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

Dr. Rania Saleh, Founder & CEO of Oryx Dental Software, joins the Group Dentistry Now Show. Dr. Saleh shares her thoughts on:

Bridging the gap between dentistry and technology
Standardizing care across multiple locations within a DSO
Ensure a consistent patient experience across all offices
Advice for DSOs looking to invest in technology
Much more

To learn more about Oryx Dental Software visit – https://www.oryxdentalsoftware.com/

You can schedule a demo of Oryx here – https://www.oryxdentalsoftware.com/demo/

If you would like to connect with Dr. Saleh you can email her at rania@oryxdentalsoftware.com or connect with her on Linkedin – https://www.linkedin.com/in/rsaleh/

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Dr. Rania Saleh discusses a technology driven approach to patient care. Full Group Dentistry Now DSO podcast transcript:

Bill Neumann: Welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. And as always, we appreciate you watching us today. We are closing in on 200 podcasts, so we should be there by the end of the year. So quite a few under our belt, and we couldn’t do it without you, a dedicated audience, and driving us to bring fresh perspectives, new people on our podcast. And we definitely have one for you here. We have Dr. Rania Saleh. She is the CEO and founder of Oryx Dental Software. So I said doctor, so she is a practicing dentist. So this is going to be a really interesting conversation. We go from clinician, practicing to software entrepreneur. Rania, great to have you here. Thanks. Thank you. And it’s been a while we met. a long time ago, I believe it was either Dykem or ADSL meeting and Oryx was in its infancy then. So you’ve really made a lot of progress since we last saw each other in person. But first, maybe a little bit about your background and then why you decided that Oryx needed to exist. What was missing in the industry? What was missing with the practice management solutions that were already on the market?

Dr. Rania Saleh: Thank you so much for having me. I’m Rania. I’m the founder of Oryx Dental Software. I was a practicing dentist. I had nothing to do with software. All I knew is how to turn on my computer and that was about it. I was practicing with a single location turned into a multiple location, multi-specialty locations. And then I got pregnant and had to be put on bed rest. My practices were doing extremely well at that time, and it started going downhill. We started getting bad reviews. Our production was not as good as it was. And I couldn’t figure it out because nothing had changed. We still had the same doctors, the same office managers, the same protocols. And this is when I started looking at every little area in my practice and seeing like, what is different. And I realized that with the clunky software that existed, it was a lot of manual work to implement a lot of the protocols in a practice. And that’s why I decided to go and create Oryx.

Bill Neumann: So unlike other practice management solutions that are in the space and being that you are a clinician, you really took the approach to focus on clinical excellence and then also running a multi-specialty practice focused on standardization as well. So talk a little bit about the why behind that and then the impact that that has had on your customers.

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yes, so I’ve always believed in improving the patient outcome and also having a very good and successful practice with increasing the revenue. So we created a patient experience, the start with the patient completing their forms ahead of coming to the practice. And the reason that this is this allows us to triage the patient before they even come in. So if someone is low risk in all their areas, they might go to see the hygienist. If someone is high risk, dental facial said that they’re interested in straightening their teeth or in cosmetic procedures, then we would put them with a more senior dentist. Then we created an exam that takes about seven minutes. It’s all evidence based. It’s based on the teaching of the COIS Center. And once we complete that exam, every patient is getting the exact same diagnosis. And that standardization of care puts the doctors at ease if you have a new doctor, because they know that they did not miss anything. But also for the patient, they’re leaving with this report about their condition. It has their photos, it has their diagnosis, so they understand why they need the treatment. And with that, we see a huge increase in case acceptance. The standardization is very important because if I have, let’s say, a stage 3 periopatient, the diagnosis should be the same because we’re looking at bone level, we’re looking at bleeding points, we’re looking at criteria that would give that diagnosis. But then when it comes to a treatment plan, the clinician at the DSO could decide that this is how we want to treat our stage three period. So they could say that for any patient that is stage three period, we want our hygienist to send them straight to the periodontist. Or maybe another DSO could say we want to see them every three months, and we want these adjunctive procedures. So from the leadership level, we’re able to see who’s following our treatment protocols. And from the clinician level, they know that this is the standard, it’s evidence-based, and we’re following the best protocols. And if someone questions that, they click on a little eye icon, and it gives them all the literature where that came from. So I used to have dentists that were either overly aggressive or overly conservative. And it’s like, I don’t want to do a crown on this tooth, or I want to do a crown on every tooth. And we had set protocols to look at the risk of the tooth and decide, is it going to be a crown or a filling? So anything that was yellow or red would go to crown, anything that was green would be a filling. And that’s how we decided in my practices. And with that protocol, it could go across on the location, you could try it in a region and expand it.

Bill Neumann: Well, that sounds so important, especially as you start to scale up and you’re like if you’re acquiring practices and you have clinicians that have been doing things a certain way or you have younger clinicians coming in that are looking for some guidance and some guardrails, having that standardization, those protocols really can be beneficial. We talked a little bit about you working now with some large DSOs, some emerging groups. Do you have any success stories you can share with us?

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yeah. One of my favorite story happened in our early days. And one group that had seven locations were doing good. They had good clinicians. They were making 750K a month across their seven locations after implementing Oryx. I believe for nine months, they jumped to 1.3 million a month. And they attributed that mostly to the standardization of care, to a higher patient acceptance, because patients leaving with that report were going back home and saying, oh, I understand I really need this CRAM, or I really need this periodontal treatment. And that increased their production. The other thing that changed also for them is having the analytics to get them the real-time performance. And because all the data points were coming from one software, it was very easy to see the data across their locations.

Bill Neumann: So let’s move on to one of the hot topics in the industry. It’s been, I would say it’s probably the past two years has been like the hottest topic. As soon as interest rates went up, everybody’s focus went from acquisition to revenue cycle management. And it’s a huge challenge in the industry. I’d love to get your feelings on how it’s impacting the industry. and then also how you’ve really built Oryx to help solve for some of the RCM issues that are going on right now.

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yeah, I mean, we know you need a very well-honed program on the RCM side to be able to scale. And we found that the automated workflows work best because you’re not really counting on one person doing it all. Anything that we could automate, we’re automating. So it starts with pre-collecting the patient data and the forms like their insurance information, their credit card. And then as you’re doing your treatment or completing a treatment, the software would automatically know, for example, that if it’s a root canal, we’re going to need to auto-attach the PA. and we’re going to need to auto-attach the narrative. And the system does that automatically after doing all the verification and make sure that we have a great claim to send that will be accepted immediately. If it’s a Perio case, we’re auto-attaching the Perio charting, maybe the AI annotated radiograph and sending that to the insurance company. And then after we get the claim, if there’s still any payment, you can send the sequence of how you want to contact your patients. So maybe two days later, you want a text to pay. After that, you want an email. Maybe at day 30, you want to send them some payment options. At day 45, you want a reminder for your front desk to calm that office. So all of that could be built into the system to create a robust revenue cycle management system. And some offices decide to outsource that, and we’re very proud that we created NowRavGen, and it’s a team of very qualified revenue cycle managers that could take it all on.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. Wonderful solution. OK, so some of the listeners and people watching this are going to go, oh my gosh, practice management software. Changing something like that is probably one of the most difficult things to do in the industry. And that’s why sometimes you see, you know, DSOs that are running seven, eight different solutions out there. The complexity can be a challenge. Sometimes there’s the concern about cost. So can you address some of those issues? Because, you know, you probably deal with that every day.

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yeah, I don’t think it’s a choice anymore. Like patients have come to expect a modern seamless experience. And in order to do that and stay competitive, you have to have a service that has modern technology. So I don’t think it’s a choice anymore. Everyone is going through it one way or another. The cost effectiveness of having one solution is huge in terms of Using a system like Oryx, you’re saving 30 to 60% if you’re not using an on-prem software and a lot of multiple add-ons. The cost saving happens that way, but also from having to manage all the infrastructure, the IT support you need to connect on these different solutions. That alone gives you a step up. The other thing that you would get is by having all the data coming from one system, you have that better integrity of the data, so you’re able to come up with better solutions and find problems sooner. It’s never easy to do a transition, but we do a great job staging the transition and supporting the offices as they go through it.

Bill Neumann: And I think that is important. You’ve got the team there that is really going to help during that transition. Another concern, one of the big topics, we talked about RCM being one of them. Another couple that I think are maybe right under RCM, well, maybe I would say security, cybersecurity is, you know, maybe one and two are RCM cybersecurity, and then scalability. So can you talk a little bit about the security side of things, and then also, you know, how How successful is Oryx when somebody is scaling up, whether they’re adding additional, they’re buying practices, if they’re doing de novos, can you kind of address those couple of things, security and scalability?

Dr. Rania Saleh: So a lot of things I took for granted and I assumed everyone does it because our CTO brings a lot of experience from building enterprise software on the buyer side, the B2B buyer sides for companies like Walmart, Nestle, Nike. And coming from that experience where you’re scaling the buyer side for organizations like this, like scalability is first in mind and also security. So that happened for us naturally from day one, where we sat and said, if we’re expanding, what are our plans? How does that happen? Also, the way we store our data, the encryption that we do, I think we do well above what the industry expects at our level. So from that side, I think we started with an infrastructure that scales. We didn’t have to think about the problem after the fact.

Bill Neumann: So as we start to wrap things up here, a couple more questions that come to mind. Advice, you had practice several locations, multi-specialty. If I’m a DSO considering a new technology, whether it’s practice management solution, whether it’s AI, whether it’s, I mean, there are, I think DSOs and multi-sites are bombarded by technology solutions that seem to change daily. Every time you look at something, there’s improvements and different versions of things. So maybe can you Provide some advice for some of the emerging groups that are listening here, how to evaluate solutions, whether it’s Oryx or maybe even some others out there. How do you go about doing that? It can be overwhelming. And I think sometimes you’re trying to run your business as well. So I think it’s hard to dedicate time to really understanding those solutions.

Dr. Rania Saleh: So I think there are some key questions to ask, like, is there a great experience for all the stakeholders? And that’s really the hygienist, the patient, the doctors, the leadership team. Everyone is going to interact with the software one way or another, and they need to have a great experience and they need to get all the data points they need. So I think that would be a very important point to ask. definitely is the solution scalable, secure to meet the future needs? And will the organization work with us and be responsive to our needs? And this is something that we see more as we work with more DSOs, everyone’s needs are so different. And we have to be flexible, like one of our recent DSOs wanted, we’re struggling a lot with doctor pay. across their different locations. They didn’t know how to calculate the doctor pay. Everyone was using a different number to calculate it. So we sat with them. We came up with the best metric for their specific need to calculate it, how to get on the lab fees, how to get what they need to get to the correct number and to be consistent across location, and we launched it for everyone. So, that’s an important question. Is my software solving some of the big problems that we have? So, yeah.

Bill Neumann: So I, this is one of the last questions here. It’s going to take, take out your crystal ball. And if you can give us, give the audience a little bit of a idea of what you think the future, the next couple of years of practice management software is going to look like, how it’s going to evolve and maybe specifically how is Oryx, you know, what do you have in the, in the works, how that, how you think your platform’s going to evolve?

Dr. Rania Saleh: I mean, AI is huge in every industry and dentistry is no different. So I think AI will continue to impact us a lot. So other than our integration with Pearl AI for imaging, we created our own voice pair, your voice exam, summary of the patient interaction. So that’s going to be launched this quarter. We also are working on more workflow and automation. Just like I said, anything that could be automated should be automated. No one should be doing redundant tasks. We’re working on more API integrations. We already have a lot going on. We keep adding to that. And I think the patient experience is always one of our prime concerns that we keep adding to it. We keep improving. and the standardization of care. And we’re very lucky to have our integration with the COIS Center where we get the latest evidence-based literature every year, so the software is always up to date.

Bill Neumann: That’s great, Rania. I mean, really, my thought after this conversation is really this is a clinician driven practice management software. I mean, you can really tell with your partnership with Cois and I mean, the way you developed it, it really, it rings true to kind of that sentiment. So definitely a different perspective on things. And I think we’re going to see Oryx continue to grow and lead. I see your name everywhere. Your organization is at all the DSO meetings now. You’ve got a big team. So if somebody isn’t going to an upcoming DSO event, where can they find it? If they want to get a demo, what’s probably the best way to do that? Can they go to your website to sign up for a demo?

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yeah, they could book a demo on our website or it’s dentalsoftware.com.

Bill Neumann: Okay, and we’ll drop that in the show notes, orexdentalsoftware.com and link to that demo so you’ll have access to that. If they want to reach out to you or they’ve got their clinician that maybe has four or five or 20 locations and they want to ask a little bit more, is there a way to get in touch with you?

Dr. Rania Saleh: Yeah, of course, Rania at orexdentalsoftware.com.

Bill Neumann: Great, and we’ll put that in the show notes as well. Ron, great conversation. Really appreciate it. I’m excited. I just remember meeting you years ago, and I mean, the product is now being used by emerging groups and established DSOs, and I think you’ve got a lot, from what I understand, coming up really soon that’s just doing things differently. It’s a different approach and refreshing, and I think it’s much needed. So thank you, Rania. Thank you, everybody, for watching us today. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann, and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.