Dr. John Meis:
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of the Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner Wendy Briggs. How you doing, Wendy?
Wendy Briggs:
I'm great. Good to see you, Dr. John.
Dr. John Meis:
Good to see you too. And we have a guest with us, our good friend, Amol Nirgudkar, and Amol is the CEO of a company called Patient Prism. And it's one of the companies that we have definitely recommended to our clients and to our listeners and our readers. And so, Amol, do you want to tell everybody a little bit about Patient Prism and what it is that you do?
Amol Nirgudkar:
Yeah, thank you for having me, both of you. I have been a big admirer of the work you've done at Team Training Institute. I've been an avid reader of your books, John, for a few years. The latest one was great and we love being part of your network of people who are just the most amazing dentists out there that want to truly grow their practice in the right way.
Patient Prism started with the idea that could we train Alexa to understand dentistry? That was the question I asked. Could we understand why patients don't book an appointment on the phone? Could we understand that without actually having a human being listen to that conversation? Just we could always put more humans on anything, but we wanted to understand it quickly, accurately, and we decided to use this technology, natural language processing, which is the same technology that Alexa and Siri use to be able to understand what prevented a patient from making that appointment.
And then if the patient didn't make an appointment, Patient Prism was able to use these bots, that were machine learning bots, that quickly understood not just what was said on the phone, but the contextual reason why the patient didn't book. And then our idea was to get that information in the hands of the office manager or the call center manager in the quickest possible time so they could then react to that intelligence, call the patient back, and recover the revenue.
It was the first attempt to do this, is to can we understand what happened? Who called? What did they want? Why didn't they schedule? And what can we do to get them back? And can we do that in a very short period of time? So that's really in a nutshell what Patient Prism does.
Dr. John Meis:
So this right now, artificial intelligence is all the rage, people are talking about it, but this is not particularly new technology. Your company has been using it since you and I first met, before you and I first met, which has been now years ago. And what I think a lot of dental practices don't understand is that we're not very good as a profession on managing our phones. We know that about 60% of calls during normal business hours get answered, which means 40% don't. If you could change that statistic, one in every 10 calls is a new patient. And so if you could improve that, and that's really what your technology does and why I was so excited about it because, as you said, it gives people actionable information that you can do something about right now.
Amol Nirgudkar:
And that's really the full promise of AI. People think AI is these robots walking around and taking our jobs away, it's not. At this point in time, the point of AI is to give us insight. We have a lot of hindsight and we see a lot of information and there's almost an information overload in dental offices. There's so much data, KPIs, everything else. What do you focus on really? There's not enough time in the day to do everything. There's not enough time in the day to have all these 19 solutions to run a dental practice. So what the 2023 [inaudible 00:04:03].
Wendy Briggs:
Just to interject, historically in dental practices, yes, we have the KPIs, and yes we have the data, but usually it's done by spreadsheet and we're not looking at it until the month is over. Right? So I think, to your point, your focus on realtime data can be a game changer for so many. And I will also speak to the comments that we often hear from clients. They're overwhelmed by AI. They don't really understand what it is, they don't know where to start. And what I love about some of the things that you've built is it makes it almost user-friendly for everybody.
Amol Nirgudkar:
And it's true. So you are absolutely right, Wendy. You've been at more practices than I could ever imagine I would be in. And physically talking to teams and they're overwhelmed. It's not all their fault. It's not all their fault. They need support, they need training. That's why the Team Training needs to exist. They need training, they need continuous training, but they also need training in the front office, how to talk to patients on the phone. Because at the end of the day, the conversation is not supposed to be about clinical stuff, because they have no idea what's going on in the patient's mouths, as you guys can attest. Patients are going to make a decision to book an appointment based on what you make them feel. Can you trust them? And our philosophy is we want to make more access to care more easier. And if Patient Prism can help drive better conversations. Or if it doesn't drive... If the first conversation is not good, then at least we know what went wrong so we can have a second attempt at a first conversation, which is odd to say. And that's it.
So we give them actionable tips. "Here's a patient called... They didn't have insurance, you didn't offer them financing. Call them back and tell them we have care credit or we have whatever it is that we have, come on back, offer them something to come back in." Or sometimes you realize that we just said no to this full arch patient that's going to spend $45,000 with us. And we told them they can come in April and it's February. Is that what we want to do?
Number one, forget the money aspect of it. The person has probably accumulated enough money to afford this treatment, they have made the effort and they've not even thought they could do this, but they just retired, they have some money, they can finance this treatment. And now you are telling them that they have to wait two more months to come in. And it's really about patient care. It's not about... Yes, we want to make money. Yes, all of us do, but we want to put the patient in the best health possible. And that's really the promise of AI, is to understand things quickly and fix them in real time, hopefully.
Dr. John Meis:
So if you can imagine what it would do to your office if you had a real clear understanding of what your team was doing very well and what they weren't doing very, you had a tool to help them learn how to be better. And when we have a misadventure, like you're talking about, an opportunity that was missed, the ability to identify that and to respond to it so quickly that... Obviously, the patient's going to be very, very impressed. It's going to set you apart. And this drives...
I've seen it in practice, after practice, after practice. Improving the phone drives the profitability of the practice. And some people say, "Oh gosh. We don't really have a very good appointment availability." Well, if that's the case, are you accepting discounted reimbursement from insurance companies? Well, if you increase your patient demand, you can start to eliminate PPO providers as a provider, as a payer source, which then drives even more profitability as you're able to help patients get better, get healthier. So now we see, instead of a patient base that's reliant upon insurance, we see patients that are reliant, that are looking for and want to improve their dental health. And it just makes everything spin better.
Amol Nirgudkar:
I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think this is the secret to how do you work smarter or not harder. And sometimes there's doctors we've seen work over the years, working like crazy, four or five days sometimes a week, and they're just not seeing their take home pay go up. And you wonder why? And part of it is that you are focused and you have all this insurance patients that are giving you $400 for a crown, when you could be charging $1,000 for a crown, but you were saying no to the patients... I mean, so it's a multifactorial problem. We get it, right? We're just fixing the top end of the funnel, which is there's the patient who needs service that you maybe spend some marketing dollars to attract into your practice, are they able to get an appointment? If not, why not? And then let's get them back.
Dr. John Meis:
Yeah. So yeah, you've fixed the front end, we fix it once they get there, right?
Amol Nirgudkar:
Right.
Dr. John Meis:
That's what our company does. So the one thing I really wanted to hear more about, Amol, is you have just come out with your trigger system. And I'm not sure if that's what you're calling it in internally, that's what I've been heard it called, but what exactly is that? And when you described it to me, I thought, "Oh man, this is absolutely a game changer."
Amol Nirgudkar:
So there's two things. One thing is a trigger system and one thing... So I'll talk about both those. One is the DeepLens solution we launched, and DeepLens was the first attempt at basically having a robot. A trained machine analyze the conversation at such fast speed and provide a synthesis and a recommendation to the agent or the office. And so if you don't mind, I can share a screen, my screen and show you what it does. And I'll give you live examples of what it did. We just launched it last week. It was all over the news. Yahoo Finance picked it up, but then nine other publications picked it up as well. But I want to show you what it means. So if I can share this right here.Let's see.
Wendy Briggs:
Absolutely. I know we do have some people who listen to the podcast on the way to and from the office. So if you're one of our listeners, we will post the link to the video on the homepage. So if you're just listening to this on your phone or in your car, we'll post the link to the homepage so that you can actually see what Amol is going to be showing if you're listening right now.
Amol Nirgudkar:
Okay, let me just see here. Oh, [inaudible 00:10:54] entire screen.
Dr. John Meis:
[inaudible 00:10:55] best to describe what we're seeing.
Wendy Briggs:
Yeah, true.
Amol Nirgudkar:
I'll do my best. Yes. And share. So the idea is you guys... Can you see introducing the lens slide?
Dr. John Meis:
Yes sir. Yep.
Amol Nirgudkar:
Great. And so basically just imagine the patient calls at nine o'clock in the morning, and the conversation lasts up to 9:05. So they hang up the phone and at that point they have not scheduled an appointment and our AI has figured that out while the conversation is going on, that the patient decided not to move forward. At 9:06, the only reason I put 9:06 is because I cannot put 9:05 and a half. So at 9:06, Patient Prism sends out this alert and I'll show you what DeepLens looks like. At 9:10, the front desk or whoever you've assigned as the champion in the office, calls them back and reschedule them. And this happened last week. So these are two live examples I'm going to bring out. And the examples are this. Here's a patient, called at nine o'clock, wanted wisdom teeth removal, talked about PPO insurance, but then said I had no insurance and wanted availability in the morning, AM or the afternoon. Right?
Dr. John Meis:
All right.
Amol Nirgudkar:
So four wisdom teeth extracted, was a new patient, and all of this... The patient attempted to schedule the appointment to have wisdom... But before the appointment can be scheduled, the patient must fill out some paperwork. Agent provided the necessary information, told the patient that after the paperwork would've completely submitted, they would call them to set up an appointment. Basically, at this point what we have realized is the patient got overwhelmed by the paperwork requirement and so appointment was not booked due to paperwork. Guess how many humans were involved in any of this analysis?
Dr. John Meis:
I'm going to guess zero.
Amol Nirgudkar:
Zero. That's right. A machine did this in one minute. One minute. And the patient was called back and said, "Sir, don't worry about money. We have financing available here. You can get the 0% with care credit," whatever that was. Patient made an appointment. That $3,300 was recovered, and basically we brought the patient back.
Let's look at another example. This was from yesterday for DeepLens. Look at how detailed this is. Emergency, right now, which means the patient wanted to come right away. Potentially wanted an implant, talked about a whole bunch of ARP Medicare advantage plan, wanted a set of dentures, went price shopping, availability was right now. And then all of a sudden here we are on the DeepLens analysis. We get to see the agent schedule the patient, blah blah blah. All of this is at somebody's fingertips within a minute. And now this not only allows us to do this analysis, which means... Okay, well, somebody looks at this stuff. I'm like, "I don't need to live and listen to the phone call. All I have to do is look at this stuff, call the patient back and give them something." Give them, "Okay, maybe we don't take Medicare but here's what we can do within payment plans or whatever that might be."
Dr. John Meis:
Sure.
Amol Nirgudkar:
And now on top of this, what we can do is set up triggers. So this is DeepLens, which allows you instantaneous stuff. On triggers, what it means is that... Now you see those topics? Topics are emergency implants, insurance, money, restorative availability, and there are topics like that, or orthodontics. Now, we can set up triggers based on what your practice is wanting to choose for. So we can set up a trigger like, "Hey, let me know in real time, a dashboard... Show me a dashboard across all my locations or one location every time a patient who wants an implant, but we're not able to schedule them."
So we can set up these triggers that are important to your practice so that they can go to your cell phone, they can go to your Apple watch, they can go to your email. And the right people are getting these triggers in their inboxes, on their watches, so that they can act upon this. Like, "Man, we just lost a patient. They wanted to spend $5,000 and here's the reason why." And by giving this information, pushing this information to them, and a lot of... I'm going to stop sharing for a second now. By pushing this information to them, we are not forcing these practices to pull information from analytics, we are saying here it is, go do something about it. And that's making a difference.
Wendy Briggs:
What's so interesting to, Amol, is Dr. John and I have long taught about... Talked about the unintentional barriers that we tend to place in front of our patients that really want to do business with us. And sometimes we don't have a sense of these barriers. My guess is that first one where they said, "Hey, the paperwork became overwhelming." My guess is the doctor at that practice probably had no awareness that our team felt like the paperwork had to be filled out before the appointment was filled. That probably was something that evolved without the knowledge of the owners or the doctors because that silliness. So just having that information at our fingertips, we can right the ship before it becomes long-term, disastrous consequences. So these are real-time examples of things that we've talked about that we know happen, because we've seen the data ourselves. But a lot of times the owners are not aware at all of these things happening.
Amol Nirgudkar:
And part of what we have really, really studied being in dentistry for so long is that change management's hard, and how do you get people to do what they're supposed to do? And how do you make that change stick? And sometimes when a doctor sees that, I mean, Wendy goes in and says, "Wow, I mean you are making it difficult for the patient to make an appointment, because you got these 10 pages of paperwork before they can even make an appointment." And you tell them, you go and tell them, but now you show them data that, "Hey, you lost this revenue opportunity, because you have created a barrier for a patient." Sometimes they're older patients. Sometimes they just don't want to do 10 pages of paperwork before they can make an appointment.
So it was simple. The way they corrected that, the office manager called the patient and said, "Sir, all I need is 10 minutes with you and I'll fill out your paperwork. Just give me this information on time." And they made it easier and the patient's like, "Man, that was nice. I don't have to worry about it." And that was it. It was so simple. But that's where technology is helping, is giving them the insight into, "Man, maybe there's a business process that we need to change that will help and reduce the barriers."
Dr. John Meis:
Having the ability to listen to the calls coming into my own offices, it is absolutely stunning to me how often a patient calls wanting to make an appointment, a team member answered, presumably wants to make an appointment for the patient, they have a nice conversation and they hang up, and no appointment was ever made. It happens so frequently that... And they're good people and they're trying hard, but they're not getting any feedback from that. So they're really not aware. They're in their busy day and they've got people here and there and they're working hard, but they don't understand how frequently that happens and what a problem that can be.
And really having the data of what's standing in the way of people making appointments is really one of the things that your technology does and does it so quickly and so well that it's really... For those that want more patient flow or want more patient flow of a certain kind. So we have a lot of practices that would like to do more sleep dentistry. Well, if you have this searching every single call that sleep is mentioned or sleep apnea is mentioned or breathing issues or any... And now you can zero in on those. Now, even if your practice is relatively full, you can draw out from it the patients that need the dentistry that you want to do and like to do and enjoy to do.
Amol Nirgudkar:
It's so true. And what we realize from all this, is we realize that how many operational issues are preventing the practices from growing, actually. Although we're talking about the phones here, it really has to do with that sleep medicine patient can't get in because your hygienists are completely full and booked out for the next six weeks. You got to figure out some way to say yes to a patient. And that's where... We are at the tip of the iceberg where we figuring this out, but then we realize that, "Oh no, I think there is a lot more. This is not really marketing's fault." This is not where you say, "I need to spend more money on marketing." That's the easy answer. Usually it's the wrong answer. The answer is there's something inside the office that you need to figure out that is preventing patients from being able to see your doctors or your hygienists.
Dr. John Meis:
Yeah. No, absolutely. We are excited about the technology, and now with the new pieces added that allows us to really zero in at an even deeper level, we're just so excited. And you, your team anyway, I don't know if you're going to be there personally, but our annual summit, the Champions of Dentistry Summit, your team is going to be there to show off this technology. To help people understand how it works and how easy it is to use and how impactful it can be. So we're super excited to have you at the summit. And for those [inaudible 00:21:06].
Wendy Briggs:
One more thing, Amol, I would love to be able to put on our homepage a link or something, so that if people want information, they want to schedule... They don't want to wait until the end of April. Although we look at... We were joking this morning that it'll be here before we know it. But if they want to schedule a call or get some more information now, could you send us a link so that they can book a call? Or if it's a PDF that they can review. I know you had a fantastic writeup in Yahoo Finance, so congrats on that. But anything that you would share with our listeners so that they can figure out what their next step should be would be incredibly helpful.
Amol Nirgudkar:
Absolutely. I will talk to my marketing director and see what's the best way to provide you with that link, along with maybe a graphic that people can click on like, "Hey, deploy AI in your practice." But no, we're passionate about this industry a lot and we've loved... We know that there's so many things that need to go right in the dental office for the dental office to be profitable and successful. And we feel that improving this journey of a patient right at the phone is going to drive that across their entire process of coming in, seeing all the people in the door. So thank you very much. I mean, I think we are very appreciative to be participating in the conference and being sponsors there, and we have truly enjoyed working with you over the years. Thank you for having me.
Dr. John Meis:
You're very welcome, Amol. Thanks so much for being with us today. Congratulations on this big tech jump that you just took. Already it was fantastic and now even better. So we're excited and we recommend your company. Pretty much every time we talk about patient flow, you guys come up. We're appreciative of what you've done for our clients and the difference that you've made. And that's probably going to be it for this episode of the Double Your Production Podcast. Thanks everybody for being with us, and we'll see you next time.
Amol Nirgudkar:
Thank you.
Wendy Briggs:
Bye-bye everybody.
