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

🎧 Kiltesh Patel, Founder & CEO of tab32, joins the Group Dentistry Now Show. If you want to understand dental practice management technology solutions in 2022, then this podcast is for you.

What you will learn on this podcast:

Technology past, present and future
What is ‘tech debt’ and why should DSOs care?
What is true cloud technology?
Understand dental artificial intelligence
Why is data collection, storage & organization important?
Why do DSOs need big data analytics?

To find out more visit – https://www.tab32.com/
Schedule a demo – https://bit.ly/3t4GPJX

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 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:

Hi. I’d like to welcome everyone back to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I’m Bill Neumann, and as always, thanks for listening in, whether it’s Apple, Google, Spotify, or anyone of the number of listening platforms. We appreciate you. You might be watching us on YouTube, or you just found us on groupdentistrynow.com. So thanks for listening or watching. Without you, we wouldn’t have a show.

Bill Neumann:

And of course, without great guests, we wouldn’t have an audience. So the next great guest that we have here is Kiltesh Patel. He is the co-founder and CEO of tab32. You may have seen him at one of the many DSO meetings. If you haven’t seen him, you have probably seen tab32, but either way welcome, Kiltesh, to the Group Dentistry Now Show. Thanks for being here.

Kiltesh Patel:

Thank you, Bill. Appreciate this for that fun, amazing opportunity. I look forward to having amazing discussion with you.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. And I’ve seen a lot of your team members. I saw your team members at the ADSO meeting recently. And gosh, I feel like I see them just about everywhere. And you and I met, gosh, it’s got to be three years, maybe longer, maybe four years ago now.

Kiltesh Patel:

Yeah, it’s been a while.

Bill Neumann:

Yep. So a little bit of background on Kiltesh, and then I’m going to let him fill in any of the blanks here. He has his MBA, and like I mentioned, he is the CEO and co-founder of tab32, the dental industry’s number one complete cloud-based technology platform. And we’re going to find out all about that in a second.

Bill Neumann:

Earlier in his career, Kiltesh worked as an informatics product manager at the University of California, Davis School of medicine. He also served as the director of technology and medical informatics for health sciences at the University of California, San Diego, where he received his MBA.

Bill Neumann:

So the first question is, because I don’t know if everybody knows what informatics is, so since this is your area of expertise, I’d love to get your definition on that and why that was kind of a focus of yours.

Kiltesh Patel:

Well, so back in time, I used to work at the Center of Translation Science. What it meant was we took lot of data and derived the meaning. This is about 10, 12 years ago when AI was still, and AI is still an infancy, but this is even before an infancy stage where supercomputers were needed to do computing for some model development and whatnot. And that is the time that I started working on some of this translation science research across the genomics. And that’s where I came from as my background of informatics.

Kiltesh Patel:

And the informatics system itself is to derive a meaning from underlying data in an intelligent way. Basically that’s what your informatics is, and how can it help do either better care, better service or whatever it may be, efficiency that we are talking about. That’s where I came from.

Kiltesh Patel:

And specifically at the work itself, we used to do some research around genomics and breast cancer. I’ve written several algorithms, novel algorithms, which is kind of an informatics to find those cancer genes within the strand of the gene. So that’s what that little informatics word meant and what I did back in time.

Bill Neumann:

So you’re originally working on informatics in regards to cancer, and specifically breast cancer. So take us through how you ended up in the dental industry and the creation of tap32.

Kiltesh Patel:

Right. So when I started my business school, while pursuing it, I figured that there could be some exciting problems, lot interesting problems that could be solved. And one of the areas, because my background was in informatics and big data management, it turned out that where can I make the most impact? And I felt that dental… I did evaluate a few other areas, but dental came out to be one of the areas where I felt that the data is really in silos. It’s not really available. The care models could be innovated to deliver more efficient and better care.

Kiltesh Patel:

And also patient engagement was not at center. It’s in the fragments. So if you think and take this and [inaudible 00:05:26] this 10 years or 15 years, 12 years ago, at least, this is the infancy of everything that when I started thinking about it, and that’s where I felt that I could make a huge impact if I could figure out a way where I can build better care models, engage patients better in a very meaningful way. And then obviously, leverage that data that is sitting under the desk of the provider to then how can I really get that out into the cloud? So this is all that story that started.

Kiltesh Patel:

And the first hurdle that I came across was data. It’s really doesn’t exist. This is 10 years ago. Every single app was sitting fragmented. And that’s where I felt that let’s first do the hard lap, which is making sure that we have an amazing, or a backbone, that can address the business need in one single operational efficiency, leveraging the efficiencies across the patient care, patient engagement and also the care delivery model. So that comes the practice management platform. And then obviously you build on top of it.

Kiltesh Patel:

The rest of it, what in turn we have done is we have really, really discovered the data. And that is whap the story of this last five, seven years is that we have taken that hard lab. Now we are putting that into play, and we have amassed so much data, and we are learning so much data. And towards later part of this, if we get an opportunity, we can talk about some AI things that are happening at the front. And I can assure you that probably tab32 might be the biggest data store in the dental industry as we speak across. And some amazing stuff is happening in the R&D labs at the moment.

Bill Neumann:

Really interesting. So you talk a little bit about the past, which was, there was no data out there, or it was siloed, so you weren’t able to access it and do anything with it. So when you talk about data, what types of data are you speaking about? So we’re not just talking about patient information. Talk about the data.

Kiltesh Patel:

Well, so it’s every aspect of a care that we are talking about. Either you are starting… Think of this when, before I came into this industry, people were thinking practice management is something which is scheduling and charting. Charting was also sold separately. If you went even five more years, charting was not a module as well. So charting was also sold separately. Now these were all disparate systems. So when you think about that, and when I come in to say that we want to create a better care model, how do you really do if the systems are decoupled and really don’t even talk to each other in the way it should be.

Kiltesh Patel:

So that’s where I came into play and said, let’s talk about what patient care is and what patient-centered care is. And it doesn’t start when patient really enters into the practice. It starts way beyond. So often you hear a lot of people talking about, we want to deliver Starbucks experience. But how do you deliver that Starbucks experience when you have such a siloed information and not really know that patient. If patient has to wait for 30 minutes in your practice, most likely that patient is not going to return. That’s kind of a number that we are looking into and we are diving deeper into. How can you make sure that patient, when has waited for whatever the reason, returns happily with an intervention. That’s the kind of a technology that we need in play. We don’t have that. We have reactive technologies. We might know that, but it’s only reactive when we lose that patient.

Kiltesh Patel:

So that’s the kind of thought processes when we started building out the systems. And if you think about that, I’ll just summarize it that from the time that a patient thinks about going to a provider or patient is returning patient, which is booking an appointment online, reputation management, to all the way, everything in the care workflow, to the money in the bank of the provider. That’s what I mean by data, because that’s an entire longitudinal care data across not only care and clinical, but also on the financial parts, also on the scheduling part, also on the engagement part, if you think about it. So it’s an entire breadth of data that we are talking about. And analytics cannot be done on one specific thing. You have to understand the entire continuum of data. That’s where you can deliver and create better care models.

Bill Neumann:

So that’s really where you’re focused on data. And then so that’s really how tab32 was born, right?

Kiltesh Patel:

Absolutely.

Bill Neumann:

With that focus from the data side. Tell me about what you’ve seen as you enter the dental industry and you see the way things were set up, siloed, different modules, program. They didn’t talk to each other so you’re able to do certain things over here and certain things over there. They weren’t necessarily cloud based. So now tab32 has been around for a while. You continue to innovate. What are you doing currently that gets you excited. I’m just kind of curious about where tab32 stands right now. And tell me about maybe where you are compared to some of the other platforms out there. We don’t have to name any names, but…

Kiltesh Patel:

Okay. So let’s do one thing first. Let me explain you what tab32 does, because it’s a very loaded question that you have there, right?

Bill Neumann:

Yeah.

Kiltesh Patel:

So let’s talk a little bit about what tab32 does today. So tab32 is a platform technology that addresses your basic practice management needs. On top of practice management needs, there are five or six other systems or vendors that you are using. It consolidates into one platform, which is our practice management platform, and delivers an efficient care workflows, patient provider workflows obviously, to help manage the care as well as finances and everything else. So if you think of patient communication module, practice reputation, which is reputation management, if you think of radiology or imaging platform like, or let’s not name it like you said, but any imaging module and then claims attachments, as well as the analytics. These are all five, six different things, really where you are sitting on this. We have it seamlessly under one platform.

Kiltesh Patel:

What it does too, obviously it’s a cost function of a cost. And we can provide that service at much more cost effective, but second is the transparency that it brings. So imagine that you might have APIs, but APIs are not really the way to really create transparency across what is happening in which system. It has to be one platform. You can have five different systems, buy those five different systems and have it layered out. It’s not going to deliver you that reason. You need to have a platform. That is what it is going to deliver you results. So that is where we highly differentiate.

Kiltesh Patel:

So if I had to answer your question about what tap32 does today, it’s an all-in-one comprehensive, robust platform, which addresses from start to finish of a patient journey from patient engagement to all the way to money in the bank of a provider through its practice management platform.

Bill Neumann:

A holistic patient journey platform.

Kiltesh Patel:

Correct. So that’s number one that you’d be talking about. Now, the other part of your question was how do we differentiate among the competition? So one of the things that you have to understand in the context of technology is that technology gets outdated very quickly. So you buy $5,000 top of the line Sony television today. Within two years, you will see that under $1500 or $1000 in Walmart. That’s the kind of exponential cost. And the availability cost decreases for the technology.

Kiltesh Patel:

And that’s true for even the technology systems that exist today. So something which is built, the reason I’m giving you this analogy is that something that is built 15 years ago has amassed so much technology debt over a period of time that you can put bandaids and bandaids and bandaids. But at some point you have to rip off that bandaid. But when you try to reap off that bandaid, there is no easy way then to rewrite the entire system, which is not easy. We have seen this over and over. Blackberry not being able to innovate quickly enough to meet the iPhone standards, vanished. And there are so many other examples, even on social media before Facebook came on, if you remember so many of them. It’s all about technology. It’s about scalability and a lot of factors that come into play.

Kiltesh Patel:

And that’s where I feel that the major strategic difference is that you might want to look in the rear view mirror when you’re driving, but you do not want to make the decision looking in the rear view mirror what is for next 10, 15 years. Next 10, 15 years is about technology innovations, cloud, and it’s picking up momentum. And that is where you need to make those right decisions, technologically and strategically, to make sure that you get what you get. Because if you go back, if you make those decisions 10, 15 years old, you’ll have lot of trouble moving forward in many different ways.

Kiltesh Patel:

Now, the second part to the differentiation factor is, obviously, the way we have built out our technology itself. So when I say it replaces five, six different modules or vendors on a single platform, if you think of all our competition, they have to beg, borrow or partner, or even buy in some cases, all these modules to make it look like it is one, but they’re still selling you a la carte of what you need rather than giving you a one platform across the board. That’s where we highly differentiate.

Kiltesh Patel:

If you put apples to apples in a comparison, tap32 will always come out as number one in terms of providing the number of features, number of services and efficiencies across the board, including the cost. So that’s where I feel that the bigger differentiation comes from tab32. Besides that the technology, which is the third tier which I started, with will allow you to give a bigger aspects. For example, a big aggregation of data is within seconds, you get an aggregated view of you might have 50 locations. You might have 100 locations. Within seconds, you’ll get those aggregated results of what is happening either at the executive level, regional level or an office level. You don’t have to download thousands of excels to really then reactively build those production and collection and your recall reports. Really this is happening in lifetime, live and real time.

Kiltesh Patel:

And that is what I meant when I said that you can, if you want to deliver services like Starbucks, you need to know your data. You need to understand that data, and that data can help you in real time. You cannot make the decision by second guessing. And that’s where this whole thing comes up. So I think that important tier of technology and data is another aspect.

Kiltesh Patel:

And then obviously, the things that I’ve spoken about, like AI and other things are only going to add on more when it comes to a major differentiation among all of this other competition that is going to come along. I hope that helps.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah. That helps out quite a bit. So you mentioned tech debt. Just to clarify that, I mean, do you see with a lot of the multi sites out there, do you see DSOs using older technology? It’s a term that’s new to me, but makes a lot of sense. I mean, you could get yourself in trouble using something, and you talked about it, you put bandaids on it, and eventually you need to move on. And in some cases, it’s paralyzing to move on because you’ve been using such an old system that to update and upgrade can be a massive undertaking.

Kiltesh Patel:

Correct. I mean, just a simple example. It slows down. Innovation slows down. The new features does not come as fast as you would like. It always feels like business is stretching to meet the technology rather than technology meeting the business need. The ideal state of a technology should be that technology meets your business needs, not business meets your technology. That is what will happen. And you’ll see that. You might not realize and are able to pinpoint it, but when you see certain aspects that why is technology lacking this and that? Why do I have to wait for 24 hours to get my data? Or why do I have to wait for this and that? Really, that is the technology. If you really, really clean the sand up, and you would go deep down, you would realize that is technology that happens.

Kiltesh Patel:

And like it or not, you as a customer are going to inherit that cost directly or indirectly. And it’s a significant cost you’re talking about because revamping is basically rewriting 10 years ago something that was rewritten and that in itself is a huge disruption when it happens. And it’s going to happen. It’s bound to happen. It’s just a matter of time.

Bill Neumann:

So talk to me about what you would consider a true cloud technology. You talked a little bit about having to wait to get your information versus that real time access that on-demand access. We hear the need for cloud dentistry, cloud platform. But what does that mean? And are there different types that exist out there?

Kiltesh Patel:

Right. So I would explain this in a two ways. One is going to be that web technology has evolved, which is web 1.0, web 2.0. I don’t know if you’ve heard about those terms, but they are very common terms used in this particular area. And what happens is that you can take server-based application and host it on the cloud. And there is no guards that is saying that’s not cloud-based, but that is also cloud-based. But is it going to deliver you the efficiency that you need? No. Probably what you have done is you have taken your machine from the desk to the cloud, but that is all you have done. It’s not going to give you more benefits other than what it was, and it inherits all the limitations that existed. That’s your legacy technology hosted on cloud.

Kiltesh Patel:

Then there is this web 1.0, which is basically the 10, 15 years old technology. This where technologies that were made with HTML were and older technologies that really were made for intranet and then interoffice communication platforms and other things. Obviously, people also leveraged it for the larger enterprise needs as well. But those technologies built are written in such a way that they’re very, very much focused on the limitations of CPU, the amount of RAM that it has, the infrastructure of that particular system that it has. It does not easily scale.

Kiltesh Patel:

With the cloud that it is, which is today and last few years, the phenomenon is that you can scale up number of CPUs. You might have often heard, oh, I can scale up number of CPUs. I can scale up easily number of RAM which is required to read this, and I can have a farm. But this technologies which are 15 years old cannot easily leverage that. So what will happen is you indirectly are using these technologies to host it on a cloud, no different than a legacy system with all the limitations that existed on the enterprise infrastructure, because those data centers were not really standard data structure and scalable data structure. So you are inheriting all those limitations.

Kiltesh Patel:

Again, it might seem that you are cloud, but you’re still inheriting a lot of limitations the same way, unless you have really redone it using Google, Amazon, or even Azure’ technologies, which are built in a way that are modularized enough to leverage those cloud functions in highly scalable way. That is when it’s going to make an impact. And that is where tap32 differentiates itself from all the competition I can see at this point in the market, where we are probably the only one who is truly written on the cloud platform that allows us to scale a hundred machines in a split of a second. That’s how fast it is. And that allows us to have n number of clients as fast as we can.

Kiltesh Patel:

It’s important for you as a business. Imagine the downtime that you could get or slowness that you could get. That is critical part of your business. I can tell you, and guarantee you at this point, that tab32 has 98.987 uptime, probability and percentage across the board. I can tell you for last 2017, we haven’t gone down. We haven’t gone down from eight to five, only for a couple of hours in maintenance over the weekend is what tab32’s record is. And we have transparently made that available to all our customers on our portal, saying, hey guys, here it is. Here is what the stats looks like. That only is possible when you have a technology which is really, really scalable and provides that kind of in depth, strong infrastructure. So that’s where I feel that differentiation of web 2.0 comes in from web 1.0.

Kiltesh Patel:

Now there is one more tier that, if you don’t mind, I would love to share with you is that we talked about legacy. We talked about web 1.0, and now we are talking about web 2.0. That’s your cloud infrastructure. You can host it on cloud. We call it true cloud because it’s 2.0. But there is yet another tier, which a vertical tier where I’m talking about horizontal tier. So there is SAS 1.0 and SAS 2.0. So let me explain you what SAS 1.0 is. SAS S-A-S, software as a service, 1.0, what it really means is that there was a race about 10 years ago to take anything that was client server take under the desk technology to code it on the cloud and host it on the cloud and scale it on the cloud. That was a race that was happening. You might have heard lots of systems doing that.

Kiltesh Patel:

Some of the examples could be your HR systems, all your accounting systems, gusto and whatnot. All of them have done the same thing. But what has happened is that SAS 1.0 was a race to take all the systems to the cloud and code it into cloud. SAS 2.0 [inaudible 00:26:38] differentiates itself is not so much of a race to take one system, two system, three system at a time. SAS 2.0 is about platform, thinking and having a vision of a platform, and then leveraging that platform to provide all the services across the care continuum, covering the entire vertical care chain, basically. So that’s what SAS 2.0 differs from SAS 1.0.

Kiltesh Patel:

So if you take five different vendors, they all might provide cloud, but you’re still not getting their efficiencies, effectiveness, still lot of cost. That is where tab32 has innovated in last seven years to have one single platform. And you can see us as an… I can call us as an undisputed leader because lot of folks in the industry have realized that and started buying companies, either it be a radiologic imaging company or analytics company. They’ve started putting together that portfolio that looks as if it is one, but it is still not one. It’s still different. That’s the major difference of it.

Kiltesh Patel:

So to all in all answer, the difference, that’s what true cloud technology means. Web 2.0, SAS 2.0. And it’s very technical, probably that you might not expecting it, but I thought your viewers might, who might be technical, might love it.

Bill Neumann:

We have a lot of CIOs and CTOs that listen in. So this will be great for them. They can geek out on this. So good stuff.

Bill Neumann:

Let’s talk a little bit about, so it’s moving from true cloud technology over to AI. Again, AI is all the rage now. We hear AI and dentistry and the different AI companies that are out there. It exists everywhere. I think as you know as consumers, we see it in our everyday lives. We’re getting used to it, whether it’s the Amazon platform that seems to know what, anticipates our ordering, or give us suggestions based on what we’ve ordered in the past, things like that. So talk to me about the AI that tab32 is using and just in general, what your thoughts are of AI and dentistry?

Kiltesh Patel:

Well, AI is definitely a buzzword as we speak. How much it has to be seen in the time, I feel personally that AI is going to matter if there is an ROI, service ROI, better services, better care, and you can measure that in a clear ROI. Beyond, I’m trying to remove all the clouds around buzzwords and getting straight to the point that what it means from a user’s perspective and how it’s going to scale up. I’m sure if you rewind five years, you might have heard big data and so much around big data. And nothing happened since then. It was a buzzword, but nobody could really clear out the cloud. That’s where my head is at that if you clear out this cloud, it seems that AI could be an amazing tool, amazing technology that can help. If we can create a use case that has better care services from providers’ perspective, from insurance perspective or whoever it may be.

Kiltesh Patel:

Now, that being said, tab32 has been sitting on the humongous data. You’ll be amazed that we have so much data across the board, almost 15 million patient records that we have, and growing more than 100,000, or sorry, a 100,000,000 outpatient visits that we are sitting on, which is your appointment, treatment, care data. We are sitting on one of the huge data that we are leveraging as we speak. Some exciting stuff is coming up, but we are thinking that beyond the AI is a buzzword, how can we make it that is provider-centric. And when I say that, it’s not only the practice management data, I also mean that it’s equally for the radiographs basically. We have all kinds of radiographs. In fact, we probably might be one of the vendors who has radiology image across all different types of sensors, all different types of internal cameras and whatnot. So the breadth and depth of image understanding is one of the deepest that we can bring in this particular space.

Kiltesh Patel:

Now, that being said, I definitely am excited about it, but I’m a little bit cautious that, let’s not get into the buzz phenomenon of it, but let’s make it really a use case. Some of our AI modules are upcoming in Q3, Q4 of this year. It’s pretty exciting stuff, but I would like to still see a lot more validation. That’s where my head is at if you ask me from an AI perspective.

Kiltesh Patel:

And I can also tell you that little bit about the AI itself, right? So because there is just a lot of questions around AI. AI, it depends on what question a user or a data owner is asking. That’s what it means. What data you have, the data that you have, and what question you are asking to that data. So AI is not going to solve everything. Forget about that. AI is only going to solve the problem of the question that you are asking to the data that you possess. The data might be infinite, but you only have part of that in finite. That is the only answer that it’s going to answer. It’s not going to come up automatically answer for everything.

Kiltesh Patel:

So in other words, what I’m trying to explain is that more data that you have, every aspect… So let’s take an example of imaging data, 50 different sensors. You might have one sensor or one imaging platform, but if you have 50 different sensors, 50 different internal cameras, and you have huge data set, which is what your data set, and you are asking question against that, those models are going to scale well than something which is built on one specific aspect of right. It’s going to be very difficult to scale at that point.

Kiltesh Patel:

So something that people should understand, what this AI is and how AI is going to address some of those things, I personally feel that once the whole buzzness goes off it, the fizzle goes, it’s going to be an ROI. And that’s what tap32 is preparing for.

Bill Neumann:

So let’s talk about your area of expertise, that informatic side. We talk about data collection, storage and organization. From a DSO perspective, when they’re evaluating practice management software, why should that be part of their decision tree? And are you seeing that? Is that something that’s being evaluated like it should be, again, the storage, the organization, the collection of data, when it comes to saying, hey, we’re looking at practice management and practice management solution? Are they actually evaluating that?

Kiltesh Patel:

Unfortunately, the awareness is quite low unless you really have a built out tech team at the DSO level. Awareness is very, very minimal. And I want to get your help and leverage your platform to really help and educate a lot of our folks that, when you’re making this decision of your practice management, think five steps ahead. And five steps ahead, if you anywhere resonate in that five steps ahead that I want patient care as an exceptional patient care, then make sure that you have a better understanding of your data. Just don’t make decisions because of deals and this and that. The data is going to make the extremely important factor, or it’s going to be an extremely important factor in your growth moving forward.

Kiltesh Patel:

And that being said, what I really, really would like your users to focus on is that make sure that the practice management you choose has an ability to really give you data in a real time or near real time, if not. Do not get into a conversations of API. APIs really have done data warehouse so many years. API is not an answer to your data warehouse. Your data warehouse really needs to be a separate platform or a system that allows you to view all your locations data, either it be in an aggregated view at an regional level or global level or at a practice level. Your data should be there in that data warehouse. Just make sure about those aspects of it and make sure that your basic tenants of the system has those features built in, rather than saying you have an API, you will leverage APIs. And for the benefit of your users, do you mind if I explain a little bit on API, if that’s okay rather, bill?

Kiltesh Patel:

So the reason that one should use API is not to build data warehouse to get your collections. And that’s not the right way. The API is basically used as a transactional communication when you are trying to do one small transaction between the two systems. That’s what application programming interface, API, is technically used for. It’s not used for data exchange at the data dump level. You cannot dump data of 5,000 page. That’s not what API is for. APIs are not built for that. So to not get into API conversations, unless you are building some amazing patient engagement workflows, which is integrating into your website. You’re talking to the scheduler. That’s where the use of API is, not to build a data warehouse, to be very precise of that example.

Kiltesh Patel:

Hope that helps, Bill. I’m going a little more technical than you might want.

Bill Neumann:

No, this is great. This is excellent information. And the nice thing is if people need to listen to it again, they can do that. No, great points around data collection, storage organization, and the use of APIs, or don’t use APIs when it comes to large data dumps. So that’s the lesson there, for sure.

Bill Neumann:

Let’s talk a little bit about, as we talk about data, we’re talking about data quite a bit here on this podcast. Let’s talk about data analytics and DSOs actually evaluating these analytics, having access to it. And then of course, being able to act on that. So how does having access to this data really help them grow their businesses? And why should they care?

Kiltesh Patel:

Right. So, number one thing is I speak with lot of DSOs who happen to have inherited different practice management systems, Bill. What I have, and many of them I’ve helped them to build a standardized model where we can pull data from, since I can’t use the name, system A,, system B, system C across different practice managements and consolidate into one standardized model, which we provide as a service as well, by the way. And we are working with a lot of DSOs. And that data then allows them to build their reports in a real time or near real time basically.

Kiltesh Patel:

The benefit of building such reports on the single system is that you’re not building to a particular practice management. Imagine if you had 20 different practice management, how many reports are you going to build? It’s difficult to maintain, manage, and everything around that. So that’s where tab32 comes and provides this data warehouse platform. Apart from its practice management platform, where you can have different practice managements spitting out their data into one single standardized model that we have created our proprietary with understanding of last 10 years. That really is built to make sure that it delivers you data, either it be a production, either it be a recall or either it may be your peer mix, all kinds of data reports can be generated on top of it.

Kiltesh Patel:

Now, coming back to your bigger question was analytics. So this is the building block, data warehouse is a building block for analytics. Now, imagine your analytics is a very… Conceptually, it is a very huge umbrella, but I’m only going to talk about a smaller umbrella within that, which is business intelligence report, BI reports, basically, which is what most of us are talking about when we are talking about analytics. It’s a lot bigger umbrella from an analytics perspective.

Kiltesh Patel:

So coming to the business intelligence reports, what happens is that within this building block of data warehouse, if you had one standardized model, you can now go and acquire 20 different locations with all kinds of practice management. You’re still good because you get that data right into that same standard model, and then your reports work as it was before. So the idea would be with that kind of infrastructure where you have this business intelligence under the hood of analytics allows you to make those decisions effectively.

Kiltesh Patel:

Let’s take what I’ve heard today and seen today, and have you… I’m sure you must have heard that I’m not going to name, but a DSO getting compromised by a ransomware because some data drives were locked out by a ransomware. what was on that drive? Excel documents, Excel reports. Why do you need to have Excel reports? That’s where the bigger problem is challenging. And for getting such 100 location or even 50 locations DSO to organize, if you do not have structured information in a right secure and compliant infrastructure, you are bound and vulnerable no matter what it is that you are doing. You are bound and vulnerable to have this issue. It’s going to happen sooner or later. It’s just matter of risk and risk mitigation in the timeframe.

Kiltesh Patel:

So coming back to our data discussion here, why it is critical? Because every report, you do not want them in the hindsight. You want real time report. You can’t make decisions these days hoping that somebody will drop an Excel. Analysts would take five days to build the report, end of the week or early next week or 15 days, I’ll get that report. And hope that once a month, I get that report, I’m good with it. No, you need to know your markers on a weekly basis. You need to know your markers compared to the previous years, this week, when you are comparing your data and that has to happen. And it can only happen with a technology and infrastructure like data warehouse as a tenant, and then you can build on top of it.

Kiltesh Patel:

And that’s where I feel that is important. Those experiences that we talk cannot be delivered in void. You can’t have Excels to deliver. Starbucks doesn’t look at 50 Excels to deliver experience. It’s happening in real time. That experience that you enter into store, collect your tea, or you order on your phone, and you go there and pick up, it’s happening in real time. And we need to catch up on that. And it only helps accelerate that process, if it makes sense.

Bill Neumann:

Great conversation. As we start to wrap things up here, Kiltesh, just some… You mentioned a couple of things, as far as the future for tab32. You talked a little bit further out this year with some exciting things on the AI side. Anything else you want to mention as we close things out. And then also want to make sure that the audience is able to contact you or somebody from your team. So I want to make sure we drop that contact information in the show notes, but website address is relatively easy. It’s tab32.com. Right? So that’s easy enough. If they want to reach out to anybody on the team, do we have an email address that they can reach out to?

Kiltesh Patel:

Absolutely. So I’ll give you… We’ll pass on the email address. We have both marketing team around and marketing and sales teams. So we’ll pass on that information to your viewers.

Bill Neumann:

And we’ll put that in. We’ll drop that into the show notes, for sure.

Kiltesh Patel:

So if I had to summarize where tab32 is going and what’s exciting or next exciting stuff that we are approaching, very quickly is I talked about the platform, Bill, at the onset. That platform is the way to leverage and efficiencies for better care. Keeping that context in mind, we are very in short order releasing an entire ortho module, which is going to be part of our tap32 system. It’s going to be an ortho practice management system entirely within that same concept. Besides that, there is surgery module as well coming up, which is going to address the surgery. Again, both of these are slated for Q3, Q4 of this year and targeted along with an AI, which we are talking about. We have implemented some Ais, and we are testing it with our focus group. It’s an amazing stuff that is going to happen. But let’s see again from the timing perspective of release. But those are three important things that are upcoming.

Kiltesh Patel:

Besides one of the major announcement, if you would allow me to make over here is that we are releasing a practice management agnostic imaging platform. So you can have any practice management leverage our cloud-based imaging platform at a very low cost. That is our upcoming module. It should have some PR and marketing going on by end of this quarter. And you will hear that this platform will allow our providers to have couple things. One, those who wants to continue the practice management system, they can leverage our cloud-based imaging platform. It allows them to offload their 7 or 10 years worth of imaging data, which is in huge terabytes because it requires lot of space. We can take it to the cloud, help them store and manage that. And then any future imaging systems, it happens on the cloud.

Kiltesh Patel:

So it’s a big step in that direction for agnostic practice management systems, that we are going to provide this imaging platform across the board and at the very low cost. And it’s going to help providers reduce that burden of data management that happens because, coming back to that story, we are at data management company and that’s what we do, and we provide data solutions around that. So this is another innovation that’s going to be rolled out very quickly.

Bill Neumann:

Well, Kiltesh, tab32 certainly has a lot going on right now. So that’s great. So we’re going to keep our eyes open for that imaging platform to launch soon. And again, I mentioned earlier, if you want to find out, instead of an email address, you can go to tab32.com. And actually, if you click on the solutions tab, you’ll see enterprise DSO practices, mobile dental practice or solo. You’re probably the enterprise, so you’re going to click on that, and then you’ll be able to find out more and be able to contact somebody at tab32.

Bill Neumann:

Kiltesh Patel, CEO, co-founder of tab32, thanks for joining us on the Group Dentistry Now Show. Appreciate it. We got a deep dive into informatics, data management, true cloud technology, your thoughts on AI, what tech debt is, all sorts of really cool stuff. So all you IT and technology geeks, this is definitely a great podcast for you. Thanks a lot, Kiltesh. Thanks everybody for listening and watching. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.