Episode #502: How To Improve Results, Automate More with Less Work, with Dave Monahan

How do you get more people into your practice without the extra work? You can do it with automation! And to share the best software for automating your processes, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dave Monahan, founder and CEO of Kleer, to introduce three new Kleer features that will help you automate more so you and your team can focus more on your patients. To learn more about Kleer and how to get started, listen to Episode 502 of The Best Practices Show!

Episode Resources:

• Dave’s email: [email protected] 
• Mention ACT Dental for a discount! https://www.kleer.com
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• Kleer’s social media: @kleerllc
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Main Takeaways:

Automation will help increase your collections.

More automation means more time with your patients.

Automate the renewal process with Kleer. It will pay for itself!

Kleer Intelligence Automation will eliminate many time-consuming tasks.

Automated marketing with Kleer Intelligence Growth will grow your membership.

Quotes:

“You have patients who come in all the time but are very hard to make any profit off of. Then, you have other patients that are profitable that don't come in. So, what does a membership plan do? It gives the patient coverage. It gives them access to some discounts. Most importantly, though, they're paying a subscription for access to their hygiene visits. And so, on average, on our platform, a patient pays $30 a month. That goes directly to the practice. That's not given to Kleer. That goes to the practice. It doesn't go to the insurer. It doesn't go to a third party. It goes straight to the practice.” (7:02—7:33)

“For $30 a month — again, it'll range. It’ll range from $20 to $50 a month, depending on the type of plan and where you are from an economic standpoint, like where you're located. But the net is, that patient paying that subscription gets their two cleanings or two exams, their X-rays, typically, an emergency exam. We’ll design this with the practice and customize for the practice, depending on what their treatment protocol is. But since they're paying a subscription, they come in. They come into your office for their hygiene visits. So, it goes from a fee-for-service patient who comes in once every two years, to a membership plan patient who comes in one-and-a-half times a year. Those are the numbers. So, they come in three times more often.” (7:33—8:09)

“What happens when somebody is in hygiene? They accept treatment. 75% of all treatment is accepted in the hygiene chair. So, it creates this cycle where they come in, they get their hygiene, and they accept treatment.” (8:11—8:22)

“When you measure a Kleer patient who is using a membership plan versus a fee-for-service patient, they come in twice as often. They accept 142% more treatment, production is about 172% more, and collections are 182% more.” (8:43—9:00)

“One of the things we’re going to automate is the posting of the subscription payments. So, if you have monthly payment plans, or annual payment plans, or some mix of the two, when that payment gets processed, we’ll also write it back into the Practice Management System and nobody needs to enter that data into the Practice Management System. So, that's one automation feature that comes with Kleer Intelligence.” (12:06—12:24)

“Another one that sounds small but it’s one that office managers really appreciate is, now that we have access to the patient data in the Practice Management System, if a patient walks up and wants to join your membership plan, all you have to do is query the name of that patient, select that patient, and we’ll autofill all their information — name, address, phone number, email, all that good stuff that we need on our side — so you don't need to do that and practices don't need to do that anymore.” (12:25—12:49)

“Benefit tracking status. So, we’ll have access to the Practice Management System. If they have, let's say, two cleanings included in their subscription and they’ve used one and we know there's one remaining, it’ll be easy for us to let the office manager and also the patient know there's one cleaning left. And so, if they come in for their cleaning, ‘This one is part of the subscription,’ versus having to charge them. So, there's tracking things like that and automating things like that.” (12:49—13:12)

“The research said [patients are] worried about cost. They don't want to negotiate. They want more care. So, they're sort of stuck and exposed. That's the net of it. And so, what the membership plan does for them is, let's say it’s $30 a month. They're like, ‘Wow.’ The feedback we had is, ‘That's very affordable. I could do that. Can I do $250 in one visit? No. But I can do $30 a month for access to the care I need.’ So, it enables them to get access to the care they want, in a way that they can afford, in a way that makes it easy for them to pay.” (14:42—15:14)

“We have another set of features that we call Kleer Intelligence Growth. And this helps a practice grow their membership. So, the first feature that practices have asked for around that is, ‘Can you market to my patients? Can you automatically market to them, and I don't have to do anything?’ So, what we’ve done is we've built an infrastructure where we can now identify different patient sets inside your data that are a good fit for your membership plan.” (17:14—17:40)

“Any patient that's over 65 years old, who is uninsured, who has outstanding treatment, who has not been in the office for 18 months — sounds like a pretty good patient, right? If you can get them back. We’re learning that they do like the idea of membership plans. They don't have access to insurance. Once somebody retires, a lot of these patients end up dropping off because they don't think they can afford care. So, we run a series of emails over the course of four weeks to these patients and get them interested in the practice and book a visit. And then, hopefully, when they're in for their visit, they actually purchase a membership plan. And we’re having success with that.” (18:12—18:47)

“PPO optimization is, we can look at all your PPOs that you are either in-network or out-of-network with. And, by the way, we can analyze and understand if you're in-network or out-of-network with them, and we can tell you exactly what your level of discounting is by PPO. And what we’ve done, we do this on the side for practices that are on our platform. The difference is, we’re going to build it into the platform for everybody. But when we do it on the side, practices typically know, ‘If I'm collecting a certain percentage of my fee, then it’s profitable for me. If I'm not, then it’s probably not profitable for me.’ So, we can very easily say, ‘Okay, production for Delta Dental is $1 million a year, and you're collecting 65% of your full fee.” (20:54—21:33)

“What's really cool is when you stack [the PPO optimization data] up against each other, you can see which ones are producing for you, from a total revenue perspective, and then which ones are producing for you from a collections perspective. And if you want to move away from PPOs, where do you want to start? You want to start with the ones that are small production and low collections. We can identify that PPO for you right away. It’s, bam, you see this graphic we pull up, and we’re like, ‘There it is. There's the one to start with.’ And it also tells you how all your PPOs are behaving. And then, you can branch off of that and say, ‘Okay, maybe a PPO is large, and I can't just walk away from them anytime soon.’ So, why don't we try to renegotiate that? Or maybe I try to not bring any new patients into that . . . It provides the insight you need to start making those decisions.” (21:34—22:27)

“Our best customers come from people who've had in-house plans. And so, the in-house plans, people — I'm not saying it’s always done perfectly — typically will understand there's a lot of value in this. But they start to break down when you get to 25, 30, 40 patients, using it, because you don't know who signed up, when they signed up. You've got to track credit cards. You've got to track renewals. You don't know what type of benefits when they signed up. Things like your fee schedule sometimes change, and you're not sure which fee schedule they're under. So, it just becomes a mess. We hear that over and over again, ‘The front desk team goes nuts over managing the in-house plans.’ And you're leaving a ton of money on the table.” (24:24—25:00)

“One feature will pay for Kleer on its own, which is autorenewal. So, our membership plans just renew. You don't have to do anything. Nobody needs to call anybody. If there's an issue with a credit card, we use a backend payment processer that gets flagged right away. When it happens, it gets flagged. The patient is notified, and your team is notified. So, you just keep all that leakage out of your subscription. And not only is it good for you from a revenue perspective that those renewals just happen, and your subscription revenue builds up over time on its own, but if you are going to, at some point, exit and you want to sell your practice, you want to be able to prove that. You want to show an investor that, ‘My renewal rate is 80% on these subscriptions.’ You will get five times the value for that revenue than you will one off-revenue.” (25:02—25:48)

“Investors love to see this automated revenue stream. That, to them, is gold. And, obviously, for yourself, we have practices that are generating $1 million of subscription revenue a year. Wouldn't that be nice? And, like I said, that's going to be valued, if you do it right, when you're going to exit. You should get — the average, outside of dentistry, is 5x. You'll get 5x the multiple on subscription revenue than you'll get on one off-revenue. So, it’s one of these things that becomes a really valuable tool for you, not just from the cash flow perspective here and now, but also once you exit.” (26:28—27:01)

“On average, you have 2,500 dormant patients in your practice. From a conversion standpoint, we can't measure that too well right now because we don't have access to the data and we’re not doing the marketing to them. As we build Kleer Intelligence, we’ll be able to tell you what's happening there and give you an idea of what of that 2,500 can be moved over. We’re assuming, right now, we can move 10% of it over to a membership plan. I just don't have the data that proves it. So, roughly, if you can get to about 500 per dentist in your practice onto the platform, that's basically what we’re looking at. At $30 a month or $360 a year, that's your subscription revenue.” (28:26—29:03)

“Production more than doubles. It almost triples. So, at 170%, if you translate that — 172%, if you translate that to a multiple — it’s about 2.5 times more revenue from treatment than you would get normally. So, you take that subscription, plus more than double the treatment — fillings, crowns, and so on — in order to really get what the real impact of your membership plan is. So, it has a significant impact even outside the subscription.” (29:29—29:57)

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

3:01 Dave’s background and why he created Kleer.

5:12 Findings from Kleer’s market research.

10:30 Core automation features with Kleer Intelligence.

13:44 How membership plans benefit patients.

15:30 Kleer’s rollout plan and Kleer Intelligence Growth.

19:04 Optimize with Kleer Intelligence Performance.

22:28 When these features will be available.

23:52 Can I test Kleer’s membership plan?

25:50 Other values of this built-in business model.

27:20 What success could look like when using Kleer.

29:22 The impact of a membership plan outside of subscriptions.

30:54 Other benefits that Kleer can provide.

33:15 How to find out more about Kleer and get in touch.

Dave Monahan Bio:

Dave Monahan is the CEO of Kleer, an advanced, cloud-based platform that enables dentists to easily design and manage their own Membership Plan and offer it directly to their patients. Kleer is turn-key and free to implement. Kleer’s mission is simple: partner with dentists to increase the value of their practices by making dental care accessible and affordable to everyone.