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

Marcelle Parrish, Chief Marketing Officer of Aspen Dental, & Michael Shuman, Chief Executive Officer of Membersy, discuss the impact of dental membership.

Marcelle and Michael discuss:

Current trends with the dental insurance market
How membership plans are playing a role in expanding access
Why now the right time to implement a membership plan
How to ensure consistency throughout all of your practices
Complexity of offering a membership plan
Much more

To find out more about Membersy visit https://membersy.com/. To schedule a demo visit https://bit.ly/44N0lLa .

If you would like to find out more about joining Aspen Dental visit https://careers.aspendental.com/us/en .

If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube.

Our podcast series brings you dental support organization and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Welcome, everyone, to The Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann, and as always, thanks for joining us today. We really appreciate it. We have two guests that we are proud to have on the show. Whether you’ve been to a DSO meeting lately, you may have seen them there before or not, but you’re going to get a chance to really get the know to them today. Thank you to Membersy for sponsoring this podcast. Couldn’t do it without you, and we have the CEO of Membersy with us today, Michael Shuman. Michael, welcome.

Michael Shuman:

Thank you, Bill. Thank you so much for having us. Happy to be here.

Bill Neumann:

Michael is kind enough to bring on Marcelle Parrish. She is the Chief Marketing Officer for Aspen Dental. Marcelle, welcome to the show.

Marcelle Parrish:

Thank you. A pleasure to be here.

Bill Neumann:

Great to have you both, and we’ll start off with you, Marcelle. Love to get a little bit of your background, and then if you wouldn’t mind, I mean, most people know who Aspen Dental is, but maybe you can get us up to speed on what’s currently going on at Aspen.

Marcelle Parrish:

Hey, Bill, thanks so much. It’s a pleasure to be here. My background is primarily in direct-to-consumer digital businesses with large brands. I started off at Johnson & Johnson, went to eBay, and then previously at Ralph Lauren, but what I loved about Aspen was it was the opportunity to combine a lot of the digital and marketing expertise to create and be part of this powerful brand. Aspen has done an incredible job over the last 25 years creating a branded network of dentists that provide incredible access to care. They break down the barriers.

When I met with the team here, I was so intrigued by the DNA that was so core to Aspen and that purpose-driven essence, and I felt like this was the perfect place for me to be. I’m continue driving an amazing brand and connecting with patients in a way that I hadn’t been able to in my past. It was much more direct-to-consumer, so this feels more personal. It feels much more connected to the purpose of Aspen, so it’s been an incredible two years and I’m excited for many more here.

Bill Neumann:

Michael, maybe a little bit about your background, CEO of Membersy. Can you talk a little bit about how you got from… Maybe just short bio and then where you are now and then talk about Membersy?

Michael Shuman:

Yeah, I would be happy to. I entered the health benefits arena about 13 years ago. I previously worked for a health benefit administrator in the Dallas area and took on the opportunity to join Membersy back in 2016. We in a lot of ways feel like we’ve been at the forefront of the membership movement. I had the opportunity to join originally as the executive vice president of sales in the partner success side of the business, and ultimately had a chance to become the CRO over the span of a few years. Most recently last year in April, I was named CEO and it’s been just a heck of a run for us.

We’ve been so excited to continue our mission, which is in some ways very similar to Aspen’s, which is providing quality access to affordable dental care. We’ve been fortunate enough to partner with a group like Aspen and various other DSOs across the country to help facilitate that access to affordable care. We feel as though it’s been a great mission and it continues to be a very hot topic in the industry today.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, it sure is a hot topic and I think it’s great. We’re going to talk about the impact of dental memberships for dental practices in DSOs, so I like the title of this, Growing Together: The Impact of Dental Membership. Perfect, and we have both of you here. We have Membersy and we have Aspen, so I would love to focus on a couple of questions here, and Marcelle, we can start with you. What current trends are you seeing in the dental insurance market and that impact that that’s had on your patients?

Marcelle Parrish:

Yeah, Bill, that’s a great question. What we’re seeing more so than ever is cost is truly a barrier to care. Over the last 25 years, we’ve seen this become an issue and patients are now more than ever delaying care, having more pain, more costs associated with not being able to get the care they need because there’s a lack of insurance. When you look at the state of America, over 76 million Americans don’t have dental insurance, and our research shows that because of that, dentistry is the number one skipped medical appointment out there than anything else.

For us, it was important for us to consider, how do we break these barriers down? How do we really find a way to service our patients that don’t have insurance? Whether it’s through giving back with some of our larger programs of days of service where we’ve given about 22 million-plus dollars of free dentistry service to veterans and their family members in need, we wanted to take a step back and hear what our doctors needed to help support their patients. For us, Membersy made a lot of sense because a lot of our patients were saying, “How do we get this care without delaying?”

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Marcelle. Michael, I’d love to get some feedback from you as well. What are you seeing across some of your customers? What are they saying to you? I mean, do you… The membership plan seems like a great not just alternative, but a great really option for people that don’t have insurance or maybe do have insurance, but are looking for maybe more coverage.

Michael Shuman:

Yeah, a great question, and Marcelle touched on the number of uninsured patients across the country today and it’s an ever-growing number. When we first started the business back in 2015, the number of uninsured was roughly 30 to 35%, which has grown closer to 50% today. We had the unfortunate situation earlier this past year where so many employers that unfortunately had to make cuts and, therefore, there was continued to be a growing number of uninsured patients across the country. You now see a trend going on today where there’s hundreds of thousands of individuals who are going to be unfortunately potentially losing their Medicaid coverage as well. The membership program is certainly an opportunity to help fill that gap and bridge that gap from the uninsured to the insured. Ultimately, what our partners typically see is a different change of behavior oftentimes with the uninsured patient base.

Oftentimes with the uninsured patient base, oftentimes, unfortunately, it can be a one-and-done type of situation with those patients where they’re looking to come in, get their routine work done, and off they go, but membership programs have the opportunity to create more of a loyalty mechanism to keep those patients coming into the practice for the long term. Ultimately, the biggest thing is we want to ensure that we also provide an opportunity to help close treatment in a more effective way for the groups that we work with. That has certainly been at the forefront of the success around membership programs today.

Marcelle Parrish:

Michael, I want to touch on that really quickly because you’re exactly right. The compliance is so critical because so often our patients are just come in and they will have a quick emergency and because they can’t afford the treatment, they just leave. Then, that problem becomes worse and worse, and really the cost to them increases over time. It’s truly a health crisis, and to your point around that membership aspect, when they feel like they have the ability to come back in, complete that treatment, it really solves a multitude of problems. I think that loyalty aspect is something that’s so critical for us at Aspen as well.

Bill Neumann:

Marcelle, you mentioned earlier the 76 million Americans that don’t have dental insurance, so at Aspen, are you seeing or hearing from your patients more often that they either don’t have insurance, maybe have lost it and are looking for different options? What are you hearing out there from your clients, your patients?

Marcelle Parrish:

Absolutely. It’s really from our doctors telling us that more and more patients are coming into the office without insurance, so we’re seeing more of our patients finance more so than ever. There’s a lot of trepidation around, “I have a huge treatment plan. How am I going to afford this?” In talking to our doctors, they’ve been asking us, “How can we find a way to help these folks that don’t have insurance?: When we heard that across the board, especially from not only our doctors, but the office staff who connects with the patients, too, on a more intimate level sometimes where they’re saying, “Look, I really can’t afford this yet. How can I delay? I want to pa for it. I don’t have insurance.”

I think a lot of people in the economy have lost insurance, but also have given up. When you think about things that if you’re trying to save money, one of the things you give up first is dental insurance. It’s too expensive, and so finding a way for us to help these patients who’ve lost insurance, who don’t have access to insurance, or have put it off was really critical.

Bill Neumann:

Again, building off of what you’re telling me there, Marcelle, it seems like this is an interesting time. If we look at how… I think things have quickly changed with the economy in the past let’s say year, 18 months. What would you say, and Michael, I’d love to get your feedback as well, timing-wise, some of our audience may be thinking, “Okay, we either have a membership plan that we’re not utilizing well or we don’t have anything.” Would this be the right time to really implement a membership plan?

Marcelle Parrish:

That’s a great question, and the question is as you came out of COVID, we were seeing more and more people asking for this. Our doctors were saying, “Hey, we need some sort of solution,” and so we started investigating this just over a year ago because we wanted to ensure that we gave the best solutions to our doctors to provide that access to their patients. For us, we tested this. We are very methodical, very thoughtful in how we roll things out to our offices because we want to make sure it’s easy. It doesn’t add complexity. That’s a huge aspect that we think a lot about for our doctors, making things as simple as possible and as easy for them to sort of integrate into their daily operations.

We tested about a hundred different offices, and what we saw across the board was this was easy. It was much simpler than adding insurance in some places for the customer and the patient to understand. For us, after that test, we heard an even louder cry from doctors saying, “Hey, we want to do this in our office. How quickly can we get this for our patients?” It’s been really nice to see that, but again, to your point, the right time is really after we test it, we make sure it’s the right thing for our patients, it’s the right thing for our doctors, and then we scale across this vast network that we have.

Bill Neumann:

Michael, what do you say to that as far as timing-wise with dental membership plan? Are you getting more requests from DSOs and group practices out there looking for some options? Patients coming to them without insurance and looking for access to care?

Michael Shuman:

We definitely do. I’d love to say that the time is now. I think the time was a couple of years ago in a lot of cases to be honest with you, but with that said, the timing has to work for the group that we’re working with as well. I say that only because in a lot of ways, at least our partners, we take on the brunt of the implementation process and the workflows and creating the onboarding process for the membership program. With that said, it is a two-way street. We need our partners to be ready for that as well, so just in terms of how our partners are set up and ready to scale, that’s a big indicator whether or not they’re ready to take on a membership program as well.

Now, in general, absolutely the time is now to create a membership program, and you might see oftentimes that there’s DSOs and DPOs out there in the industry that have… they might even have disparate membership programs across multiple offices. A partner like us has the ability to help streamline that process and in a lot of ways standardize the process while still allowing autonomy and flexibility across offices and regions and states and so on and so forth. The timing is absolutely now from a consumer standpoint, but that said, the partners need to be onboard with their own timing as well. There’s a million different priorities that are going on in the industry today, and that’s certainly something that we all understand. The timing has to be right for the partner in that regard as well.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, great point, and you mentioned standardization a couple minutes ago. At Aspen, you have over a thousand dental practices, correct? I think it’s over a thousand now, so-

Marcelle Parrish:

And growing.

Bill Neumann:

… so standardization across a thousand-plus locations can be challenging, so can we talk about how you ensure that consistency? I’m sure Membersy can talk a little bit about how they help you, but Marcelle, talk about that because I know that’s super important to ask and you’re branded across all locations, which is not… I mean, it’s not unique, but it’s not common across dentistry. Some are branded and each location kind of does their own thing. Aspen’s different. You really have a lot of standardization and consistency, so talk about that and the importance. Was it easy to do that?

Marcelle Parrish:

Well, I think you’re exactly right. Aspen is unique in that we are the largest branded dentistry organization in America, and it’s been important for us to take that route because for us, the brand is the most critical thing and our brand is our patient experience. To your point, driving that consistency across all of our different organizations, from our office staff to the recruiting to the collateral, ensuring that patient experience is the best it could possibly be is critical to who we are as a brand. We enable our doctors to do that every day and we do so through training, ensuring that we have the right training, not only for our office staff of how to content with our patients, but also for our doctors.

Mentorship, we do doctor journey training where they come in and they go sort of the 101 doctor journey where they’re learning not only different skills from implant placement to how to place their… how to create their first crown and bridge implant to spending time in our Chicago office where we have extensive training facilities for them. That consistency, Bill, to your point, is so critical to the experience that we are able to deliver to our patients, and so for us, when we rolled out this membership program, we want it very connected to Aspen and how we delivered that care to the broader network that we have. What we liked about Membersy is that they branded this for us. It is really all about the Aspen Dental savings plan, and for us, that was critical. We didn’t want to bring a third party in. We really wanted this to be from us and delivered in a way that we knew the experience would live up to the standards that we have for our patients.

Bill Neumann:

Michael, talk a little bit about how you can assist with consistency and standardization.

Michael Shuman:

Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest reasons why membership programs were created and have become so prevalent is because with the uninsured patient base, there was an incredible amount of inconsistency in how they were treated and presented with treatment ultimately to move forward and continue with their dental work. What membership programs have really enabled is standardization across the board in terms of how uninsured patients are treated at the time of service. It also provides a baseline in terms of cost of how they’re going to be charged.

Oftentimes, and this isn’t necessarily related to Aspen or any of our partners, but years ago before membership programs had become so prevalent, there are so many times where there’s price negotiation on treatment, some verbal discounting, maybe just one-time discounts, things of that nature. It created more of a shopping around culture as opposed to a loyalty culture, so membership programs have become extremely prevalent because it does provide consistency across the board.

Then, there’s of course ways that we can help enable that through our trainings and our partnerships in the implementation and onboarding process for all the practices that we work with. We do so in collaboration with our partner to ensure that we’re adhering to their guidelines and ensuring that we work hand in hand with them to preach that consistency across the board.

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Michael. Marcelle, I forgot to ask you this question, but when you were going through the decision-making process and looking at different membership plan options, what went into that decision-making process? How did you ultimately partner with Membersy?

Marcelle Parrish:

Yeah, absolutely, Bill. It’s a great question. For us, security of our information and our patient information is critical, and compliance across states from a legal perspective is unbelievably important to us. When we were looking at the options out there and what we felt with Membersy was they were very focused on ensuring that security and that patient confidence that their information would be protected. For us, evaluating a partnership both on security, both on HIPAA compliance, both ensuring that they had that expertise as well to really know how to go into market was important. We wanted someone who’d done this before, they did it well, and they really first and foremost protected patient data. For us, we connected with Membersy and they hit all across the board all of those things that we were looking for.

Bill Neumann:

Thank you, Marcelle. Michael, a question about from an administrator perspective, the person at the practice or at the group that’s going to be handling this, what do you offer somebody like that? Going from not having anything to onboarding and the education, the training, whether it’s one location or over a thousand, talk about how Membersy can really help an administrator of a plan.

Michael Shuman:

Sure, absolutely. We feel as though we’re likely the most experienced in the industry at this point just in terms of scaling with DSOs. We provide a full implementation timeline and a process right from the get-go. We usually kick it off with a nice implementation kickoff call and go through the entire process in terms of all the deliverables that are needed from both parties. We always preach to our partner that we’re going to take the heavy brunt of the implementation process. With that said, oftentimes our partners are as involved as they want to be throughout that process. We certainly want a very engaged partner to ensure that we’re very collaborative through the implementation process and we’re hitting all the tough points that we need to in the implementation and the training as needed.

We want to make sure that we also handle things from an operational perspective with our partner hitting multiple layers within the organization, whether that’s dealing directly with the DSO or DPO entity themselves, all the way to their regional managers, their regionals VPs, down to the office managers and front desk staff, treatment coordinators, et cetera. We hit multiple layers within the organization to ensure that everybody is well-equipped to offer the membership program, it’s consistent across the board, and they’re set up for success.

Marcelle Parrish:

I would echo that, Michael, in terms of what we’ve seen is sometimes some of our offices needed a little bit more help. It was not just… Some of them were like, “Yep, got it, no problem,” but whenever we needed a moment to say, “Hey, Michael, we have some folks come in and train our office again after rollout just as a refresher?”, that was something that we really valued in terms of ensuring that our offices felt like they were supported across the board. For us, it wasn’t just the beginning, it was also if there was a midpoint during sort of that implementation aspect where the offices might need a little additional support, we would call in Membersy to really help those offices get them back to where they felt more comfortable, so it wasn’t a one and done.

Michael Shuman:

Yeah, I’m really glad you brought that up, Marcelle, because it’s not a one and done. Oftentimes, it’s an ongoing process and you’re going to have the unfortunate situation where we might even have a little bit of churn there at the office level throughout time. We not only hit them with an initial training and onboarding process, but we have a partner success team that is ongoing working with the office managers and the front desk staff to ensure consistency across the board. To Marcelle’s point, if there’s any offices who aren’t picking it up as quickly as others, we put a little it more of a focus on them and ensure that we get them in a good spot and ensure that they’re well-equipped to offer the program and very comfortable in doing so.

Bill Neumann:

As we get to the end of the podcast here, I had a couple additional questions. Marcelle, how would you say you measure success with the membership plan? How do you look at that and say, “This is working really well?” I know Michael talked a little bit about it where you might have some inconsistency, whether it’s a new staff member or somebody that needs to be trained up a little bit, but alk about when you look at the plan, how do you measure that success?

Marcelle Parrish:

That’s a great question, Bill, and I think it’s important for our doctors to hear as well because for us, the first and foremost that we reach out to hear this is successful is from the doctors. We’re in a constant communication with our offices to ensure, is there anything going wrong? Is there complexity that’s been introduced? When we looked at what this success looked like for us it was, are the doctors happy? Is this working for them first? Second are patients getting more access to care?

That was what we really saw shift is our uninsured patients were saying, “Yes, today,” to the treatment because we offered this plan. For us, that is success. It goes back to our core DNA of breaking down those barriers. As we were talking earlier, cost is a significant barrier, especially to the uninsured. This solved that problem for them, so when we think about how we define success, it was really seeing those patients that were uninsured say yes to their treatment plans.

Bill Neumann:

No, that’s great. Michael, what about you? What are you seeing with some of your beyond Aspen? How are other groups measuring success? Then, any thoughts around KPIs? What groups should be looking for? What do you typically look at with a membership plan to see if it’s really working well?

Michael Shuman:

Yep. Well, we measure success based on how our partners measure success, and so ultimately, we’re not going to be successful unless they’re successful. Oftentimes it’s very much related to case acceptance and ultimately revenue. I think there’s a little bit of a misnomer sometimes in terms of a membership program. I know that there are groups and certainly doctors who are concerned about discounting their fees, but ultimately with a lot of partners that we work with, we oftentimes see double or triple the revenue from these members as opposed to the uninsured cash paying patient base.

I would say the main KPIs to track certainly would be case acceptance. We oftentimes like to shoot for a target 30% or above in terms of improving that case acceptance rate and ensuring that we get a certain amount of visits throughout the year from these patients. Really, the KPIs are mainly around loyalty and overall revenue for the practice that we’re able to generate.

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Michael. On your end, Marcelle, any thoughts around how… You talked about how you measure success, but what do you typically look for? What are you seeing in practices that have implemented the membership plan well?

Marcelle Parrish:

Well, I can’t give specific details, but what I can tell you is that where we have implemented the membership discount card for Aspen across all of our offices, we’ve seen definitely an uptick for our uninsured patients saying yes to care. What I think is really powerful for us is our doctors have asked for this. They wanted to ensure that we could provide care to uninsured in a way that was simple and it made it easier and really lived into what they want to do best, and that’s provide the care to their patients and do so in a way that genders that loyalty, that compliance to the treatment plan.

Michael, you’re exactly right, so often patients come in and they come out and they don’t feel that connection. At Aspen, you’ll hear our patients talk about the connection they have with their doctor, and the connection they have with the entire office, actually. This is just one more tool with Membersy that we’ve been able to provide them that enables them to take care of patients in a way where they keep coming back. I hope that answers your question. We’re pretty excited with the rollout of Membersy for our doctors and can’t go into details, but we’ve been pretty pleased. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here with Michael today.

Bill Neumann:

That’s a great point. Marcelle, it would be great if we have somebody listening in that is either a clinician that would like to find out more about Aspen, could be somebody whether they’re on the… an office manager or somebody like that that could be listening in. How do they find out more about joining the Aspen team?

Marcelle Parrish:

Please have them contact John Murphy. I think he’s actually been on your podcast before, but-

Bill Neumann:

Yes.

Marcelle Parrish:

… [inaudible 00:28:14] give you his email address. I can’t tell you. I joined this company two years ago and I continue to be impressed with how powerful this community is. This is like an Aspen family. There are so many doctors providing such incredible care to patients that I feel so proud to come to work. I would love to have even more folks join our Aspen family. If you are interested in joining us, please visit careers.aspendental.com. Enter your information. We would love to welcome you to the family. It’s an incredible place and I’d love to meet you personally as well.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great, and you mentioned it earlier, but if you’d like to give some more detail, you talked about your Chicago HQ and you talked about the training center there, that I had the opportunity to visit the smaller one. You outgrew the first one in like a year, and then you I think doubled or tripled the size of it, but I was pretty impressed with the first one. That’s an opportunity, obviously bring in a lot of the clinicians or all the clinicians there to learn and the facility is incredible, but if you have any detail on that, I’m sure the audience would love to hear about that.

Marcelle Parrish:

Oh my gosh, Bill, I’m so excited. I am looking out right now at our TAG University. It’s a university we’ve created to really focus in on every aspect of the doctor’s journey, of our field staff’s journey, how they can help connect with the patient. There’s training from a clinical perspective. We’ve just created a new OCC, which actually doctors come in and they practice and they learn how to do implants. I just was sitting in the other day, and it was incredible to see a first-year come in. He was a little nervous and you could actually see on their face they were like, “I’ve not done this before,” To have the guidance and the membership our doctors were providing to them, and I have to tell you, it was actually very moving to see that doctor, the new doctor come out of that procedure so confident and feeling like he could really do this.

I’ve been just impressed with seeing it firsthand. Our commitment to our doctors is we’ve built this facility. You’ll come in, you’ll get to know every aspect of the training facility. We have ongoing trainings, not only in office, but also virtually. Our doctors will come in and train. We have mentorship programs. What’s been really nice to see about our office is that we’re really leveraging the strength of the network of our family to bring that expertise into our clinical offices, into our clinician, and into our field staff in a way that’s very powerful across the network. I’m excited. Please come visit us. We’d love to have you.

Bill Neumann:

Thank you, Marcelle. Michael, final thoughts from you? If somebody is listening, whether they have an emerging dental group or whether they are a larger DSO or DPO, how can they learn more about Membersy?

Michael Shuman:

Please visit us at membersy.com and you’ll find all the information that you need there and also have the ability, of course, to schedule a demo with one of our team members. That would be absolutely the best way to learn more about us. Just a quick little plug here. I mean, we here at Membersy, we ultimately just pride ourselves on being an extension of your organization. This is your program and you have the ability to control your own pricing destiny with us. We are in the background ultimately to help facilitate the membership movement and can do so through our operations, through our technology, through our compliance, and of course, our experience in helping scale with the groups that we’ve worked with up until this point.

Please reach out to learn more. I’ll certainly be at some of these upcoming conferences throughout the rest of the year, and I would love to meet every one of you. Lastly, I’d just love to say thank you so much, Marcelle, for joining today. You and Aspen have just been an absolute home run partner for us and could not ask for a more engaged partner. It’s just been an absolute pleasure.

Marcelle Parrish:

Oh, thank you so much, and likewise.

Bill Neumann:

Well, thank you to Michael Shuman, who is the CEO of Membersy, and Marcelle Parrish. She is the Chief Marketing Officer of Aspen Dental. Thank you both for joining us on The Group Dentistry Now Show. Until next time, we appreciate it. Whether you’re watching us on YouTube or on groupdentistrynow.com, or you happen to be listening to us on Apple, Spotify, or Google, we appreciate you tuning in today. Until next time, I’m Bill Neumann.