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

Elliot Zibel, Founder of ClariFi Health, & Dr. David Janash, Partner of ClariFi Health and Founder & CEO of Underbite Dental, share their thoughts on:

Data in the DSO industry
What it means to be a data-driven organization
Why they started ClariFi?
Measuring ROI & success with data

To find out more about ClariFi Health visit https://www.clarifi.health/

You can also reach out to Elliot Zibel at ezibel@optimushealthcaremgmt.com or Dr. David Janash at david@myunderbite.com

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Full 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 or maybe you’re listening in. But without an audience like you, we wouldn’t have great guests like the next two guests we have on the show today. One, Elliot Zeibel, who you probably have seen on the podcast before. He was representing Select Dental Management. So he’s back for a second time. So, Elliot, welcome back. Great to have you back.

Elliot Zibel: Thanks. Do I get an award for being on twice?

Bill Neumann: No, we have some people that have beat you out. So maybe fourth or fifth, we’ll get, we’ll definitely get you an award, but it’s good to have you back. And then for the first time, and before we started recording, we have Dr. David Janash on and we were saying, I was wondering how the heck have we not had him on the podcast before? but it’s been way too long. And we actually, so he is the CEO and the founder of Underbite Dental Management. And coincidentally, I think you were founded in 2018, somewhere around then. And Underbite was also an Emerging Groups to Watch winner in 2018 as well. So you’re a winner, 2018, and now we’re finally having you on the show in 2024. So way too long, but glad to have you here, David. Glad to be here. Thank you so much. Yeah, good stuff. So we’re going to be talking about Clarify Health, which is a brand new company that both Dr. David Janash and Elliot are involved in. They’re going to talk about this really revolutionary platform and what it’s all about. And you’re going to see them at upcoming meetings and have a real good idea about how this is going to help your group. But first off, let’s go back to the beginning and talk a little bit about your background, Elliot. For the folks that may not know you, we mentioned Select Dental Management. You founded that organization. They’re still around today. So maybe a little bit about you and Select and then maybe some of your experience prior to that and how that led you to be the founder of Clarify Health.

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Bill. So yeah, so I’ve had about 20 year career history as an investor, entrepreneur, board member in various industries and also in companies of various sizes from pre-revenue to multi-billion dollar businesses. And I think that you know, that perspective is really valuable to me, because I’ve been able to see lots of different businesses that have been really successful. I’ve seen businesses that have struggled, I’ve seen businesses that have failed. And I’ve run businesses, so I actually understand the challenges of of not just coming up with a plan, but actually executing and driving that throughout an organization. So most recently and probably most relevant to the listener base would be my experience at Select Dental Management. So I started Select Dental Management 2018. Over a four-year time period, we acquired 44 locations and scaled the business to eight states, 700 employees. I was the CEO for the vast majority of from 2018 to 2023 and left to really go and to start other healthcare companies. I love to be an entrepreneur. I love to grow businesses and thought there was a big opportunity to leverage my experience and learnings from Select and otherwise to go do other things. You know, Clarify Health, I think, honestly, for me is really, you know, the culmination of all my learnings from what to do, what not to do running a business. And I think one of the things that we’ll talk about in more detail is, you know, the importance of being data-driven and really having a data-driven organization. And we’ll talk about what that means. But from all of my experiences on boards and as an operator, investor, really, I’ve seen a huge differentiation between organizations that are truly focused on making data-driven decisions and those that are not. And so Clarify Health was really born out of necessity, I would tell you, from my experiences as the CEO of a large, fast-growing dental company. And I knew what I needed to do. you know, how I wanted to do it, but I couldn’t really do it because of the lack of technology and lack of solutions in the industry. And so I decided to create Clarify Health and we’ll talk more about how we address data problems and how we improve business operations and patient care and ultimately dental group value as we go through the podcast.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Elliot. And Dave, for the folks that don’t know who you are because you haven’t been on the podcast before, although I know you’ve been in the industry a while, you’re a clinician. You founded Underbite Dental Management back in 2018. Talk a little bit about that experience and then how that led you to becoming a partner at Clarify Health with Elliot.

Dr. David Janash: Yeah, so thanks again for having me on the call on the podcast. I was a general dentist from about 2004 to about 2018. I started my first practice in 2007. And for whatever reason, the entrepreneurial voice in my head said, go out and buy another one. So I did that and had a tremendous amount of success and maybe some luck and scaled that. And I had some very interesting times doing that. And it just seemed like the next thing to do was to start or buy practice number three shortly after that, and then practice number four and five came on. And each time, I would watch my team, you know, grow personally and professionally. And that was really, at some point, became more gratifying to me than putting in a row of veneers on someone’s mouth. And I just decided this is what I want to do. I had some challenges along the way, obviously. And as Elliot sort of can attest to, you know, some of those had to do with what’s going on in the company and, you know, how do we go from point A to point B on this particular issue? And so about a year ago, Elliot and I sat down and we looked at my company and understood where I had opportunities to drive results and create value for myself and others. And it was very obvious that I had a ton of systems and solutions that I had created. I’m a little bit of a tech geek. I identify as a tech geek first, before I was a dentist actually. And it turns out that some of the stuff that I had created were things that Elliot at some point said to me, he’s like, I don’t even have, I didn’t even have some of these tools in my own company and they were triple the size of mine. And so I thought, you know, well, let’s work together on creating something that’s really, really impactful and can really help all group practices. And, you know, a year later we’re here and we have this amazing thing and I can’t wait to talk more about it.

Bill Neumann: This is great. So thank you, Dave, by the way. So let’s talk a little bit about, I didn’t mention this, but Clarify Health is really an operating system that leverages data. You can hear data many times in this podcast and artificial intelligence to improve the health of patients and also create value and improve that value in the dental groups that you all have. So with that being said, go back to data. So you hear data-driven a lot in the industry. So really what does that mean and why is it so important, Elliot?

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, so data-driven to me means that you are using data to drive all of your strategic decisions in your organization throughout your organization. So not just at the C-level or senior level, but you’re using data in the practices as well. And I think the reason that that is so important, and there’s a lot of examples we could give, but there’s just a tremendous mountain, I would say, like Mount Everest of data that supports the fact that data-driven businesses substantially outperform those that are not data-driven. And being data-driven, you know, we’re going to talk about more later, is it’s not easy. Just because you have, you know, an analytics platform or you have data does not make you data-driven, right? It just means that you have data. Being data-driven means you can take that data and transform it into insights, into action and execution. And so if you combine data with a strong company and operational framework and culture and mission vision values that we all know is really important, the amount you can accomplish, it just grows exponentially. And so for me, it means as a CEO of a company, right, if I have an HR department, a marketing department, and all these different verticals, I need to be able to measure what success looks like for the metrics that matter the most to be able to forecast my business and to be able to understand, as Dave mentioned earlier, what’s going on? Are we performing well? Should we celebrate? Are we executing on the initiatives that we all agree are really important this year? And if not, you know, who is accountable? Right. And so really being data driven, I think, is the glue that that holds together a company and that facilitates, you know, scalability. And I think, you know, we talk a lot about, you know, if you can’t measure something, you can’t manage it. And so many times I’ll go into a dental office and I’ve probably looked at several over 300 dental locations and I’ll go in and we’ll talk about hygiene reappointment and I’ll say, what’s your hygiene reappointment rate? So it’s 100 percent. I’m like, okay, great. So we go and we put our analytics platform on there at 75. And you’re like, well, why? Why is it not 100%? Right? The doctor thinks 100% it’s not. And the answer is because we’re not measuring it. If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it. And we certainly can’t scale it. So I think the more you get into the philosophy and process of measurement and focus, the more you can really drive execution. So, you know, for me, becoming data driven, not only substantially impacted my business in a very positive way, right, when we started being able to track and understand patient retention rates, team engagement scores, which are mission critical, organic growth, x acquisition, right? efficiency, RCM and all those other things. I mean, it really became a lot easier to run my business. My team was happier because I was involved in the micro level because I was able to delegate and hold people accountable. And I was able to elevate and to really focus on things that I really like to do. both in the business and out of the business, right? So I think by really embracing a data-driven strategy, and again, it’s gonna take time and work, and we’ll talk through that, but it really has tremendous rewards both in your business and outside of it.

Dr. David Janash: And I would just like to add something to that. I mean, as a general practitioner, when I was in my first practice, and then picked up practice number two, I would basically come home at like six or seven o’clock every day. And I would look at how things went for the day. And I would, you know, try to do some analysis, maybe at the end of every month and, you know, understand, try to understand how things are going. And unfortunately, You can become paralyzed with all the data that’s available to you, but I couldn’t tell at any time what data mattered. And it was also very, very frustrating to try to figure out, you know, not just what data to look at, but even just pulling the data out became hard. And for anyone out there that’s got multiple offices, I mean, do you really want to do the same thing over and over again, and understand each practice on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis, and pulling these reports from whatever practice management software solution you’re using, When you get to maybe if you maybe if you have two that’s bearable But I would say if you really want to scale and want to get to like three past three, you know You just don’t have the time and the energy to do this And so I just wanted to add that after a certain while for anyone out there that really is interested in pulling this data there’s something to be said for the the ease and the time that you can gain back from getting a really smart system in place, because just for anyone doing this manually, that’s tough, and it gets harder as you grow. And so I just wanted to add that in.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, well, that ties into a question I was going to ask you regarding the challenges, really, of being data-driven. And you touched on a couple of them, So is it that, you know, a lot of the data exists because we talk about data a lot in the industry. There are a lot of different solutions out there. Maybe that’s one of the problems. There are so many different solutions. And then, of course, you have to go to each one to get to grab that data. And then you have to act on it. Right. So there’s not just getting the data, but then there’s, you know, because you could have all the data in the world. And if you don’t do anything with it, then doesn’t really matter. So there’s, I think there’s that issue as well. So maybe go through some of those challenges, because it can be can be a little overwhelming. You probably have all the information that you need somewhere, but then taking the next couple of steps to actually act on it, and then make sure that, you know, you, there’s ROI as well can be a huge undertaking. So Talk about some of those challenges. I’m sure at Underbite you’ve run into that before, although you’re a tech geek, so maybe you’ve got it all figured out.

Dr. David Janash: Yeah, well, no, I don’t actually. And and to be honest, you know, some of the some of the gripes that I have with my own, you know, IP, if you will, has been the fact that it’s very expensive to maintain on a monthly or quarterly basis, you got to use a lot of different software solutions that are sort of either out of the box or custom that you have to build. That doesn’t happen cheaply. You have to pay software engineers to create these things. Some of them don’t know dental at all and they literally have to start from scratch to understand dental. Number two, accuracy is a huge thing. If it’s not accurate, good luck with getting anyone to act on it and getting anyone to believe in what you’re doing or what you’re trying to drive. And last but not least, again, from a convenience perspective, If you don’t have access to this data and the right sets of data, you might as well be a sitting duck. You really think you have some sense of what’s going on, but the truth is you’re driving blind and you really have no idea. So those are just some examples of some of the challenges that I’ve had to overcome. And we’d like to think that going forward with some smarter tools and new perspectives on how to grow a group and track the data sources and incentivize people and understand things like team engagement and the growth of each office, these data sets can be much more impactful going forward.

Elliot Zibel: I would just maybe add a couple of things to that, Bill. You touched on one of the topics, and one of the big industry issues is data is siloed or trapped in these various locations. And getting that data, if it’s not automated, which is really expensive and requires sophisticated engineering and so on, then it’s a manual process and it’s not scalable, it’s not timely, it’s not accurate, it’s not repeatable. So that the data where it exists, you know, disparate systems is one of the major challenges that exists. The second part of it, to your point, like once we have the data and we’ve cleaned it, it’s normalized, how do we actually present it in a way that is impactful, right? So the four disciplines of execution, I love the concept. And one of the things they talk about, they talk about prioritization, right? So we got to know what’s wildly important. We got to act on lead measures, right? What are those lead measures and how do they drive the outcome we’re looking to drive? And number three is you need to have a compelling scorecard. And so when I see these scorecards out there, it is like, honestly, I call it a data puke. So you see these scorecards and there’s red and yellow and it’s like a rainbow and there’s 55 metrics. And I’m a numbers guy. I’ve been doing, you know, analytics my whole life and When I look at that screen, I’m like, I don’t know what, what am I supposed to focus on? Right? So part of this is like giving context to the data and also making and making it impactful so that when, you know, your practice leader looks at the scorecard, two things jump out at them. And those are the two things you really want them to focus on. So I find that a lot of times people, you know, kind of vomit this data all over the place and expect people to be able to digest it. That is not productive at all. So, really, a lot of what we focused on and what we focus on at Clarify is transforming that data into something that is digestible. So, if the answer is you should be focusing on retention and adding specialty services, then that’s the answer. And it’s going to be very clear on that scorecard that those are the biggest opportunities you have. And so, I think there’s elements of you know, challenges in many different regards. And honestly, that’s really why we created Clarify was really throughout my experience, trying to be data driven and understanding the importance of that, but actually trying to be data driven in practice, it was a hell of a lot easier in theory. And in practice, there was a lot of challenges and a lot of a lot of hair. And I think, you know, we realized that we can create an off the shelf platform that took all the data that we needed, not only put it in the right place, but also translate that data into action in EBITDA dollars. Because I don’t, no one really cares about having the data if it’s not going to drive ROI or result. And that is a very special skill set that quite honestly, doesn’t really exist in dental from what we’ve seen, right? And we’ve been working really hard and spending a lot of money to figure it out. But I think it’s like just having the data again doesn’t make you data driven and it’s hard enough to get the data. But once you have it, there’s a whole nother set of problems about how do you distribute it frequently, accurately, and how do you make people understand what you’re trying to report on.

Bill Neumann: I’ve got a couple of questions for you. Talk a little bit about the problems that you’re solving with Clarify that maybe really some other products in the market don’t address today. And then another question I have is, what data are we measuring? What’s important out there? Because there’s so much that you can measure. And then I think you could just get bogged down with just analyzing everything. And again, maybe you’re spending time on things that really don’t matter to your group or your practice. So that’s another issue as well. So how do you kind of cut through all that clutter and figure out what’s important to your specific group?

Elliot Zibel: Yeah. So, I mean, there’s a lot of important data out there that we are aggregating, but let’s start off with like the things you need to start out with, right? The first is your financial data, right? Coming from your ERP system, which could be QuickBooks or Sage Intact. And, you know, we aggregate all the financial data and we have very simple reporting at a very high level. If you just want to know You know, I would argue the things you have to understand about your business, right? I’ll give you some financial metrics. One, your revenue. Two, your practice EBITDA. Three is your corporate expense. If you’re a bigger company, you need to understand what your centralized costs are. Four is your consolidated EBITDA. So that’s your practice EBITDA, less your corporate expense. You need to understand those numbers. You need to understand, are they growing or declining? Right. And you also need to understand, you know, margins, percentage of revenue. Right. Because if I tell you I have an 18 percent, you know, practice margin, is that good or bad? Right. We need to be able to compare that versus internal and external benchmarks. So for me, financial data, that would be the data sets that I would certainly want to understand. And then below that, there’s lots of drivers and things you can get into detail of. And the Clarify platform takes you all the way from high-level revenue to all the way to procedure-level data, all the way to provider-level data, so that you can really dig and understand if revenue’s down, why is revenue down? And you kind of go through the process and you understand, well, my visits were down. Why were visits down? Visits were down because we had fewer working days. Why were working days down? Well, because Dr. So-and-so got COVID and he was out for two weeks, right? So you can really start to understand the root cause of problems, but also understand your business at a very, very high level, which is mission critical and important. On the PMS side of things, there’s lots of data. This is where I find people getting really overwhelmed. I think to me, there’s only two ways to grow a practice. One is revenue growth or production growth, and the other is efficiency. On the revenue growth side of things, if we just break this down as logically as we possibly can, your revenue or your production is driven by visits and the level of care you’re providing for each visit, right? And we can break that down further between dentists and hygienists, but those are the drivers of your business, right? So for me, I want to understand what’s my trends in visits, doctor hygienes, what’s my trend in level of care per visit, hygiene doctor, and that is the ultimate driver of my business at a very high level. Now, if you want to go beneath that, how do we drive visits, okay? Retention, reactivation, new patients. Right. How do we drive level of care per visit? Right. That’s preventative care services like, you know, perio and FMX and fluoride. It’s restorative services and specialty. So you can start to get to these different levels of detail that are really important when you’re creating an operating plan and trying to figure out How do we prioritize and how do we focus? But, you know, I think it’s most important for people to understand the highest level and just understand the drivers of their business and how they’re trending and how they’re performing. And so really Clarify was designed to do that, right? To effectively enable groups to become data driven, right? To have data from their PMS system, their finance system, their HRAS system, employee retention, employee engagement, et cetera. applicant tracking system data. In addition to, you know, we’re working with various vendors on artificial intelligence data sets, call answering data sets. So the idea is that you don’t have to go to one to all these different locations, you know, to potentially get your data on a regular basis or accurately. It’s all in a centralized operating system. And it’s all curated so that you and your team members understand what you should be focusing on. And so I think that the idea of putting that all into one place, and then really the other component that I think is very unique is that everything is correlated back to EBITDA dollars. So you see a PMS screen and it says your retention sucks, but like, what does it mean if I improve it, right? So what we do is we show you if you improve your retention, by 10%, that’s gonna drive a million dollars of EBITDA in your business. So what we’re doing is also quantifying to help you prioritize and assess what should we be focusing on. We’re quantifying every opportunity based on benchmarking. And so we can sit there and show you a very easy to understand screen that says, here are the top 10 ways you can grow EBITDA in your business. And that is powerful information because now the CEO can sit there and say, okay, we’re gonna focus on three things. And we’re going to take them from this list. And we’re going to make sure we execute on those three things using Clarify system and software as well. So it not only helps you identify the problems, it helps you drive execution. And ultimately, ROI is based on EBITDA growth. Like that’s it, right? We are Our mission is to improve patient care and EBITDA dollars, period, end of story. I think that’s also a pretty unique approach. Like when I talk to vendors, there’s no ROI discussion. There’s like, well, it might impact this, it might impact that. My view is like, I’m sick of hearing about products that there’s no clear benchmark to measure success. Our benchmark is what was your EBITDA when you started and what’s it six months after you’ve been with Clarify and it should be meaningfully higher from the data we’re giving you and the solutions we’re providing you to actually execute on those opportunities.

Dr. David Janash: Yeah, and there are a lot of other software platforms that are probably better designed for the dentist with one location. And those, you know, in varying degrees, will offer you plenty of information. But if you have three, four, five locations, as Elliot said, you need a place to understand where the problems are, what your priority should be, and addressing these issues on an office-by-office basis sometimes is the right way to address them. And you wouldn’t even know unless you had something like Clarify to give you a higher level perspective than the typical practice management software platforms offer. Definitely a higher level of understanding than the other solutions that are available that are, you know, again, meant for the person with one or two locations. After a while, you just don’t have, you would never know where you have an issue with team engagement, or where you have an issue with patient retention, unless you were using something like Clarify, you would just be using your gut, to be honest. And if you were doing this manually, trying to track this data manually, it would just be a complete waste of time. And you wouldn’t even know where the best place to begin. So actually, I have an interesting story to tell you. When Elliot had created the most basic version of this and asked me for access into all of my servers for all 13 locations, I granted him access and he gave me a call after the data set was run through Clarify. And he said, Dave, did you know that you’re paying a little higher than average or higher than this benchmark for your credit card processing fees? And he showed me on the screen. you’re paying, you know, this percent, but you should be paying that according to sort of industry standards or whatever. And I was shocked because two weeks prior to that conversation, I actually recognized it myself by honestly by chance. And I said, it’s so funny that you should mention that because I actually am demoing three different new credit card platforms to try to drive that down because I’ve been able to recognize it just again by chance. And Each office had the same merchant processing platform in place, but those costs started to creep up and the software platform recognized that for me right away. Another thing that was recognized was he said, you have a million dollars worth of revenue, which essentially goes purely down to the bottom line in the form of EBITDA, that you could recognize if you took x-rays at a more regular and consistent clip. And I was like, wow, that’s a million dollars in pure profit coming at me if I exercise or execute rather on this initiative to take more x-rays when appropriate, when necessary, because the team wasn’t doing it as often as they needed to be. Now, if you had a different software platform doing this for you and you had one office, it’s a no brainer. You just have one office. But Clarify was able to recognize where those x-rays were being, where those patients were being neglected. And so now you’re talking about patient care, not just revenue, but also being able to take care of this issue from an office to office level was a major game changer for us.

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, it’s a good point, Dave. I would just add to that, that another differentiation is just the ability of the product. So what people don’t want in the market is an expensive reporting solution. Nobody wants that, right? Because it doesn’t have value, right? You know, there’s no value add to expensive reporting solution. Our solution is actually goes from the C-suite all the way to the practice level. So we have our morning huddles, we have opportunity levers for people to practice leaders that are looking to create, you know, incremental production or what have you. We’ve identified all the different ways that they can do that and put it in a very easy to understand format so that they understand like the x-ray example is a really good one. So now we identify there’s a million dollar opportunity in revenue and profit if we can provide standard of care x-rays or what have you. Well, how do we execute on that, right? Well, the practice leader needs to see in their morning huddle every day that Elliot’s coming in and he needs an FMX. So our system links the strategy with execution. And then we can sit there a week later and say, hey, Diane, you had 100 people come in that should have had an FMX last week, and only 30 of them got it. Why is that? And then we can go another layer and say, well, let’s look at it by provider. Well, you actually have two providers doing a great job and three that are doing a terrible job. So why don’t we solve this problem by having the two that are doing a great job help train the other three? Maybe it’s a time issue or what have you. But I think you can understand how it’s like taking this C-level strategy and this data that, you know, first of all, FMX data is never, I’ve not seen, honestly, almost any dental groups that look at their, what percentage of patients are getting FMX when they should. So we’re not measuring it, right? That’s the first problem, big one. So once we start measuring it and managing and focusing on it, we can then start to drive those results higher. And a lot of this is really driven by what I call identification of outliers. So it’s great. I want to cheer on the companies that are doing really well and are at the best FMX percentages. But really what moves metrics is looking at the bottom performers and getting them to average. If we can get those bottom performers to average, That is the way you’re not going to get a 95% rate to get it to 100%. It doesn’t matter. You get someone from 20% to 80%. That is really impactful. So a lot of what the software is doing is identifying the opportunities, then going further and saying, here’s how you execute on them, and then going further and saying, here’s your opportunities by location, by provider, so that as a regional leader or as a CEO or operator, you can understand very clearly when you’re trying to drive an initiative where you need to go to kind of make progress, if that makes sense.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it sure does. So let me go through this. Maybe we can kind of bullet it out as far as like the differences and clarify compared to some of the other platforms. I heard Dave talk a little bit about built for multi-location, right? There may be some other platforms out there that are great for solos, but this is built for multi-location. So you have that. The other is it’s all in one, right? You’re not going to different platforms to get data. You’re kind of pulling from different areas. Give me some other bullets, because I want to kind of try and make this simple.

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, you’re doing a good job. So we talked about breadth of data, right? So various data sources, many of which currently aren’t even being looked at or analyzed. Um, we talk about ease of use. So, you know, the ability to, you know, uncover opportunities, identify things that you didn’t even know were opportunities in your, you know, in your business. Um, we talk about, uh, you know, ability to help drive execution. So the fact that we’re able to go from the C level to the practice level with scorecards and so on and so forth is, is really impactful. Um, you know, the other I would tell you is like, having a product built by operators for operators. So like, you know, if anybody has ever run a company, they understand how hard it is to take, you know, an initiative or idea and then actually make it happen, let alone make it recurring. But we understand that, right? We understand that because we made mistakes. you know, doing that along the way, we also have figured it out and had a lot of successes. So having a product that’s developed by operators that have driven, you know, what I would argue are like best in class outcomes for dental groups, like between Clarify and Underbite, I’m sorry, Select Dental and Underbite, you know, and then lastly, I think that the reality is we’re not just identifying things and you know, and saying, good luck, like we are actually going to like the merchant fee example. So, you know, we identify that we have partners, right, that we’re going to refer, we refer, you know, Dave to that are actually going to solve that problem and make sure that he realizes those synergies and savings. So we also think of ourselves as like, not just identifying the opportunities, but we’re accountable you know, in some ways for driving execution and our platforms accountable for driving execution. So I think at the end of the day, like what you end up having is an operating system. And what is an operating system? It’s something that, you know, makes everything you’re doing right easier, whether it’s in your computer or in your business. And that’s basically what we’re doing. We’re allowing CEOs and leadership teams to have full visibility, to drive velocity of advanced financial analytics reporting, throughout their business on various metrics. But ultimately, we’re enabling them to create better businesses. And we’re giving them a framework to do so. And that framework, you know, we talked about before, is, you know, there’s four things you need to do, in my mind, to have a great company, a great healthcare company, a great dental group, you need great patient satisfaction, you need great team engagement, you need strong organic growth, You need to be efficient, have great margins, and you need to have really high quality revenue cycle management, right? You need to be able to make sure that production is converting to cash. And if you can just do those four things well and measure that, and you’re in the top quartile of, you know, relative to other groups out there, 100%, no doubt in my mind, you’re going to have a great business. And so Clarify is giving you that framework and the ability to, you know, we asked before, what do you measure? What matters? If you can’t measure anything else, those are the four things that matter. And they matter because again, studies after study after study, higher team engagement levels drive two times higher income versus lower levels, you’ve got higher patient satisfaction, 50% higher EBITDA margins, then, you know, then low patient satisfaction, and so on and so forth. So basically, what we’ve done is we’ve taken all of our experience all of our mistakes, all of our successes and created a framework that if you follow and you measure and you manage, that will give you the path to substantial value creation.

Bill Neumann: Since we start to wrap up the podcast, I wanted to get final thoughts from both of you. Dave, why don’t we start with you and then Elliot, you can kind of finish up and I want to make sure you let people know where they find out more about Clarify Health, maybe what shows you might be at, Do they get access to a demo? But Dave, why don’t you start things off?

Dr. David Janash: Yeah, I think, first I want to add that, you know, Underbite, since the inception, has always been very team focused and sort of, you know, our purpose and our mission is to offer people personal and pathways, I’m sorry, personal and professional pathways for growth. And that got us to where we are, you know, 13 locations sort of all up and down the East Coast from Connecticut down to DC. Most of them are in the New York City area. And I always thought that we had a pretty healthy level of team engagement. But boy, was I wrong. Turns out that when you run all these metrics through Clarify, I was literally like given a flashlight into how things were actually running in my business. And it’s been a major, major game changer for me. And as it continues to develop and grow, and we continue to prioritize and execute on all the initiatives that we have within it, thanks to the insights that Clarify offers, plan on, you know, being involved with continuing to drive how we can impact other groups. We just came back from a conference just a couple weeks ago, and it was extremely well received. And, you know, I’ll let Elliot talk about more about sort of where we’re going with things and where we’ll be going as far as like conventions and conferences. But generally speaking, I’m just excited to be a part of this and I’m excited to actually have my business run better than I ever thought it could, honestly.

Bill Neumann: Dave, I like what you said about being a flashlight into your business. That was great.

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, we talked a lot about predictive analytics. So, you know, it’s, we have to understand the past, that’s critical, because we understand where we sit today. But what’s, what’s the most impactful thing about what we’re doing, is we’re actually helping you understand what to do in the future. And that’s where the differentiation really, I think, shines is just the ability to help you prioritize and move your business forward and skate where the puck is going, not where it is today. So, you know, where are we? So we we are going to be at Dykema. And quite honestly, we’re not marketing all that much. You know, we already have several hundred locations in our backlog we’re working through right now to get live. We’ve got a tremendous group of beta testers that we’ve identified as industry leaders that are giving us real-time feedback to the product. We want to make sure this thing is just as good as it possibly can be. And so we’re really focused, honestly, in the near term on just data is the first part of it. I think what you’re going to see from us coming forward is going to be leveraging AI to drive automation, right? And to kind of remove expenses from practices. And we’re already working on that in the second half of this year. So the best way to do it is to get in touch with myself or go to our website, clarifyhealth.ai, LinkedIn, et cetera. And love to have a conversation and put folks that are interested in our queue for onboarding most likely this fall.

Dr. David Janash: Excellent. We even have vendors that are lined up that want to offer their APIs into Clarify so that we can prove to their customers the ROI that Clarify or their own product offers via Clarify’s data analytics. And again, removing the barriers between the various, you know, siloed data sets that exist out there.

Elliot Zibel: Yeah, I think that’s a good point, actually, Bill, that I would leave as a call to vendors. So I’m having conversations with more than 10 CEOs of like the vendor community of which I, you know, believe are some of the more impactful ROI driven technologies and what I’m saying to them is guys, What if I could show your clients that, on average, when you implement, let’s just say, patient prism, right? Amal is an advisory board member of Clarify, so we’ll give him a nice plug here. So if I can show Amal and Amal’s clients that when you sign up for patient prism, your call answer rates go from 65 to 80. That’s cool. But let’s actually translate that back to EBITDA and say, hey, you can drive 20% EBITDA growth in your business if you put patient prism in. And by the way, if I can put that in front of the CEO of the company, not necessarily the head of marketing, who may or may not be able to really get dollars allocated to things they want to do, that’s the power from a vendor perspective. So my note to all vendors is, if you don’t have an API, need to get one. And if you don’t understand ROI and the ways that you drive ROI, we can help you with that. But I think it’s super, I think the value of Clarify is not, as I started it, right, as every company started, morphs and evolves. I started it for the dental groups and then I started realizing, wow, this is actually in some ways like a marketplace, right, where we can actually vet the vendors and make sure that the ones we bring into our platform are driving ROI. We can show how they drive ROI, and we can translate that to the C-suite so that the vendors can get their products and their stories on a better footing and just a clearer way explaining to leadership teams about, again, how should they be allocating their capital or their time. So that’s really something that I really look forward. We’re going to be announcing a lot of partnerships over the next four or five months with vendors. And those vendor data sets, like I can tell you from being CEO, I never saw any of them. And they’re really valuable, really, really valuable. And so our job is to then translate those data sets and the impact that those products have had with their customers. Because we’re measuring that, right? We can quantify that because we have their PMS system, their financials, we have their call answer, we have all their data. So we can easily show you, hey, here’s what the impact should be. And then we can track for you. Are you getting the impact that we thought you should get? So I think that’s really where this becomes really, honestly, a really great thing for the industry. And our core competency, what do we do? It’s ingesting data, normalizing data, and presenting it in a way that is understandable. And then fast forward to six months from now, it’ll be taking that data to drive automation of workflows to remove costs from the system.

Bill Neumann: So you heard that vendors, this isn’t just for DSOs and dental groups, you know, this is important to you as well. So, yeah, we’ll make sure it’s so it’s ClarifyHealth.ai is the website. And then I’ll drop both your LinkedIn handles in the show notes so people can reach out to either one or both of you. And like you mentioned, you’ll be at some upcoming shows. So get a demo there, at least get a chance to say hi to Dave and Elliot and find out more about what they’re doing at Clarify Health. Thank you both. This was great. And just hearing this over and over again, the fact that there’s not one place where groups can go to get to really capture that data. I mean, it’ll be it’ll be really nice because I mean, I’m sure that that’s a full time job unto itself just to gather data and then pull it out and then try and interpret it. Might be two or three full time jobs. Who knows? But, you know, the fact that Clarify Health is kind of doing all that and working in conjunction with vendors is great. So thank you both, Dr. David Janash and also Elliot Seibel for being here today. Great info. And until next time, I’m Bill Neumann and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.