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Mike Baird, CEO of Henry Schein One, discusses:
- Trends in the dental industry including AI, claims simplification, cost reduction, analytics and cloud.
- Challenges and inefficiencies that DSOs face such as standardization, management costs and resources, management of complex hardware and software needs.
- DSO market trends like medical interoperability, common disconnects between medical and dental leadership and responsibilities of software vendors in the future.
To find out more about Henry Schein One or any of their products visit https://henryscheinone.com.
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Full Transcript:
Bill Neumann:
Hey, I’d like to welcome everybody back to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Newman and we are approaching episode 100. So, we’re pretty excited. We thank really the audience for their loyalty and jumping on every single episode. And whether you’re watching us on YouTube or listening in on Apple or Google or Spotify or wherever you listen in, we really appreciate that. Without an audience, we wouldn’t have a show and we always have great guests, so that’s why you keep coming back. And we are going to have a conversation today with Mike Baird. He is the CEO of Henry Schein One. He’s been in that role for a little bit over two years. So, Mike, welcome to the Group Dentistry Now show.
Mike Baird:
Fantastic. Great to be with you, Bill.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, we were talking a little bit before we started to record this about Henry Schein One and just the breadth of products and services that Henry Schein hats, right? So, you’ve got Henry Schein and then we have Henry Schein One. So, I’d love for my first off to give us a little bit of your background prior to joining Henry Schein One and then what you’ve been doing in that role with Henry Schein One. But then, we probably need to talk about what it is specifically that Henry Schein One does versus Henry Schein.
Mike Baird:
Yeah, great, great questions. Well, thank you for that. I’ve been here, as you said, two years. My prior background, I’ve been in healthcare for about 12 or 13 years now, primarily in the telemedicine space. So, I founded a telemedicine company focused on helping healthcare institutions, hospitals with acute care, ended up running a company, American Well, that was one of the largest telehealth companies. Took it public in 2020. And then, the opportunity came to join Henry Schein One. And I was very intrigued by the opportunity and we’ll talk about why Henry Schein One.
Mike Baird:
But my background is primarily in technology, in cloud and SaaS companies and driving healthcare companies, which was a really great fit for what we’re trying to do at Henry Schein One. As you know, Henry Schein does a lot of things. Primarily, they’re distributor for just about everything you would need in a dental office. And over the last 25 years, they’ve managed to acquire a number of software companies, but really hadn’t done enough to really bring those assets together.
Mike Baird:
And the launch of Henry Schein One, which is a joint venture between KKR, a large private equity firm, and then Henry Schein was to really build a software-first, software-focused business to make sure to deliver what dental practices need in the way of technology and only technology. So, all we do is software. Every single software asset that was once part of Henry Schein has been brought together at Henry Schein One. And that particular focus on the word one is critical. We have over 70 different software products around the world where we’re number one in 12 countries.
Mike Baird:
Obviously, we play very heavily in the practice management space, but we also have a number of other assets. And our ultimate goal is to try to bring those assets together in a portfolio of products that really meet all the software needs of a dental practice. And so, that’s really what we reform for and what we’re trying to do.
Bill Neumann:
So, Henry Schein One in essence is really the technology side of, well, Henry Schein but then there’s that partnership. So, JV has KKR as well involved.
Mike Baird:
That’s right, 100% focused on driving software. And today, we’re fortunate to be the largest dental software company in the world.
Bill Neumann:
Wow. Okay. I did not know that. That’s good. So, we look at what’s going on in the dental industry. What are some trends that you’re seeing currently? And then, what do you expect to see in the near future? And my guess is this is going to be technology or software-focused.
Mike Baird:
For sure. It has to be. I think I would actually start with our founding mission is that idea to connect all the technology in the dental practice as one, really bring those assets together. I think if you are a dentist, and I work with lots of dentists, a lot of my family members are in the dental field. You could have 10 different vendors to bring in all the various software assets. But wouldn’t it be nice if you just had one?
Mike Baird:
And if you could bring it all together, if it worked intelligently the way you would expect it to, I think that push for what we would call an enterprise-based software solution that really meets the needs of practice from end to end is definitely an emerging trend and something that we feel like we are uniquely poised to deliver.
Mike Baird:
But beyond us and looking just at our strategy, I think there’s a number of other big trends that we’re seeing. First and foremost, high point is the cloud. I think the cloud has historically been less visible in dentistry. I think dentists are used to using software that’s installed on a computer in the closet somewhere. But when you think about your average practice with a handful of clinicians and front desk support and a dentist, ortho, really, I think the last thing they want to be doing is supporting a server in their closet.
Mike Baird:
And you look at why cloud-based businesses have thrived over the last decade in virtually every single other industry. And it’s because of that idea that you really can have the simplicity of the cloud. Someone else deals with upgrades, someone else deals with security, someone else deals with making sure that these things work very nicely together. You move away from highly customized software that really works across broad settings.
Mike Baird:
So, if you look at products like Microsoft Office 365, if you look at Salesforce and the way that’s grown, if you even look at things like the Adobe Creative Cloud, we’re seeing this trend away from on-premise software towards cloud. And only does it make it so that you never have to deal with updates. You’ve always got your data backed up, you never have to worry about security. It’s much easier to secure something in the cloud than it is in 130,000 different dental offices in the country. It really drives that stability and simplicity.
Mike Baird:
But it also now enables other things you can do because once your data’s in the cloud and you can get all of it in one place, well, now we have other things we can start to do. So, the next trend I would point to would be analytics. So, now that we have not only practice data from one or two or three practices, but 100s of 1000s of practices gathered together in the cloud, well, now we can start to look at analytics, not only at a practice level or a group practice level but even someday looking at trends comparing cross industries.
Mike Baird:
So, imagine if you were able to say, “How does my practice look versus other practices in the state of the Utah or in Mountain West or in the north, east south?” Et cetera. That intelligence I think will be critical for practices to start to really zero in on the ways to be successful and to find the best way to have clinical excellence. We’ve seen this in my prior work, in healthcare being a very common trend. I think it also mirrors up very nicely with the trend of DSOs and group practices that we see in a big way.
Mike Baird:
Obviously, if you’re trying to manage multiple of practices, it becomes really necessary to know how does practice one, two, and three compare with 10, 11, and 12. And so, we see that as being a major trend and one that we’ve started to invest in a big way to make sure we have analytic solutions for our customers. We think this really helps practices do their daily huddle and figure out ways to optimize the day-in and day-out of their business.
Mike Baird:
The next trend I would probably highlight would be everything around cost reduction. I think every practice out there’s trying to find ways to reduce their overall cost load and then drive more profit. We think technology can help with that in a big way. I think of a relatively simple application we launched with Voice Perio. So, the fact that the computer can actually listen in and capture those measurements very quickly means I’ve now saved hygienist time so they can be more productive helping patients as opposed to having to enter numbers in on a computer. So, I think looking for ways to drive cost reductions in the office.
Mike Baird:
And then, the last big trend I would highlight, and we’re happy to talk more about these if you’ve got questions but would be AI. So, AI has long been one of these things we hear about all the time. Elon Musk is out there talking about how AI is going to take over the world. To date, it’s been relatively slow adoption across many industries, but we’re starting to see very tangible applications in clinical fields. So, today AI is great, I can ask my Siri to turn on the lights or set up an appointment for me or whatever it may be.
Mike Baird:
We’re probably a long way from what we would think of as sentient AI that drives our cars for us and does other things. But in dental, you look at something like imaging where we have millions of dental records, and an AI can go through and scan all of that and start to see trends. And we find that those algorithms are actually much better at diagnosing ailments and carries and other things than the human eye. And by the way, this is really good for patients and for dental providers.
Mike Baird:
Patients benefit because they can find and identify issues much earlier than you might have otherwise, providers like this because they obviously want to be able to have the right treatment recommendations and care plans for their patients. So, this is an example where we’re starting to see high tech coming into the dental practice, and again, I’m biased, but we see that coming together through technology. So, those are a couple of the trends that I’m seeing and happy to elaborate on any of those if you’d like, Bill.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great, Mike. We had recently had Melissa Marquez from Jarvis Analytics who’s now, Jarvis being part of Henry Schein One, and that analytics trend is pretty interesting. You’ve got the data and there’s data out there. We know it’s out there, so you have to gather it and then you have to be able to take that, interpret it, and then it has to be actionable. You can have a lot of data, if you don’t act on it doesn’t really matter. So, there’s a lot of interesting things there you could dive pretty deep on.
Bill Neumann:
And then, to your point, AI was the last thing that you mentioned, but that seems to be all the talk in the industry. But as we talk about AI, I think still a lot of people don’t necessarily know what it means for their practices or for their groups.
Mike Baird:
Well, just to follow up on that on analytics as an example, it’s technically possible for any dentist to try and go and export a dataset and write some SQL queries to figure out how that works. But again, that’s not their expertise. What we try to do at scale when we’re serving 1000s upon 1000s of practices, we know what those reports should look like, and by the way, we can make sure that they’re accurate. If you make a little error as a dentist in your SQL query, that’s going to have a big impact on you. When we’re doing that 1000s upon 1000s of times every single week is a standardized report. It really makes it just much simpler for a practice to see that and to be able to track that over time.
Mike Baird:
On the AI side, it’s been really fun to see, just in the last month or so, we’ve seen a number of companies get FDA class two approval for their AI solutions. This is really exciting and I highlight that because when you start talking about FDA approval, this isn’t just a theory, it’s not a white paper. These are solutions that are in the wild today being used in practices. And you’ll see us rolling this out very shortly embedded in our Dentrix and other platforms.
Mike Baird:
And we think once dentists try it out, they will never want to go back. It’s just really, why wouldn’t you want that assist to help you make sure you’re helping serve your patients and having the best clinical outcomes possible?
Bill Neumann:
So, you talked about your mission statement, which is pretty bold in my opinion because there is a lot of technology out there and some technology doesn’t talk to other technology, it doesn’t integrate. And when you start to really think about everything that goes on in dental office, that’s a pretty big task. So, tell me how does Henry Schein One go about trying to do that?
Mike Baird:
Where we think we’re quickly positioned to do this, there are a number of arenas of software that dentist deal with, obviously, first and foremost is the practice management platform, 99% of practices used that today. I know there’s still a few places that try to get by with paper charts, but the reality is it’s the operating system for the practice. If you look at other applications like what we call patient relationship management, a lot of the marketing platforms and campaign drivers, well, that’s becoming increasingly key for dentists to engage their patient base.
Mike Baird:
If you look at your online presence, what you do with a website and what you do to manage your reputation online, obviously, that’s critical, when you look at things like your claims and then how you’re processing it. So, these are different areas that are all highly related. And so, the best analogy that I always like to use, if you think about something like Microsoft Office, 10 years ago, we would always wait for the newest version of Excel 97 to come out and we would all rush to Best Buy and get the new version of Word or whatever it is.
Mike Baird:
Today with the simple subscription, I buy that whole platform and there might be applications like Teams that you think, “Well, why am I ever going to need Teams?” And then, suddenly there’s a pandemic and we all use Teams pretty much all day long. But these applications, Outlook, Excel, Word, PowerPoint, so on and so forth, while they’re all very different, they’re all intertwined where it matters. You have the same password across all of them, a single sign-on as it were.
Mike Baird:
When I want to create an appointment in Outlook, it syncs to my phone and across all those devices, when I want to share a document, those commonalities, the user experience and the user interface is very similar across all those applications. And so, once you’ve learned how to use PowerPoint, while it’s not that hard to learn how to use Word as an example, that same trend that we all witnessed happened really about a decade ago whether you use the Google Suite or Microsoft, we think is happening in dental.
Mike Baird:
Obviously, if you’re going to have a very robust claims application and the process that’s our ways, you’ve got to be tightly integrated with your practice management system. And we do that today. Obviously, a lot of people use our claim systems. Well, when I have an appointment canceled in my PMS and I want to figure out the right patients to fill that, well, why wouldn’t I want a very tight connection between my patient software, my patient marketing software, or when I’m trying to build a campaign and push that out and affect my online reputation. These are all interrelated tasks.
Mike Baird:
And so, to the extent that there is something that helps bring those together where we think the more that we can drive similar user experience, unified authentication and identities across that unified data. We talk about things like Jarvis Analytics, today a lot of that’s around some of the key clinical outcomes. But look, I should be able to use that same Jarvis data on my claims data and I should look at it on how well my campaigns perform and so on and so forth.
Mike Baird:
So, we really believe that all these applications have common threads and we are uniquely poised to bring that together, given the wide variety of software applications we have. Most people don’t even realize that Henry Schein One is developing and supporting 70 different software applications around the world. That’s probably too many. We’re actually working on streamlining that portfolio a little bit, but the ones that matter in each of those categories, we would love to see those work seamlessly.
Mike Baird:
And I envision a world very soon where you basically buy your Dental 360 platform of some sort that has all the applications you need and maybe there’s something that you don’t think that you need, but as time evolves and as you have more needs in your practice, it’s there ready for you.
Bill Neumann:
And I think to your point, one of the big challenges I think across all the industries and certainly in dental is the retention and then also this trying to find new employees and part of the workforce disappeared and didn’t come back. And so, we’re training people that may not have any dental experience to handle front office tasks or regional manager tasks. So, when you talk about the fact that the systems feel very comfortable, they’re similar. And so, I would think the onboarding process and ongoing training would be much easier.
Mike Baird:
We take some of these things for granted. This is a silly story that I’ll share really quick. My mother-in-law thinks that she’s no good at technology. And in training her over time on how to use these applications, I thought this was really funny where eventually I said, “Hey, you need to save the document.” She goes, “Is that the little Utah icon in the top?” And so, I recognize that as a, it’s a floppy disk that we’ve used 20 years ago, but to her, that’s the state of Utah and that’s how she remembers it.
Mike Baird:
Well, when you go across different applications and you’re suddenly having different icons and different ways of doing things, that is a lot of complexity to ask someone to do. We take that for granted if we’re in an industry and if we use applications every single day. But to your point with the great resignation, with the labor shortages that we have, anytime you have someone new coming in and we expect them to learn 10 different applications, each of which has their own icons, their own menu, nesting and structure, that’s complication.
Mike Baird:
And that’s part of what makes it hard for offices to reduce their costs and focus not on the technology, but on treating patients. And so, to the extent that we can simplify that, that’s our job. I view that as our mission to make it so that we let dentists and practice professionals do what they do best, which is to serve the patient and not have to worry about what does that icon mean up there? Is that the state of Utah? Does that mean Save? That’s thing we need to focus on.
Bill Neumann:
That’s funny. I like what you said about really the practice management software, the PMS being that the operating system, so that’s almost like your central point or your hub and then these other technologies that surround it or enhance it or work well with it. But that’s something whether it’s Dentrix Enterprise or Ascend or Dentrix that we all know. That seems to me the basis where everything else is built from almost.
Mike Baird:
That’s correct. And then, look, I should say, as much as I believe that we can build these common applications and you can buy that whole suite of products from Henry Schein One, we also have that robust data platform that others can tap into. So, if you really have another program you love and it works really well and you clearly need practice management data, our job is to make that seamless as well. And so, we’ve never had more connections than we do today with other competitors and collaborators in the field. And that’s also really important that we support that because ultimately, we’re building standards that the industry can use.
Bill Neumann:
So, Henry Schein One works with quite a few DSOs and emerging dental groups. So, Mike, what are you and your team, what are you seeing as far as challenges, inefficiencies, things like that your customers may be experiencing specifically in multisite?
Mike Baird:
Yeah, well I think number one, if you are a DSO, you have to think about what sets you apart from the other 1000 DSO out there. They’re everywhere. This is the new hot thing to start a DSO. And I’ve seen DSOs come up at a number of ways. Sometimes it’s through a particular culture, the way they treat their providers, how they train them. A lot of them come at this from a process and efficiency standpoint, and it’s through a technology specialty. But I think there are very common threads that we see across virtually all DSOs. The first is standardization of some form.
Mike Baird:
If you’re going to get efficiency, that’s something that DSOs look at. So, how can we eliminate the challenge of different PMS systems? Generally speaking, we see the standardizing on a tech stack of some sort because that helps them drive alignment and standardization on workflow and processes. It gets easier for them the claims in the same way. It lets them centralize their data and start to do analytics and organization-wide reporting, and those familiar interfaces of some sort will also help them maximize their efficiency and profitability as well.
Mike Baird:
And that’s really where economies of scale come along. So, I think number one is standardization. There are some DSOs that actually, their calling card is the reverse of that, you be you and do your practice exactly that you’ve always done it, and we’ll try to help with things like purchasing or whatever it may be. But ultimately, the DSOs that I believe are having the greatest impact tend to drive towards some level of standardization.
Mike Baird:
The second area that I would highlight is just the management of cost and resource. I think some of that ties to standardization, but being able to drive similar processes, they tend to focus on very robust claims management services of some sorts. So, they can use that. They can really optimize their claims, reimbursement rates and making sure they can collect everything they need to collect. Often having some singular database and consolidate reporting, which again comes from that standardization point, lets them be able to compare offices in an Apple’s to Apple’s way.
Mike Baird:
I can now use something like Jarvis, overlay that across a variety of practices, and say, “No, now wait a minute. Your claims reimbursement rate is very different than your neighbor in the same state, in the same city down the road. Well, why is that? We should be able to check into that.” Or the various cases that you have. What’s your case acceptance rate? Well, wait, those are very, very different. Why is that? And I think when they leverage that technology, they can really drill into managing their cost and resources.
Mike Baird:
Obviously, that extends to things like procurement as well, that’s less on the technology side. Folks love to work with Henry Schein in general because they can get scale on their purchasing. I would say the third area that ties across this as well is managing their complex hardware need. And so, we see cloud as being a very key differentiator for DSOs. And if they’re, or cloud solutions today, like Dentrix Ascend like our dentally product over in Europe, these products are outselling on-premise solutions by roughly three or four to one today. The future is cloud. We know that.
Mike Baird:
There may be lots of practices that haven’t converted to that, but if you look at new sales, far and away, people are buying cloud. Well, why would a DSO do that? It’s really simple. They no longer have to maintain servers and hardware in 100 or 200 locations and they can just rely on their solution in the cloud, that reduces the risk of security issues as an example, as opposed to having 200 sites that can each be a threat factor. Well, now I have one and ideally, in time as we had more and more security, we recently got SOC two certification.
Mike Baird:
We’re working on multifactor authentication. These are things that make it so that security becomes less of an issue. Those all lower the complexity of what a DSO is trying to manage in a multi-office setup. So, all of those are ways that we see technology really helping DSO. And then, the last one that I see in particular working with vendors, large or small, is the advent of the customer success manager.
Mike Baird:
When you have a relationship with someone like Henry Schein One, we have customers that are using 15, 20 different solutions from us. Being able to have that extra service and support a dedicated account manager who can make sure that it all works correctly is a critical difference that DSOs really expect. That’s something that we’ve invested heavily in. We’ve added roughly 50 or so of these customer success managers and that is really helping make sure that DSOs can get all the support they need to make all their technology work together as it should.
Mike Baird:
The last one that I would point out that parts a little bit from technology, but that is related is we’re also seeing a major market trend for the future on the interoperability of medical data and dental data. We’ve long known that the dental record and that dental medical data is highly correlated to many outcomes that we see in our standard health record. And yet historically, it’s been perhaps more complex than we would like to integrate those. So, we are seeing a major trend, especially with the largest DSOs, to look for ways to integrate that data and or leverage it in some form or fashion.
Mike Baird:
In particular, if DSOs have relationships with health systems of any sort, where increasingly, we’re getting asked for ways to be able to read electronic healthcare records from a health system and bring that in as part of the dental record or vice versa, being able to have that dental record for a patient be easily accessible for a clinician or a doctor of some sort to see the full case of the patient. So, this is another big area that we’re seeing. Historically, Henry Schein One and others have used technologies like HL7 that make it so you can share that data, but generally, that’s an effort that takes time there.
Mike Baird:
There’s work that has to be done to set up interoperability between those systems. We’re investing in a lot of both platforms and technologies to make that simpler to try and remove some of the barriers. So, you may think, “Hey, I would love to see the epic record on this patient,” but then when you get 2000 pages of every medication that they’ve taken since they were a toddler, their immunizations and other things, some of that might be useful, some of it may not be useful. So, what are ways that we as a key stakeholder in the information of health can help make that simpler, that we can connect things easier?
Mike Baird:
So, one example that we’re working on, we recently got approved to be in the Epic App Orchard. So, this is an application framework. Think of apps on the Epic platform where you will eventually be able to get data from Dentrix very easily through that App Orchard framework in a standardized manner. So, you don’t have to invest in major integrations where we hire a bunch of IT people to build that database connectivity. It’s already an application you can just download.
Mike Baird:
So, I think that’s a big trend for DSO to think about is what’s their data interoperability strategy and how are they going to be able to do that in such a way to get the healthcare data they need, to share dental data when they need it, but also to be able to use the industry-leading dental platforms like Dentrix in their practices. Let me pause there. That was a lot, but any of those you’d like me to go deeper on?
Bill Neumann:
Well, I definitely want to get back to the medical-dental integration because I think there’s a lot to unpack there and it’s really important. It’s also as I think most providers that have tried to do this, now it’s pretty complicated too, but you touched on something about the account managers at Henry Schein One. And so, we talk quite a bit to the people, our audience at Group Dentistry Now, our members. And what we hear time and time again is that the product or the solution is one thing, but if you don’t have the support and the education behind it, it doesn’t matter.
Bill Neumann:
So, you can have the best widget or software, but if you don’t have somebody that can help teach you that and support you, it doesn’t really matter. So, I think what I’m trying to say is the training and the education, that account manager and that support is as important as the technology behind it. And it’s nice to know that you have dedicated account representatives from Henry Schein One that’ll support those 70 different software solutions you have globally.
Mike Baird:
Yeah, you’re spot on. If you think about a DSO that goes out and buys four different practice groups, well, they’re all going to have different computers, different network applications in place. And as you said, you can have the world’s best option, but if it’s on a PC that doesn’t have enough memory as an example, or maybe one of these offices has a bunch of other things, they’re running their accounting software at the same time as their dental software and there’s some gaps there. Having someone that can help troubleshoot that with you in real, help make sure that you are up to spec with the recommendations in the industry. These are very critical things that you can’t just…
Mike Baird:
Sometimes we think of dental offices almost like a home user. Well, you just go to the store, buy the software, install it yourself, it’s going to be fine. But that doesn’t actually work particularly in a DSO, which is a very complicated large enterprise. They need help to make sure that we check all the boxes around security and stability and throughput on your data and making these things work in the way that they need to. And our customer success managers are a critical part of that.
Bill Neumann:
So, now back to the point about medical dental integration or interoperability, again, a lot of talk around it. You see some different models forming. You see some DSOs in particular where you have an integrated practice, so you have primary care and then you have dental. So, in that case, you may have general dental, you may have orthodontics and pediatric, you could have all that under one roof. So, that’s one scenario that you see. And then, in some cases, you also see where there may be vision involved too. So, you may have that thrown in there. So, that’s one.
Bill Neumann:
And then, the other you see is, for an example would be a ProHealth Dental. So, where they are partnering with healthcare systems, so they’re really providing the dental services but they’re not necessarily co-located. Maybe in some cases they are, but they’re referring, so their dentists are maybe doing blood pressure and checking for certain things that they can refer to primary care. And then, primary care should be checking for oral issue, oral systemic issues as well and forwarding those over to dental.
Bill Neumann:
What do you see? Do you see any models that seem to be performing really well, or is it too early to tell?
Mike Baird:
Well, I definitely like that idea, the ProHealth example and some of these affiliations back with medical providers. You’re starting to see very simple medical screening things that you can do in a dental visit on a regular basis. Often, they’ll check for various things in the mouth that can be indicators of oral cancers as an example. Obviously, there’s heavy links between things like peri disease and cardiac disease. I think ultimately, our job is to try to be where the market’s going to be and help support this. I think the first wave of thought on this was, well, my hospital uses EHR X, whether that’s Athena or Cerner or Epic or whatever. So, just build me a connection.
Mike Baird:
But the reality is most DSOs, if you look at their patients, they probably go to a lot of different medical facilities. And so, our job isn’t so much the one-to-one connection, it’s the one-to-many and thinking about that. And so, increasingly, I believe that the future will be health information exchanges of some sort. So, it’s less about, well, how do I connect a dentist and a practice? Do I need to build a connection to each of the four hospitals in my town? Well, that might be a little bit tough.
Mike Baird:
Or is there a way that we can help drive these medical information exchanges? And so, we’re working with vendors like Redox or Health Gorilla, the Care Alliance and Care Equality, I think that’s Commonwealth is the one that I was referring to, to figure out ways to be able to have bulk data exchanges on a one-to-many basis. And I think that will be critical so that if you are a ProHealth to your example and you work with 10 different institutions, knowing that we each use a standard and can do data interchange on a client ID number of some sort will make it easier for them to help.
Mike Baird:
And usually, in that definition, we can actually go in and say, “This is the data that I need.” Because one of the challenges, if you ever talk to a doctor that’s used Epic or any of the major EHRs, there’s so much to a patient that frankly would overwhelm a provider or a dentist. And so, figuring out how to filter that and extract just what you need.
Mike Baird:
These are the things that we’re thinking about as we work very closely with dentist, with health systems and frankly, with a lot of thought leaders in the marketplace to try and shape a future where we believe we will increasingly see more of that interchange between medical leadership and dental practitioners.
Bill Neumann:
So, as we start to wrap this up, so this’ll be end, and make sure I didn’t miss anything, Mike. I know we covered quite a bit there in relatively short period of time some interesting, I mean really interesting things regarding where the industry is headed. And a lot of it is technology. When you look at innovation, and again, there’s innovation on the clinical product side of things, but where I see a lot of the advancement in the industry, and this is recent, this is within the past, I’d say five to 10 years, it seems really focused on the technology side, whether it’s creating efficiencies, doing more with less people, being able to look at analytics and maybe take a look at what’s going on, whether it’s patient recall.
Bill Neumann:
You come from telehealth. There’s teledentistry now. There are platforms like that. I know Henry Schein One has those. Talk about responsibility. So, what does Henry Schein One’s responsibility really to drive this advancement and how do you do that as an organization?
Mike Baird:
That’s a great question, Bill. To me, the operative word is simplification. Technology for technology’s sake doesn’t actually help anybody. So, look, I’m a tech geek. I’ve been in technology for 25 years of my career across various industries and sometimes, we have a tendency to overengineer or throw technology people. If you came to my house and saw all the things I’ve done and my wife just wants to pull her hair out, this doesn’t actually help me. It doesn’t make my life any better. Now I think it’s cool because I’m a tech nerd, but I think at the end of the day, our job is to make things easy.
Mike Baird:
I like to use an analogy in this. If you’ve ever used Uber, Lyft or any of those systems, it massively changed the way that we interacted with a very rudimentary service, getting in a car and moving somewhere. Today, I push a button from wherever I am, I can get an instant update on where they are. I get into that car, it drives me somewhere. I get out. I never exchange money or credit card. I didn’t have to look at a map and figure out how to give them directions to me.
Mike Baird:
I get out, I’m automatically paying them. I automatically get a receipt that can be forwarded straight to my cost reimbursement system with my assistant. They knew exactly how to get me and where to go with their GPS. To me, that is a frictionless transaction. If you compare that with the dental world and when I go to pay for something and how long it takes to get a claim reimbursed, both for the practice and for the patient. These are things that today are not frictionless.
Mike Baird:
And so, I think ultimately, whether we are trying to simplify the user interface and make it so that our applications all look really similar and easy to use, if I’m working on ways to streamline the claims process to make that happen faster, if I’m looking at technologies like that Perio Voice tool that we have, that makes it very easy for one assistant to just take your Perio readings very quickly and not have to pull someone else away from a patient to plug numbers into a computer. These are all examples of ways that we’re trying to dramatically simplify what happens in the office.
Mike Baird:
And so, my view is if we bring technology in and it simplifies what you do, you no longer have to write your own queries. We have a very simple interface called Jarvis that every morning will tell you all the data that you need with the charts. And it’s similar every day. When we simplify that, we let dentist practice dentistry. They get to focus on patients and they don’t have to worry about technology. They don’t have to worry if the server’s working in the closet, if we forgot to upgrade it to the latest version of software.
Mike Baird:
If I need to worry about some security hack that’s happening, we want to take the technology away from their worry box. And I think the more we do that, that’s simplicity, this is what delights dentists and lets them treat patients.
Bill Neumann:
I think that’s a great way to finish things up. What I would say to the audience is that working with Henry Schein One, I was at Henry Schein’s national sales meeting relatively recently, not too long ago. And the one thing I’ll say is you probably don’t know as a provider or a DSO operator, the breadth of products and services that Henry Schein One has to offer. So, when you think Dentrix, that’s one of 70 offerings that they have. So, I would really take a look at what they have to offer.
Bill Neumann:
Henryscheinone.com, right? Pretty easy. You go there and you can find things out or one of the account representatives that has that knowledge base. But any final words, Mike, before we sign off?
Mike Baird:
Look, really appreciate taking the time, Bill. Great to be with you and with your audience. Folks can reach me pretty easily at Henry Schein One. I actually welcome your feedback and we’re all still learning where this industry wants to go. And so, find me at Dykema, find me at DSO, find me at one of the shows. And I would love to get your feedback as we collectively try to improve the industry and just really with you and your listeners today, Bill.
Bill Neumann:
Okay, we heard it. Mike said don’t be shy, stop and see him or reach out to him on LinkedIn, or you can find him certainly at any one of the numbers DSO shows that are coming up. So, appreciate your time. We had Mike Baird, CEO of Henry Schein One. And until next time. This is Bill Neumann for the Group Dentistry. Now show. Thanks for listening in.
