The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

Bill Becknell, CEO, Dr. Britt Bostick, Chief Dental Officer, and Wendy McCarty, Vice President of Operations, at Mortenson Dental Partners join the Group Dentistry Now Podcast.

The Mortenson Dental Partners team discusses:

Trends in dentistry
What’s new at MDP?
Key growth initiatives
Getting your team engaged & aligned on organic growth
Keeping momentum in 2024
Much more

Mortenson Dental Partners will be hosting a workshop: Navigating the Consolidation of Dentistry While Growing YOUR Founder, Doctor, or Employee-Owned Dental Group at the AADGP meeting in Las Vegas on January 21, 2024. To attend please visit Mortenson Pre-Conference Workshop | AADGP and use code GDNOW24 to save 10%.

You can also visit https://mortensondentalpartners.com/

Thank you to Garfield Refining for sponsoring this podcast. To discover more about Garfield Refining visit https://garfieldrefining.com/dso

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Full Transcript:

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Bill Neumann:

Welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann, and as always, thanks for listening in or maybe you’re watching us on YouTube. Without a great audience like you, we could not have guests like we have on today. We’re going to focus on a topic that has been probably discussed at just about every DSO meeting that I’ve attended for the past year, probably should have been focused on much more before those past 12 months that we’ve… It’s all of a sudden been a topic of conversation. It’s organic growth. I think part of the focus so much on organic growth in the past year, year and a half is really indicative of interest rates in the economy and how the industry has grown through acquisition rather rapidly in the past, gosh, probably decade. Now, we find a lot of these groups find themselves in situations where they don’t have access to capital or it’s costing them a lot more to acquire. So now they’re looking at what they’ve acquired throughout those past 10 years and going, “Okay. Why don’t we focus on these practices?” For some, it’s been a real challenge.

So we’re going to talk to the experts at Mortenson Dental and really find out what they’re doing when it comes to organic growth and really what they’ve been doing the past couple years because after COVID… And we had some of the team on right as COVID hit to discuss their plans during COVID and you’ve really done things a little bit differently maybe than some other organizations out there, and we would love to learn from you. So, a long introduction there. But we have Bill Becknell, the CEO of Mortenson Dental Partners. We have Wendy McCarty. She’s the vice president of operations. And then we have Dr. Britt Bostick, and he’s the chief dental officer. So thanks for all of you joining today. This is going to be a great conversation, certainly very, very timely.

Bill Becknell:

Bill, thank you for having us. It’s always a pleasure. Appreciate you calling us experts, but we’ve certainly made some mistakes and we’ll share some of those as we go. Glad to learn from others on your podcasts and YouTube videos, so very, very helpful to the profession. We appreciate that and appreciate the invite today.

Bill Neumann:

Well, thank you. Wendy, why don’t we start with you? Would you mind giving the audience a little bit of where did you come from? What are you doing at Mortenson? And then we can get into the Q&A.

Wendy McCarty:

Yeah. Thank you, Bill. Thank you for having us on. We are super excited to talk about our business and our journey. I’ve been with Mortenson since 2020 and prior to that was in retail for 25 years and have been in operations, 30. So operations really is what I love, and I have found that the skills have transferred nicely to dental, but still learning a lot about our dental business and just super excited to be here, so thank you.

Bill Neumann:

Dr. Bostick, can you talk a little bit about your role at Mortenson and a little bit about your experience?

Dr. Britt Bostick:

Sure. Thank you, Bill. I practiced clinically for 25 years. I was one of the founding partners in our Texas region, and then we joined Mortenson in 2013. Since that time, I’ve been clinical affairs. I’ve been a regional president, and I currently serve as the chief dental officer for Mortenson.

Bill Neumann:

And Bill Becknell, CEO at Mortenson, so talk a little bit about your background. I think you and Wendy have something similar because I know that you were retail on food side maybe, if I remember correctly.

Bill Becknell:

Yeah. Bill, that’s right. I spent the first 21 years in the grocery business with the company. I was recruited by PPG Industries to run their North American architectural coding stores. And so, I joined them in 2006, right in front of the housing great financial crisis, which was a very exciting ride. That playbook came in very handy during the pandemic, I would say, but I was there for 10 years. I grew that business to about 900 locations and joined Mortenson’s in 2014 as the chief strategy officer, later as president for a period of time, became CEO in October of 2018.

Bill Neumann:

Great. So like I mentioned when we started the podcast, we had you on right at the beginning of the pandemic and you really laid out some great strategies for the industry, what you were doing. We appreciate you sharing that. That was an interesting time. So now we’ve moved on to other interesting times in the economy and interest rates. Things have really changed, I’d say, in the past 18 months. So, what are you seeing in the industry? Where is the profession of dentistry as we look at it today?

Bill Becknell:

Well, Bill, I think your opening comments really hit the mark. The rising interest rates are definitely causing DSOs to think about growth differently, definitely looking at organic as a bigger opportunity probably than they have in the past, which really makes a lot of sense. I mean, the first priority should always be to maximize what you have before you deploy more capital anyway, but the capital right now is pretty expensive. Doesn’t mean there’s not good deals out there and great acquisition opportunities, but you definitely have to look at them a little differently. And so, after the pandemic, we knew because of some of the acquisitions we had, we had a large opportunity for organic growth. We’ve been on that path for a while, but it’s hard. It’s different than acquisitions. Really both paths are hard as everyone knows, but organic growth is a different game, for sure.

As you look at the market today and if you read the Baird surveys and the Health Policy Institute surveys or even track the publicly traded stocks, most of which are pretty soft this year. Consumer demand, patient reappointment rate, patient flow and sentiment are all common themes about being a little bit soft. We certainly see in some of that, we think that’s real. That’s really not the experience that we’re having because we think there’s still quite a bit of disruption, if you will, from the pandemic and where hygiene appointments are restricted in a lot of places. Patients are still looking to get their care and they’re willing to move around if they can get into your practices on a faster basis. And so, while we hear all of that out there, we really are seeing some very strong organic growth opportunities that we’re capitalizing on. I know we’ll talk about that a little bit more in a minute.

The other thing that we’re seeing is, and you’ve had several great podcasts on this, which we appreciate, but it’s just cybersecurity. The recent events are very, very challenging and troubling. Spend a lot of time thinking about how we make sure our patient, employees are safe and secure. We track attacks on our network. Since the Aspen breach, our attacks on network were up 700%. So I don’t know if it’s word in the thought process in the hacker community that dental might be an easy target. I don’t think that’s the case, but we certainly saw a significant impact in cyber attacks and are continuing to see that. Obviously, we’ve had the recent Shine breach. To both of those organizations, I think it’s important we all understand this is probably not a lack of diligence on their side. This is extremely difficult to combat. So we’re seeing a lot of that and working with our teams to make sure that they’re doing the right things to protect themselves personally, as well as the company and our data. Then certainly the hiring market has been a challenge for sure.

Bill Neumann:

So there’s a lot going on, for sure. So maybe we should not just name this the organic growth podcast because this is the challenges of 2023, 2024. You’re right with the cybersecurity breaches. That’s something that I think has been pretty surprising that it’s hit such large organizations with such deep benches with as far as IT goes and chief technology officers. So you’re right, it’s not from a lack of being prepared, it’s just it’s very challenging. Dr. Bostick, what are you seeing on the clinical side of things? Any changes? I know Bill touched on it a little bit, treatment acceptance, patient engagement, things like that.

Dr. Britt Bostick:

Yeah. Some of the impacts that Bill talked about, what we’re seeing at the practice level are really… We’ve been fortunate we’re not seeing that right now, but what we’re reading and hearing are that the patient flow has started to decrease. There’s an increase in no-show and cancellations. There’s a decrease in schedule strength and patients are starting to move away from elective procedures. So the impacts that we’re talking about, some are starting to fill that at the practice level.

Bill Neumann:

But you said that while you’re hearing this, you’re not necessarily seeing that at Mortenson?

Dr. Britt Bostick:

That’s correct. I think as a result of some of the organic growth and some of the opportunities that we’ve really focused on over the last two years, we’ve not experienced that yet.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. We’re going to ask Wendy about that in a second. So what’s new at Mortenson Dental Partners? The reason I ask this is you’ve been relatively quiet. When I say relatively quiet, I think a lot of the people in the audience have been to your scaling up events, and so that was something pre-pandemic that I think kept Mortenson out in front of the industry anyway. And then, of course, COVID hit and heads down. It sounds like you’ve been doing some things that maybe some others in the industry weren’t necessarily focused on in regards to organic growth. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s going on at Mortenson Dental Partners, Bill.

Bill Becknell:

Yeah. Thanks for that, Bill. We’re having a terrific year. You mentioned the challenges of 2023 and they’re certainly out there, but I think we’re going to set records on many fronts this year, which we’re very, very excited about and it really all starts with our culture and commitment to patient care. We’ve traditionally run a net promoter score well above 90. We’re very, very proud of that. As you know a little bit about our history, we’re a doctor and employee-owned organization. We don’t have any institutional capital, no private equity in our investor table, and so really everyone here is an owner. We’re very, very committed to that patient experience in giving just a phenomenal opportunity to our patients and communities to provide oral care. And so, that creates a strong demand for us for reappointment. It’s just outstanding.

I mean, obviously, some people will move away and we don’t have a practice there. So there is a little bit of patient charm, but it’s really pretty minimal as we look at the others in the profession. And then that also creates a strong demand because we have practices, and I’m sure others do too, that it can take two or three weeks to get a new patient in. And so, this really set the stage for a great opportunity for growth. We set out really to start adding providers, doctors, hygienists, dental assistants, hygiene assistants, and really try to meet that demand the best that we can.

Dr. Britt has a philosophy about yes philosophy, which I’m sure he’ll talk about a little bit later. That is just get the patients in and take care of them, and that’s really the path that we’ve been on since the pandemic and it’s really, really working out great. Our same-store sales this year will be in excess of 10%, and we’re extremely proud of that. Our new patients are up right in that same neighborhood. Really, the only thing that’s soft is our costs, which, knock on wood, is a great thing. So, that’s going really, really well. We’re super excited about the organic growth results that we’re experiencing, and we’re really setting it up that we think we can do just as good in 2024.

Dr. Britt Bostick:

I’ll add just one thing there, if you don’t mind. A really exciting part about this increased demand, at least from where I sit, is the addition of doctors and hygienists. With the growth and with the addition of these providers, to me, the best thing that I’m seeing right now is that our turnover is that it’s all-time low. So there are some struggles in the industry on staffing and finding providers, but right now I would say our doctor and provider engagement is at an all-time high and our turnover is at an all-time low.

Bill Neumann:

Wendy, let’s talk about some key initiatives behind your organic growth. Bill talked about 10% same-store growth, which is really, really incredible and it’s probably going to make some people jealous that are listening to this right now. But how did you get there? I mean, that’s not an easy feat. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Wendy McCarty:

Yeah, I would love to, and just super excited again to be on here to talk about our business. You said we’ve been quiet and I kind of snickered like, “Oh, it hasn’t been quiet here.” Organic growth, it is hard. Bill mentioned that. Any growth is hard, but really when you are growing organically, whether it’s in the dental space or any business, that causes you to really look at what you’re doing today and what you want to do different in the future. And so, with that comes a lot of change, comes a lot of team paradigm shifts and thinking about things differently. So that has kept us pretty busy for the last couple years.

Coming out of COVID in 2022, we were struggling with the same things that many people were. We had great patient flow. We had a lot of staffing challenges. We had changing patient and team member expectations, and we decided we needed to do something different. So we embarked on this journey that we lovingly call Project Care, and it is about care access rewards everyone, and we believe that it does. It rewards our teams, our providers, our patients and communities. It really has been a labor of love and a fun project to be part of.

You asked specifically, Bill, about the initiatives that we think have really accelerated our success and our results, and a couple of those have already been mentioned. Adding providers, we are up 17% on our doctor count since we started on this journey. So that’s been a really key part of what we’ve done. Growing some of our practices from one doctor to do two doctor practices and watching those relationships and that mentoring has really been a lot of fun with our teams and our doctors. The great thing about Mortenson is that we do have a strong culture and a foundation of mission and values. Once we got our team behind the vision, they grabbed a hold of it and they said, “Yes, let’s do this.” So again, it’s been great to see those doctors embrace the new doctors and work through those relationships.

The second big piece is around the hygiene. We really had to figure out how to increase availability of hygiene appointments for our patients. We know that many people are struggling with that, but we had to look at our models and we decided to incorporate a fully assisted model. That’s been very successful for us. We’ve learned a lot and we are still working through that. But again, our teams embraced it where they could, where they had the capacity and they got behind it, and it’s been really extremely beneficial.

The other piece around hygiene is working on the long game. We found when we got into this, we probably weren’t building our pipeline and our bench the way that we would have wanted. And so, we really had some working groups out there figuring out how we could partner better with schools and really build that pipeline and get the long game, as I like to call it, going. We are really excited about the future because starting to see some success for that. It’s not an immediate turn, and that’s why a lot of people don’t focus on it, but we’re excited about now and in the future what that’s going to do for us.

We’ve also utilized our team members and put in some bonuses and incentives for referrals. We believe our team members are the best recruiters that we have. They know what we have here at Mortenson and the culture that we have. They are our greatest spokespeople. So those bonuses and incentives have really helped us get that pipeline and get that referral, and again, has improved our access to hygiene appointments.

Dr. Bostick mentioned turnover. One piece that we saw was a gap was hygiene instruments and equipment, and I know I’ve heard others mention that on your podcast and talk about that. That really is a big piece when it comes to retention. We’ve got to give our teams the tools and the equipment they need to deliver that excellent patient care. So we focused on that, and I do think that’s helped a lot with the retention on the hygiene side. We’ve still got work to do there. We continue to look at equipment and instruments and how we deliver better for our teams there.

The last piece I would mention that I think has really helped around the hygiene availability is our strategic scheduling. We’ve had a lot of turnover in our business teams, and so a lot of new team members managing that schedule. What we found coming out of COVID is we needed to document, we needed to train, and we needed to get back to some strategic scheduling methodologies, including the yes philosophy that Dr. Bostick’s so passionate about. I will tell you, our teams, our new team members, they have embraced that. They appreciate the process. They appreciate the training and the documentation and how that helps them do their job and make their work easier. We’re continuing to work on that. Scheduling, as you know, is always an opportunity and an area to improve, and so we’re going to continue on that journey, but that has been really, really helpful.

The third piece that Bill mentioned earlier was really about just taking a look at the facilities that we had. We had a lot of equipped operatories that weren’t being used, and so that was part of… We knew we had to increase our doctor count and to be able to use those operatories. We have been able to basically add 10 practices just using the operatories that already existed that were dark. That took a lot of work and a lot of planning, a lot of conversation, a lot of project management, but again, has been very successful for us, as well as being able to just expand some hours.

The main thing about Project Care and organic growth that we were focused in on is we didn’t want our teams, our existing teams to think that they had to work harder. That was important to us that that was not the message that they heard and the message that they heard and that they are now seeing is that this is about doing things differently. It’s not about working harder because our teams work hard. They take care of a lot of patients, and that was important to us, but we have expanded hours, use those operatories.

Then last but not least, really around KPIs and standardization. Again, I know a lot of people are talking about that and focused on that. That is super critical because you have to make sure that you’re comparing apples to apples. So we had to do a lot of work in our practice management platform and software around making sure that practices were… We were looking at things the same way from practice to practice, and so we had to work on standardization.

I will tell you that our teams have really embraced that and appreciated that. Tenured team members and practice managers have said, “Thank you. We really appreciate the SOPs, the documentation to help us do our jobs and to make our work easier.” And so, that’s been really important to us. Through that, we feel like our KPIs have gotten stronger and really have guided us to where the opportunities are. I will tell you, by doing that, it has caused us to go down many paths that when we started out on this journey we may not have even thought about. But having that visibility, having the data to help support us really has been critical in this journey. So those are just some of the key initiatives, Bill.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. Thank you, Wendy. Dr. Bostick, on the clinician side of things, tell me a little bit about how you’re supporting your doctors.

Dr. Britt Bostick:

So for us, I mean, as Wendy said, we’ve added… I think our provider count is up 17% since we started this journey. For us, we have a communication platform that we call Hire-to-Retire. Depending on where you are in your career, that conversation is different and our support is different, but we use that platform to really stay engaged with our doctors and really understand what their wants and needs are. So we structure that all through our Hire-to-Retire. So our younger clinicians, they’re most likely involved in our Top Docs program. That’s a clinical doctor development program. That’s a one-year program. We do our days of learning throughout the year in all of our regions, and those will be focused around some of the strategic initiatives.

We also have some very focused CE for our more experienced clinicians as they’re working through their career. Their CE needs and wants definitely start to become more focused. And then our mature clinicians, we’re looking at how can we balance things, how can we be flexible in your work schedules and really work on what your transition may look like in the latter third half of your career. So we have a number of different ways to work with our clinicians really depending on where they are in their career.

Some of the other things that we’re looking at, all of us are really focused on our clinical minimum standards. We feel like when we have that constantly in front of our clinicians that we are doing a very good job at educating our patients and providing comprehensive care. So a lot of communication around minimum standards. And then we’ve also, at least on the last part of this year, really starting to focus on our communication training and our patient education and how that could potentially help drive case acceptance. We’re doing that. Really, those are the things that we’re doing on the clinical side.

We have a few other things that we’re doing to really help our providers thrive. One of those is that we have a third party that we use to provide some financial planning for our doctors and really how being part of an ESOP and owning part of our company, how that should play into your financial planning. We have four doctors that are on our board of directors. Our board of directors, we made a decision years ago that our clinical committee is a decision-making arm of our organization. So that is probably a differentiator for us in that the clinical committee is making decisions. They’re not just making recommendations. Right now, we have 16 of our clinical team members serving on either the subcommittee or the clinical committee. So when we look at organic growth and some of the opportunities that we’ve had, these clinicians are the ones that are making those decisions and help driving the decisions that are providing this growth. So really proud of our teams, where we are, and looking forward to continuing that.

Bill Neumann:

Thanks, Dr. Bostick. So another, we talked about organic growth being probably the hottest topic of conversation in the industry right now. Probably a close second is revenue cycle management, and that seems to be something else that is extremely important. Again, should always be, but seems to be a huge topic of conversation. Bill, what’s Mortenson Dental Partners doing about RCM?

Bill Becknell:

Yeah. So I agree, Bill, it is a hot topic in the industry. Every time I go to a conference, the rev cycle booths that you pass are just significant in numbers and for good reason. There is a real and a large opportunity here, and it’s one that your providers will just love to see us have success with because you should improve everything from reimbursement rates to time till you get paid and many, many other factors here. So it is a good area, for sure, to focus with. It’s rich with opportunity.

For Mortenson, and you’ve attended our scaling up conferences, and we used to share quite a bit of this is that we started automated posting in 2017 or 2018. About 80% of our insurance dollars today are posted without human intervention, which is great. The size of our posting team is probably 25% of what it was eight or 10 years ago, and that creates some opportunities for us to get into other areas. And so, insurance verification, definitely a hot topic right now as well. We went down that path in 2023, and it has been a game-changer for us. Patient clarity on what the portion from the patient is, improving that gives them more confidence, gives the team more confidence to talk about treatment.

From a practice team member, and we’ll talk a little bit about our listening strategy later, but when we listened to our team, the worst part of working in the dental practice was insurance verification. And so, when we learned that, we thought, “Okay. How do we solve this?” And so, we are doing most of that automated with some back office type support. And so, the team engagement is up and back to our mission, it allows our team to focus on the patient experience and taking care and treating the patient rather than insurance verification. So it ends up with even helping them experience. As I mentioned, the providers love this because our day sales outstanding are the lowest that they’ve been on record since I’ve been here, which is exciting. Our claims are cleaner than they’ve ever been before. We’ll just continue to make progress here.

The exciting thing about rev cycle is not only what’s happened so far, but what’s the future hold for us. We are definitely having different conversations with payers around partnerships and visibility into every aspect of that payer relationship. Payers have been scoring providers for many, many years. Over the next year, we think that we’ll start to have a pretty useful payer scorecard that we can look at when we look at our payers and the value proposition that we have with each other. It’s a win-win relationship. So we definitely want to have those conversations with our payers, but we’ve made a lot of traction there.

And then lastly, we opened up talking a little bit about consumer sentiment being a little soft and that kind of thing. I think the consumer is becoming under pressure. So we’ve definitely expanded payment options. Basically, if it’s in your wallet, we want to accept it and make it easy for the patient to say yes to the treatment that they need and be able to fund that in any manner that’s appropriate for them. But rev cycle, definitely a hot topic, a lot of opportunities there for sure, and we’ve made some really nice progress, which is exciting.

Bill Neumann:

Great. Thanks for the update on that, Bill. Okay. A lot of organic growth initiatives, Wendy. So let’s talk about getting the team engaged and aligned on these initiatives.

Wendy McCarty:

Yeah. Bill, that’s a great question. I would say when we started this conversation, we talked about we’ve learned some things and maybe we haven’t done everything right. Certainly, I think we’ve learned some things along the way here. I would just start with culture. As we’ve already talked about, Mortenson, there’s always been a strong culture here and we’ve really worked hard to protect that throughout the growth because as we’ve already discussed, organic growth is a lot of change and it causes us to do things different than what we’ve done in the past. And so, it was really important to us to protect our culture throughout this journey.

I think when you’re going to go down this path, you have to have a strong project planning process and a project management type person because there is just a lot of cadence of communication, meetings to make sure that everyone stays aligned and that the communication does flow the way that it needs to. We meet weekly on Project Care as a leadership team. It is one of the first things we talk about each week. With our regions, we discuss that with them regularly. With our teams, our practice teams, we are in constant communication with them about the strategy and what we’re doing.

I think the big thing, and we knew this, that change management, we know that change management is pretty important when you’re dealing with people and with teams. We think we did a pretty good job, but I would also tell you that some of the feedback’s been we need to do better. And so, we’re going to continue to work on that and do better with change management. Organic growth is a lot of change. And so, that would be the one thing that I would tell people is they are embarking on that is to make sure that you’ve got good change management processes in place, that you explain the why and you bring your teams along. You’ve got to allow your teams to have that space, that time and space of maybe they’re not bought in, right? As a leader, you’ve got to work them through that and give them the information that they need. And so, that’s vitally important.

As I mentioned earlier, it was super important that our doctors didn’t hear, “We want you to work harder,” or really any of our team members. It was really about how do we take the facilities, how do we add team members and put processes in place to really make their work easier and to create that flexibility that Dr. Bostick spoke to earlier. And then last I would say you have to have KPIs to help keep you aligned and engaged and to create a sense of urgency with the teams. So those are the things that I would say have really helped us and kept us together as a team through all of this. We’ve learned some things, but overall we’ve been extremely successful with those pieces.

Dr. Britt Bostick:

Wendy, one thing that in my opinion you did a masterful job on in Project Care is standardization. I mean, our teams craved some standardization, and that is a huge undertaking to really step back, look at a lot of the processes and where can we standardize some of them to really help our teams, and I think that’s also been one of the big drivers in the success of this.

Wendy McCarty:

Yeah, I would agree, Dr. Bostick. I think the key to standardization is to do it where it makes sense and to standardize the things that it makes sense to standardize and to make sure that you still have that freedom and flexibility within a framework, that the practice teams still feel like they can do what’s best for their team and their patients, but they also have this framework that guides them and gets them on a path. So standardization where it makes sense is definitely our motto and it is a lot of hard work, as Dr. Bostick mentioned.

Bill Neumann:

We start to wrap up the podcast here. A lot going on. 2023 looks like it’s a pivotal year for Mortenson Dental Partners, great organic growth. So I guess the big question is how do you keep the momentum going in ’24 and then what else do you have planned next year? So what other things are you working on?

Wendy McCarty:

Yeah, I’ll jump in there first, if that’s okay. We are excited about 2024. We’re super excited about ’23 and ’24, but we really think just continuing to work with our existing practices and looking at those practices that have a strong patient flow. They’ve got a great team who’s ready. They’re looking to expand. We had a recent event and came upon a table of a practice team, and the doctors were actually drawing out their plans for expanding their practice. It was just a lot of fun. That’s what we’re excited about is those teams that are ready, where we can expand either physically or hours, operatories and those sort of things, but we are geared up and ready for a great 2024. We think we’re going to have very similar results as we’ve had in ’23.

Dr. Britt Bostick:

I agree, Wendy. On the clinical side, for me, I just want to see our doctors continue to work their plan. I mean, they taken the time to establish what their plan was going to be through Hire-to-Retire. I want to continue to develop their plans. We’ll always focus on continuing education and the clinical aspects of our practices, but with the organic growth and the patient flow that we have, where I feel like one of our best opportunities next year is going to be to step back and really make sure we’re educating the patients to the level that they need to be at. If we can do that, we’ll continue to drive better case acceptance and that will provide an additional organic growth.

Bill Becknell:

Yeah. We will also continue to advance the rev cycle initiatives that I talked about, specifically that payer scorecard, and that’d be the third piece of that organic growth tool for us in 2024, and we’ll continue to listen. We survey our team members every quarter and we ask them questions about what can we do better to support you? What can we do better to serve you? What’s the most difficult part of your job? As I mentioned, that’s where the centralized insurance verification just really popped off the charts.

Wendy mentioned hygiene, instrumentation, all those things have come directly from our team. And so, when they tell us there’s barriers, we try to figure out how to solve those barriers, how to fix them, how to support them better so they can do a better job taking care of patients. And so, I think listening is something as an organization because it’s very important to us because we’re doctor and employee-owned, so we’re listening to our owners when we do that. They have the patient and the company’s best interest at heart, and we’ve really never done or gone wrong by doing that.

We’ll also continue to listen to Group Dentistry Now. Bill, we appreciate the podcast. We learned a lot on here as well. We’ll continue to attend conferences and pick up things from all our friends and colleagues in the community of dentistry. You mentioned scaling up earlier. We haven’t done one of those in a while. We are going to host a pre-conference workshop at the AADGP this year, and we’ll share a lot of details about the things that we’ve talked about today, as well as some other topics. So excited to not be quiet, as you’ve mentioned earlier before. We certainly missed our time with our colleagues in the community and learning from each other. So we’re very, very excited about 2024.

Bill Neumann:

That’s great. I’m glad you mentioned the workshop that you’re doing at the AADGP meeting, which will be early next year. It’s actually going to be on Wednesday, January 31st. It looks like that your pre-conference is going to be going on. And then February 1st and 2nd is the main conference for the AADGP. So now that’s great. If anybody wants to find out more about that, you can go to our website, groupdentistrynow.com. We have an events section, and then we actually have a discount code in there as well. You can save some dollars. So yeah, that’s good. We’ll certainly be there at the pre-conference. I think a lot of people, after listening to this podcast, are going to want to attend and hear what you have to say. If anybody wants to get in touch with you or find out more about Mortenson Dental Partners before the AADGP conference next year, how do they do so?

Bill Becknell:

Yeah. We are on our mortensondentalpartners.com website. We have a place that you can reach out there. I’ll be glad to share my address. It’s bill.becknell, B-E-C-K-N-E-L-L, @mdpweb.net. We love to hear from you at any time. LinkedIn works as well. So whatever might be convenient for them, we’re always glad to have those conversations.

Bill Neumann:

Well, that’s great. Well, thank you so much to the team of Mortenson Dental Partners for this. This is great information. We appreciate it, and thank you everybody for… Also, by the way, we will drop the URL so you can find Mortenson Dental Partners online. You’ll have Bill’s email address. We’ll also drop a link to the AADGP conference and the discount code so you can save some money. So thanks everybody for listening in or hopefully watching us on YouTube. But we appreciate you, Mortenson Dental Partners, and we appreciate our listeners. Until next time, I’m Bill Neumann and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.