In 2015, I joined the Wits Fund Board (as in University of the Witwatersrand), to raise money for my alma mater. Stan Bergman chairs the Board and brought to the Fund his unique vision and brilliance. Through Stan, I joined Henry Schein’s Global Innovation Center, run by Bruce Lieberthal. There is broad innovation happening in dentistry on both the clinical side and in streamlining the business of running a practice. Like in any business, access to capital matters, but so does a focus on key business metrics. Dentistry is mostly economically resilient, which gives practices some cover even in recession. But to grow a practice or a brand consistently requires a strategy to grow patients, to grow revenue per patient, and to grow profit contribution per patient. That’s it. Every innovation in dental plays in one of these three categories. What excites me is to see that there are more capital funding dental startups than ever before.

DSOPro: Tell us about Plan Forward and why you think there is opportunity in membership plans.

There were a number of reasons for my decision to join Plan Forward. For starters, we can all agree that dental insurance is not useful for patients, who don’t know what’s covered and are subject to deductibles, waiting periods, and limits on benefits, or for providers who are reimbursed on average 60% of all fees.

I’ve seen it at my own dentist – the best way for patients and consumers to pay for their oral care is through a membership plan. Patients love that benefits are easy to understand and there’s no cost creep when they visit the dentist. Providers love the plans because of what they do to production, which can be 2x-3x higher; collections, which are steady and recurring; treatment acceptance, which can be almost double; and because members are the very best patients. There is no AR associated with them, no reimbursement risks, and they are loyal.

The second reason I joined Plan Forward is because I value the way software automation drives leverage – revenue with less and less cost associated. Practices have been offering membership plans for a long time; many practices offer plans and manage them with an Excel spreadsheet. The analogy I like to use – companies looking to scale do not use Excel to run their sales pipeline; they use HubSpot or Salesforce to automate and manage the pipeline. The same is true in dental – software automates the management of the plans, the membership payment processing, the patient notifications by text and email, and the patient renewals.

And membership software does more: it lets each practice set their own fee schedules, define their own plans, and manage their own members. Practices take back control of their pricing, and their relationship with their patient. With membership, there is no third-party intervening in the oral care decision. In sum, software lets practices/groups custom design their plans, manage them, and then automate patient enrollment, payment processing, notifications, and renewals.

I’ll say a word about what else we deliver – besides tech, we set the practice up with state-by-state compliant membership agreements, and we have well built-out marketing offerings to support the practice to sell these plans to patients, grow members, and reactivate patients to convert to members. We’re working on ways to attract entirely new members, which I can say more about over the next few months.

Finally, as the new platform offers PMS integration, we can enable the practice to monitor things like plan usage and member impact on the practice, and because we can pull production from the PMS, we can work around the practice’s existing workflow; they don’t have to update another system.

DSOPro: Will Plan Forward continue to service solo practice owners? And what size DSOs do you plan to target?

When Megan started the company, she was focused on independents, and we’ll always focus on that market. Now we have a great platform to bring plans to DSOs of any size.

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DSOPro: Any final words?

In sum, it’s been great to have this opportunity to talk about Plan Forward, my personal journey, and our top-notch new platform, Plan Forward Advanced. From the reception in the market, from DSOs large and small, we know that we have something that is solving problems and driving the right business metrics in dental groups.