO side, administrative costs are going down, and accuracy is going up. And I think that’s something that everybody can benefit from.

Bill Neumann: And Jackie, from your perspective, what You’ve been using InsideDial for a short period of time, incredible numbers that you’ve been sharing with me. It’s really going to change the way you and your team handle RCM, frees up a lot of their time to do everything else that they’re doing. What are you looking forward to in 2025? What do you think InsideDial’s impact is going to be next year? And then also, I think one other question would be, to the groups that are listening that are on the fence about a solution like this, what would be some of your recommendations?

Jackie Holloway: So, the first part, what I’m looking forward to, excuse me, it’s more automation. I think the more automation that we have with the technologies available so that we can get the claims turned around quicker and have a better patient experience. You know, word of mouth, when a patient has a great experience on how something was handled, you get referrals and that’s the best compliment ever for a practice. So that’s what I’m looking forward to is more automation with the technologies. If someone’s on the fence, you know, considering inside dial, I’m sure one of the biggest hesitations is, you know, the team thinks, oh, wow, I’m being replaced by this. That’s not the case, depending on what that team member’s role is. This can actually free them up. You know, when I look at claim counts, and I mentioned earlier, you know, in September, my first order was 600 dials, and, you know, if I’ve got a team member that’s working 10 claims a day, you know, 5 days a week, 4 days, you know, 4 weeks in a month, that’s 200. It’s going to take them 3 months to get through those. And it just becomes daunting and thinking, you know, wow, I’m never going to get through this. But being able to give them a tool such as Inside Dial that can give them all the information, almost get them to the finish line, you know, give that team member a break and, you know, let them catch their breath and so that they can focus on something else. There’s always going to be one claim, you know, and Eric knows my stance, you know, there’s always going to be that one claim that has to have someone from RCN get it, you know, where it needs to be. But the AI truly does help with those claims that you can get paid and figure out what’s going on, why it didn’t make it to the payer without having to take so much of your staff’s time.

Bill Neumann: So again, wrapping things up here, Eric, what would you say would be the best way for people to, like, what’s the first step here? This sounds great. Is there a demo? How do they reach out to you? What would you say would be the first logical step to find out more about InsideDesk and InsideDial?

Eric Gallegos: Yeah, as, as always, you can go to our website, right? Inside desk.com. We actually have, uh, on the website, you can actually listen to a call. It’s not the full call because those calls aren’t that exciting. Uh, but it’s cool to listen to a sample and a piece of the call just to, so that you can hear, um, what it’s like. Schedule a demo with us. Whitney Ehrlichman and Andrew McMath are absolutely the best. Always great at listening to our clients with our prospects and everybody else in between and listening to their needs and how we can support them. And if we can’t, we’ll point you in the best direction for you guys. But InsideDal is a really unbelievable new tool. I’m glad we have something like it here in the dental industry now. There’s a lot of cool things that we can do with it in the future. But right now, our big focus is helping our DSOs kind of reduce that 90-day AR that for a lot of them is really backed up.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Eric. And you and your team, you work with a lot of group practices and DSOs. You will be at the ADSO next level coming up really soon, so you can look for the InsideDesk team there. And Jackie, if there’s anyone out there that wants to reach out to you or find out more about the Inside Dial solution from your perspective, or maybe they want to find out more about Gen 4, what’s the best way to get in touch with you?

Jackie Holloway: Um, yeah, they can reach out to me. Um, I’m on LinkedIn. Uh, you know, that’s probably going to be the easiest way to connect with me. Um, on here is Jackie Holloway listed as, you know, the director, um, you know, or if they have questions and they want to have like a connection, uh, you know, I’m more than happy to share my email. if that’s okay on our podcast here, or if you want me to give that to you on the side. But my email address is jholloway at gen4dental.com. I’m more than happy to ask questions. You know, even myself as a director, if I’m looking at new products, I ask for referrals as well. And I’ve recently went through that. And so if I can help someone out there, you know, and answer some questions, put them at ease, more than happy to do that.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Jackie. And we’ll drop your email address and your LinkedIn handle in the show notes, as well as Eric and his team’s contact info, the website information. But great, great conversation. Really appreciate it. I think that We’re going to hear more and more about solutions like InsideDial and really how they’re changing workflow, making things more efficient, freeing up time. It’s exciting times in the dental industry. I think one of the big challenges is there’s so much technology out there. As somebody that’s looking for solutions, it’s almost overwhelming. So conversations like this, and having people like you, Jackie, really talk about the solution and how it’s affected you, your team, and your group. It’s invaluable, so we really do appreciate your time and feedback. Eric Gallegos, Inside Desk, and Jackie Holloway, Gen 4, really appreciate you both being here, and thank you everybody for watching us. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show, and I’m Bill Neumann.