I joined Mid-Atlantic Dental Partners when it was around 16 locations and left when it was over 200, so we grew it really quickly in just under 3 years. As Director of Market Operations for MADP, I was at the field level – going to offices, boots on the ground. I was the main point of contact for all the Operations Leaders and providers.

At some point, I got involved with analytics in my day-to-day job and I loved it. When I was offered a role at United Dental Corporation as the Senior Director of Analytics, I took it because I really enjoy working on the technology and analytics side. 

Now at beBright, I am the Director of Product Management over Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics. We are building an in-house analytics product, which is a solution I see a lot of groups leaning toward. There just isn’t much out there in the out-of-the-box analytics realm that can map to as many practice management softwares (PMSs) and external data sources as many larger groups need at this point. When you have multiple PMSs, it’s difficult to get the data to be apples to apples. With just one standardized PMS, it’s easier to map it in the database, but with four or five plus that are wildly different? It’s a challenge.

DSOPro: Explain your role with leadership.

I provide them with information as far as the KPIs are concerned. There is a lot of context within healthcare data that best practices-wise benefits from having someone with healthcare-specific experience involved. We may need to explain, “This may not actually mean what it seems like it means. Let’s dig a little deeper. There could be other reasons this thing is happening.” We brainstorm like that together. A lot of my direct interaction is with Operations.

DSOPro: What will leadership be able to do with this information?

We use our analytics product to make business decisions. We’re looking at how well an office is doing or if we should add an extra provider. Do we need to do more marketing because there aren’t enough new patients or are we not handling phone calls appropriately? The data helps you decide what to do. If there are no open chairs to put more patients, then you might need to build another operatory or bring another provider in, depending on the situation.

DSOPro: How many offices does beBright have?

Today there are almost 20, but we’re constantly growing. We’re currently in Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, and Tennessee.

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DSOPro: Is your type of position in analytics kind of unique?

I would say when I first started in analytics at UDC, my position was pretty unique. It used to be a function of the financial planning and analysis department in our industry, but that is rapidly changing. I’ve seen more and more organizations hiring Directors of BI or Analytics. It’s no longer a function of another role, but a full-time position with the focus on data growing every day.

DSOPro: What kind of trends are you seeing in the industry? What do you think we’ll see in the future based on your experience?

I don’t know why it wasn’t before, but data is becoming this huge hot topic now. Every event I’ve gone to recently has had at least one panel about data. I spoke on a panel at Becker’s in June on the topic of “Big Data in Dentistry,” and we talked about what to do with all the information. People have always had data, but the trend is becoming more about what to do with that information on a larger scale.

As far as technology in general, obviously AI is huge. We are going to start seeing a lot of people incorporating GPT4 into more automated things at the office level, like data mining for treatment. If you’re doing a marketing campaign for implants and you want to blast it out to only patients with missing teeth, you can bring up a list of patients who have missing teeth. I think that’s going to become more on the forefront. It exists already, but it’ll become the norm.

Another thing I’m seeing companies focus on a little bit more is the sentiment, or the tone of the voice, in AI-based conversational analytics. Some of the major players in the dental industry have sentiment already, but at this point, it’s just an overall score for the call that translates into positive, negative, or neutral.

What I would love to see is being able to discern not just positive, negative, neutral for the whole call, but to be able to pinpoint parts of the call that were positive, negative, and neutral. That way you could see if a patient was excited to schedule and then all of a sudden it changed and went south. What happened at that moment, what did the team member say?

And conversely—if they saved a patient from canceling or being upset, we want to know what the team member did in that situation to save the call. To better train people, you know - “Hey, these are best practices.” You can use AI analysis for that. You could get the information before, but it was painstaking because you had to listen to all the calls one by one. They’ve had call recording for forever, even systems that do transcripts - but the AI-based solutions are starting to hone ability into doing sentiment and things like that.

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