A Champagne Tradition for Everyone: Supporting Lassie

Late nights in the office

Since I sold my office, my wife and I have a tradition: on the last day of each month, we enjoy a lovely bottle of champagne. We’re celebrating the return of the 3-4 hours I’m not spending on end-of-month practice reports anymore.

Over my 35 years of practice ownership, I ended work most nights at 1am in the office. Submitting and processing claims, writing patient SOAP notes, finalizing bank deposits – late nights were the time I’d tackle all kinds of administrative work. I had the luxury of a home-based practice in Dobbs Ferry, NY. I’d head upstairs right after the last patient for family dinners and solo time with everyone afterwards.  Blessed with not requiring more than 5-6 hours of sleep a night, I would tuck my wife in about 11pm and head back down to the office for tedious paperwork tasks until 1-2am. 

Despite my being way ahead of the technology curve, practice administration wasn’t exactly lightning fast: Thanks to DentalXChange, NEA FastAttach, and Metlife, I started doing electronic claims submission in 1990 with a dial up connection and a very slow modem.  I loved being on the cutting edge and wanted to get in on the ground floor with technology that I knew would disrupt the old way of doing things.  I advised some of the key players along the way and helped influence updates, but the whole process still left a lot to be desired. 

Take bulk check processing – what a nightmare!  There would be a non-specific line item on my Citibank checking account showing a direct deposit from Metlife or Guardian or Aetna, but with bulk checks the amount did not jibe with a specific patient EOB.  I had to go to my portal with each carrier to download the electronic EOB for each patient, then play the math game figuring out which numbers added up to the bulk deposit.  When I think back, most of those bulk deposits were in the $2000 or less range and related to 5-7 patients at most.  I recently consulted with a high-volume Dental Office that routinely receives bulk deposits of over $100,000 that correlate to care for hundreds of patients!  At these large practices, the insurance claim person is sitting with a stack of hundreds of papers that relate to patient claims also rendered by different providers.

The manual task for that one batch could take a single person days to sort through, and it's a system that’s ripe for input errors, embezzlement, and inefficiency – and don't even get me started about the need to appeal denied line items! I worked for Metlife for years as a consultant, so I understood the game. I knew exactly the criterion to get claims approved, and I perfected the process to the tune of a 100% success rate in getting denials reopened and approved. Yikes! I don't miss this part of practice.

My end of month routine put even more stress on me administratively.  Each month, my practice management software required me to perform various end of month tasks and reports before the system started the new month.  The work always had to be on time – associates and hygienists who had compensation based on production were counting on their monthly settlement checks. It was usually a 3-4 hour ordeal on the last day of every month.  In the early days, this meant I actually needed to be physically in the office (until I built systems to produce the reports remotely), so no vacations could wrap around the first of the month – quite a limitation! This gave rise to our monthly champagne ritual once I sold the practice and finally got those 3-4 hours of my life back each month.

Not much has changed

30+ years later, things haven't really changed much in dental practice administration. Yes, EFTs are a bit more common than in the dial-up days, but practice owners and staff are still spend way too many hours on insurance in their attempt to stay in control of receivables and deliver a good customer experience. Most offices still manually enter insurance claim receipts, spend hours running end of month reports, fight appeals with mixed success (not collecting everything they should), get embezzled with alarming frequency (40% of all dentists fall victim to some form of this during their careers) or just lose money due to posting mistakes and other oversights.

When the Lassie team invited me to take a look at what their software can do for offices, I was initially a bit hesitant since most of my new advisees are in the periodontal disease target space with the goal of reducing oral bacteria as the source of systemic diseases. But offices are already seeing the effects of increased public awareness that improved oral health will increase their prospects for longer, healthier lives.  That trend of increasing demand for dental care puts an increasing burden on offices that don't have efficient systems in place and are struggling to hire adequate staff for the current administrative demands. 

Enter Lassie…

This is where Lassie comes in. I can't think of a single office that processes any amount of insurance claims for their patients that won't realize an incredible increase in efficiency.  Employees that spend time crunching insurance claims can now be freed up to handle other administrative duties or even retrained for clinical support.  Lassie can process those giant piles of claims in minutes – accurately posting each procedure to the practice management software by patient and provider, reconciling against the bank account, and filing appeals on denied line items with minimal to no human intervention.  Once an office adds Lassie to their team, they can spend more time with family, focus on practice growth, clinical CE, and have staff work with patients instead of papers.  No longer will you have to reconcile every payment and check every adjustment and statement.  And Lassie can bring my hard-earned experience fighting denials to every office, closing the gap between what you earned and what you actually collect.

From now on, on the last day of each month I want to share my experience of celebrating all of the time saved by implementing Lassie into your practice.  I’ll be listening for the clink of champagne glasses everywhere!  If you need my champagne recommendations just ping me :)