In this episode Ash sits down sits down with Zane from MyDentalForce at the SWDC show to discuss practical strategies for dental practices aiming to improve their operations and collections. Zane, a software engineer with hands-on experience as a technology director in a dental group, shares how leveraging existing patient databases can unlock significant revenue without increasing marketing spend or overloading staff with multiple software platforms.

The conversation focuses on how MyDentalForce’s solution prioritizes actionable patient outreach, task management, and integrations with phone systems to help offices reactivate patients, monitor staff productivity, and manage accounts receivable more effectively. Ash and Zane talk about the importance of human touch in patient communications and how real-time analytics and AI-supported summaries can help owners and managers see tangible improvements within two to three months, all while consolidating software costs.

To learn more, visit: https://mydentalforce.com/

Key topics discussed:

• Using data from existing patient databases to drive revenue
• Simplifying and consolidating software tools for staff productivity
• Understanding unscheduled treatment plan value and patient reactivation
• Real-time task lists and prioritization for front desk teams
• Integration with phone systems for tracking staff performance
• Human vs. AI-automated patient communication
• Managing accounts receivable through targeted patient outreach
• Flat-rate pricing and implementation details
• The practical role of AI features in dental office operations

Welcome to Beyond Bite Wings, the business side of dentistry, brought to you by Edwards and Associates PC. Join us as we discuss how to build your dental practice, optimize your income, and plan for your future. This podcast is distributed with the understanding that Edwards and Associates PC is not rendering legal, accounting, or professional advice. Listeners should consult with their business advisors before acting on any of the information that is shared.

At Edwards and Associates PC, our business Hello and welcome to another episode of Beyond Bite Wings. In today's episode, we have a very special guest. His name is Zane and he's with My Dental Force. Now, I'm currently recording at the SWDC show. And again, my name's Ash. I'm your host. I ran into Zane and I would love to have my audience learn a little bit more about what he does and how, you know, his expertise in this area can help you listeners to learn more. So without further ado, Zane, how are we doing today?

I'm great. I'm really grateful that you guys brought me on and I'm excited to share my knowledge about what I've seen working with different dental practices.

Oh, perfect. So tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

Okay. So my name is Zane. like you mentioned earlier. I'm actually a software engineer by trade. I graduated from UT Austin's computer science department a couple years ago, and I immediately got a job as a technology director at a dental group within Houston.

Nice.

So you can imagine my peers are going to go work at Apple and they're going to go work at Microsoft. I'm going to advise a bunch of dental offices on all their technology stuff from imaging software, the actual analytics or engagement software they're using, even, you know, what type of TVs they're buying for their, uh, for their op rooms. So my job was literally at the intersection of anything technologically related. And this was a group of about 8 practices.

Okay.

And I worked there for about a year and a half. And a lot of, a lot of, uh, open spots I noticed while working there, especially because my lens is through technology. So I'm constantly looking at how we can leverage technology to make the staff more productive or to just drive more business into the, into the operation.

I'll be honest, man, you don't sound like a software engineer.

Okay.

That I've met before.

Really? Okay. Well, I'm, I'm happy to hear that. And I'd like to say that's because I have interfaced with so many dentists and, and dental owners, hygienists, front desk staff. I've talked to everybody you can imagine. Okay. That's awesome. So when it comes to, you know, dental lingo or I don't, you know, knowing what the problems are day to day in your job in a dental practice, I feel pretty informed on that.

And then what decided you to create your software?

So something we saw constantly, and not just at the group that I worked with, but also at many other offices that I've done consulting for as well. In an environment like this year where there's a lot going on in the world, people might be hesitant to spend as much money. Some of our offices are down 15-20% in new patients this year just because of what's going on. We wanted to see how we can leverage what your practice already has in your database to drive the revenue because a lot of these patients, they get forgotten, balances accumulate.

Mm-hmm.

patient goes somewhere else, and all of a sudden you have a bunch of dead patients in your database and you want to try to reactivate them. So that's the angle that we're trying to attack from. How can we get your staff to take advantage of what's already in your database? How can we make sure that this is a culture that's established across your entire company? So that's kind of where we got started. We also saw that there were a lot of dental software tools that just weren't, weren't up to par. Quality wasn't as well. And me coming from a CS background, I worked at several big tech companies while I was in college. I thought there's just a really huge opportunity to churn out some extremely quality software that also takes advantage of everything that's already within your business.

I'm actually glad you brought that up because, you know, whenever I have my client meetings to discuss about the health of the practice, they always move into the conversation of lead generation and spending more on marketing.

Yeah.

And it's crazy how they never think about looking at what's already there in the database. Right.

And I would add to that that, you know, marketing teams are amazing. Like, they truly do amazing things, especially in the competitive landscape, online landscape that I mentioned, you know, changing very rapidly. They're good.

Right.

But how do we ensure that the staff actually capitalized on those patients after they came in? Okay, your marketing got you a lead, came in for an exam, and there was all sorts of treatment that was prescribed to them, but they said no and walked out the door. Okay, that was, let's say that's 2 months ago. How can we revisit that patient? How can we ensure that not only are we revisiting that patient, but we're ensuring it's happening across the entire organization?

Mm-hmm.

So whether you have 5 front desks at one office or you have 5 separate offices in general, we're able to kind of get them on the same page where the highest value patients need to be contacted first. Every single day when they come in, you have a predetermined list of patients that that need to be contacted. And instead of just booking appointments and, and generating production, what we're really going after is just that your staff is used to being on the phone. When they look at the forecast, which we also have within our app, and they see, you know, 2 weeks from now there's almost nothing on the books, like, what, what are they going to do about it? We have that solution for them. We give it to them as simple as possible.

Hmm.

We rank the patients for them, we give them the different lists they can contact, and then we give that visibility back to the owner so that they can see truly How many patients were booked, how many, how much production was actually generated, and which one of my staff is actually converting these patients when they're on the phone. So we integrate with some voice over IP software. We integrate with Mango. We're looking, we're talking to a few others, but we're trying to basically capture this entire end-to-end process of patient outreach, whether it's booking appointments, just calling patients to see how they're doing, or recovering leads that your marketing team already got previously.

Oh, perfect. Again, amazing. So it sounds like your software is there to help capitalize on what's already being utilized by the practice. So your front desk people as well as your phone system, they can all integrate onto your platform. And I've seen a little bit of your user interface. It looked very friendly and easy to read. And you can have your front desk team basically create their own profile, log in, and see what they need to do every day.

Exactly.

Just by looking at it. That, I mean, that's—

And one thing I would also add is, you know, front desks, dental office managers, doctor owners, they're constantly bombarded with different software tools that are being thrown at them. So I, I've, I've talked to many staff who have been very frustrated because their manager or their owner has like 10 different things for them to log into in the morning for them to check on. We are trying to just consolidate all of that. You log into MyDentalForce, you can see everything that you'd possibly want. You can see your analytics, you can see how many new patients came in. We have patient engagement software, sending texts to other patients. And of course, the meat and potatoes, which is our patient outreach feature, which is constantly having our staff productive and booking appointments.

Hmm.

So we don't want anybody to feel like, you know, oh, here's another tool that we gotta log into in the morning again. Like, 'cause that's a lot, that's how a lot of staff see it. And, and I totally empathize with them because it, it can get very chaotic. So whenever I'm talking to, you know, users, whether they're front desk or managers or, you know, potential customers like owners, I want them to know that they're not losing anything by switching over. They can keep all the good elements of another software that they're using while also getting the benefit of using ours as well. Okay.

So it's more like an ad hoc thing.

Exactly. But like I said, the biggest value proposition I'd say is that we are constantly getting your staff on the phone and filling your schedules.

And it goes a little further than let's say, cuz there are some ad hoc software companies that, uh, come tailored to some specific, let's say practice management software like Open Dental and whatnot. But this, your, your platform goes a little further. It's not just giving them analytics and KPIs. There's also the outreach part.

Absolutely. Right. And we want, like, like you mentioned earlier, um, or I'm not sure if it was you, but we want to give the data back to the offices. Like there's all sorts of data in stuck inside of your database. I promise you, you know, there's a gold mine in there, literally. Um, on average, we find that there's almost 600,000 in unscheduled treatment plans in the average office that we connect with. So when I say goldmine, like we're talking actually a goldmine here. Wow.

Yeah. So addressing that is again, the primary focus of our software. How can we make sure that all of these opportunities are never slipping away? Because it might be 600,000 today, but in 2 months from now it might be 800,000.

Yeah.

Right. It's a constantly evolving number. So that's why our software is kind of like a ubiquitous, always-on system that your staff logs into and they have, they know exactly what they need to do for the day.

Okay, perfect. Yeah. And again, in the demo, I noticed that it gives you like a specific number of tasks to do per day, right?

We want to try and itemize it as much as we can because like I said, you know, I'm sure you know, a manager, a dental office manager or front desk is an extremely chaotic job. Like there's so many different aspects of things that they have to keep on top of constantly. So if we can simplify it and give it to them in a way that they can easily digest and they actually understand why they're doing this, that is what has sealed the deal for a lot of the, a lot of our users who have had positive feedback for us.

Right. And even from a number standpoint, let's say, you know, you said your average, uh, amount that you see, uh, per practice is about $600,000. So even if they can recover 10% of that, right? $60,000. That's an additional $60,000 of collections.

Exactly. And, and for $60,000, you say, like, we could say $60,000, but how many patients are you, are you reactivating? Sure, you might go and sell that treatment plan from January.

Right.

But now they're locked back in. They'll come back. Okay. They, they, they, they realized again, like, hey, XYZ Dental, that's actually my dentist. I'm gonna go back to them in 6 months for a, for a new patient exam or whatevernot. So it's the entire pipeline. Sure, we'll get you that one appointment and that one treatment plan that you didn't sell, but we want to completely reactivate that patient.

And this will be done by your existing team members.

Exactly. Yes.

So not robocallers or like—

No, no. And, and just to, just to maybe get away from my product a little bit. I do a lot of different consulting with different dental offices specifically for technology. I believe almost 80% of dental practice owners have demoed an AI software in the last year and only about 11 to 20% have actually adopted it. Okay. Look, I don't wanna beat around the bush. Patients do not like hearing a robot calling them. Okay.

Yep.

That's just something that I think the patients are not there. It's just not there yet.

Okay.

Anybody can easily tell, even if it's somebody older who's not as familiar with technology, they know when a robot's calling them. We wanted to empower the staff within your office to be able to make those phone calls if they need to cut a deal, if they need to work out a payment plan. Um, if they remember a niche little detail about that patient, that goes that much further in getting them back into the office.

That's fantastic. No, I'm, I'm one of those people. I don't, and I'm not even a dentist. I don't like robocallers.

Me neither. Yeah, me neither. And I'm the most pro-AI, pro-technology guy you'll meet, and I still hate it when an AI calls me.

Yeah, because there are certain things in life I feel like is very service-oriented, people-oriented, right? And I feel like, you know, a dental office or your physical PCP medical office would be that.

Yeah, totally. And, you know, people are scared of going to the dentist. Now you got a robot calling you from your dentist's office, like, you know, that may not sit well with a lot of people. So that's kind of why we'd like to empower the staff to do this. We do have some AI features, but they're mainly for texting. So we do automated outreach. via text. But if somebody's going to call you, we want it to be a human being, and we prefer if it's somebody from your practice.

So let's say you said earlier that you guys can integrate with phone systems like Mango, and you guys can identify specifically which team member isn't performing up to par, right?

Correct.

Okay. So at that point, are you guys able to notify the owner that this is the person? And maybe give them a script of what they can do to improve?

Absolutely. So it's really great that you mentioned that. And I'd like to speak on just the, I guess, admin part of the app where if you're a corporate director or if you're the owner themselves, you have total visibility into what your staff is doing. Now, I can throw a bunch of numbers at you, but really what we're trying to do is analyze the sentiment and the actual content of what they're saying. We're able to do that with Mango. We're able to pull the entire transcription. For that patient, for that specific call. And we're able to use AI to analyze it and basically give, you know, small little critiques to the admin or whoever's viewing that on the other end as far as how they're doing.

And then of course the numbers speak for themselves as well. But we do kind of have like a plain English summary of how they're doing, what the general sentiment of their call is, whether they've been getting good patient responses, et cetera. But we try to give the director or the manager or whoever it might be that's actually watching the staff, The tools they need to see to identify kind of who actually is good at converting the patients. Who do I want talking to the patients more often and who's actually gonna bring them back in?

That's good to know. Yeah. Because it's almost impossible, even if they have a way to record the phone calls, monitor them. I know that whether it be the owner themselves or the practice manager, they're just so busy. Yeah. Right. So having a summarized script, Exactly. Or write our transcript of what the phone call was.

I can see how that would be helpful.

Absolutely. And it really, yeah, it really goes a long way when we partner with our phone companies because staff, like, it's a constantly evolving job. Like when you're talking, when you're a patient-facing person, like you always are learning things about how to accommodate patients. Okay, maybe I shouldn't say this next time. Maybe this is the attitude that I need to bring to the patient. It's not like we're trying to, you know, figure out who's not doing what they're supposed to. It's more of we're trying to empower the staff and their manager to grow them as healthcare professionals so that their patient communication is top tier and your patients are always given the utmost respect.

Of course.

Of course. Yeah. So focusing more on improvement, not for, you know—

No, not for, you know, exactly.

Cutting the fat or—

Exactly. And yeah, I just think that in a constantly evolving technological landscape for dentistry, there's a lot of AI being thrown around. There's a lot of new tools coming out. We really just want to kind of focus on the engine of the practice, which is keeping your schedules booked and making sure that your staff is on top of contacting them constantly. Right.

Yeah, I could tell you're very passionate about this and you put in a lot of your thought and yourself into developing this software. For me, I remember when I first ran into you and I was listening to you, I was just thinking of it from a numbers perspective. I'm like, okay, this is very cost-effective.

Exactly.

And again, it's completely up to you if you want to put out the pricing out there or not. But again, when I spoke with them, it's very cost-effective. Secondly, it's very easy to integrate. And I believe Zain also mentioned that it takes as little as, what, 60 to 90 days to see Yes.

So for our outreach feature, like I said, we're, we're establishing a culture. Okay. This is not like an overnight project. We are completely changing the mindset of your front desk and your manager and just all your patient-facing staff. Right. We want them to know that, hey, there is one objective in this practice and that is our patients. Right. Not only is it our patients, but making sure that they keep coming back.

Right.

And a lot of that has to do with their attitude, the way they speak, their general performance as a healthcare, uh, professional. So like I said, that's what we really like to focus on amongst all of these things.

Yeah.

And, um, to answer your point about the costs, I'd say most of our practices save anywhere from $400 to $500 a month because we're able to consolidate a lot of the software that they have. Of course, we have our patient outreach feature, we have analytics, we have engagement. Like I said, we don't want the staff to log into 10 different things per day. We want them to log into MyDentalForce, see everything that they need to, and then the admins also can see everything that they need to, the managers, the corporate staff, whoever that might be.

And is the fee like per profile login that's set up or is it—

So we typically charge anywhere from $200 to $400 a month per practice, per, per month. And it varies depending on the size of your office. But no, we do not charge per user. You could have as many staff as you'd like in your office.

That's awesome.

It's a flat rate. And we, we work very closely when we're implementing to make sure that everything is exactly to your liking. We can make small little customizations per client as they request, you know, if it's within reason. And there's no limits on any users that you can add.

Okay. That's fantastic. Yeah. Oh, and there was one other thing I wanted to touch upon, right? Let's talk a little bit about the collections feature of your software.

Sure. So similarly to a system of patient outreach that we're trying to create within your practice, like you mentioned, people who may have purchased, you know, older databases with the large AR or maybe practices that haven't really paid attention to that or given special Attention to just collecting balances, we include that as well. So we basically go into your database, we figure, we pull your entire AR list, and then we identify which patient balances are outstanding that would be very collectible. So we surface them again as a list to the staff. They can see exactly, you know, how much the patient owes, what the insurance might pay, and then what the true patient balance is. And then we also have several options for the staff as far as what they want to do with that patient. So, you know, a patient might owe $1,000. You might call them and they just don't have it on them right now.

Well, we can get around that. We have payment plans that we can incorporate with them. We can, you know, send them links to sign up for the payment plans. If they want to give them a discount, maybe we can also accommodate that as well. And whatever you're able to collect from the patient is written back to your PMS. So you have a very good visibility of like your financial recovery for these patients. So whether you were able to collect the full amount, That's great. If not, well, did you guys at least try to work it out with them? Get something back, which is rather than nothing.

So that, that's kind of why we, it's very much along the lines of the entire patient outreach engine. We want to make sure that you're collecting as much money as you can from the patients while accommodating their financial needs. Of course. Yeah.

So 2 big things you've hit for me, right? One, use your existing, you know, assets that are there, the database system, right? Without having to go out there and find new things.

Exactly.

And then number 2, your accounts receivables.

Yes.

Right. Keeping an eye on it, making sure it's, it's not getting too high.

Because like, I've seen this happen time and time again. Like, the doctor owner will come in, somebody will show him the AR report, and then he'll get so scared because it's a giant number most of the time, right? Well into the 6 figures for most offices. Then they get mad, you know, they come in, they yell at the manager, whoever. They're like, okay, start collecting this. Okay, then what? The manager goes to Open Dental or whatever your practice software is, they click AR list and they see a 12 to 15 to 20+ page list. How are they supposed to digest that?

That's right.

They're supposed to go in line by line, look at the patient's account, figure out what the balance is. Maybe it's not even a patient balance some of the times, right? Maybe the insurance is supposed to pay. Well, we try to cut all of that out. We'd like for your staff to log in and when you tell them to work on the AR, they have everything right there that they would need to collect from the patients and recover what's actually recoverable rather than attacking some imaginary large number that Open Dental throws at you.

Right. Yeah. That's fantastic. Amazing. All right. Well, thank you so much for being on our episode and educating our listeners. I learned a lot. I'm glad you worked on a software that actually caters to the needs.

Of course. You know, and I'm glad you didn't go work for Apple or Amazon or Google, you know?

Well, I'm here for the long run. I'm sorry to anybody who is not happy, but the dental industry has me for at least the next decade. So—

Awesome. That's awesome.

I'm here to be here.

I think we're, we're gonna be very glad that you, you decided to stick with this So for our listeners that are more curious to know about your software and what else, you know, however else you can help them, I mean, how can they reach out to you?

So you can visit us at mydentalforce.com. You can email us at [email protected]. We got a Calendly link if you'd like to book a demo, it'll go straight to my email. So you guys will be speaking with me directly and I can answer any questions that they have. If you guys do go to our website, you'll see some of the case studies we have with real groups that we've worked with, and then all of the other peripheral features that I didn't mention on this podcast right now. Okay. So if you guys go to mydentalforce.com, you can find anything you need about us.

Perfect. Awesome, Zane. Well, thank you so much for making the time for us.

I appreciate it.

And sharing your knowledge. It was a real pleasure.

For sure. It was a pleasure. Thank you very much.

Thanks for listening today. Be sure to subscribe to Beyond Bywings on your favorite podcast platform. For more information, You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, or reach out to us on our website. You can also shoot us an email at [email protected].