Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful.

Hello, and good morning, everyone.

We are really looking forward to walking through this webinar with you today. I am Sheela Roth, head of clinical education at Pearl, and excited that all of you have joined us. You guys are the top 1% here that's really ready to finish your year in strong.

Let's start with a quick question.

Can you believe we're already approaching the end of the year, first of all? Crazy.

I know. I feel like we were just doing a kickoff webinar last year.

And the question I want you to think about while you're sitting here with us in the next forty five minutes is, is your practice ready to finish strong? Have you maximized all the avenues? The good news is there's still time to make some impact. And on today's webinar, your best year ever starts now. We're gonna give you 10 essentials for the year end success. We're all about making sure that the opportunities are working for you, and I couldn't think of a better person to guide us than Steven Anderson. Steven is the founder of Total Patient Service Institute, a best selling dental industry author, and one of dentistry's most respected speakers.

He is the true practice growth expert and works with a team that can help you do that. He has spent over thirty years helping dental teams improve patient experiences, and that ultimately leads to the most successful practices. Steven, we're thrilled to have you. Let's get started.

Thank you, Sheela. Good to good to be with you. And for those who do not know Sheela, we are just comparing notes.

We 've had about the same number of years in dentistry, and Sheela's been a dental assistant, a hygienist, worked in the front office, consulted with practices all over the country.

And Sheela surpassed the ten thousand hour rule many years ago. Sheela, do you know what the ten thousand hour rule is?

No. I'm scared.

So ten thousand hour rule, I don't know who came up with this, but, basically, it is it takes ten thousand hours of experience to be world class.

Oh, okay.

I think you passed the ten thousand hour mark a long time ago in Dennis.

Great to be here. We're going to walk through priorities for the next sixty days.

It'll... You know, today's the... What is today? The twenty ninth, twenty eighth, October 29. And, typically, you know, when we hit Halloween, man, everything starts to change.

And there... So, Sheela, this is just quick trivia, and this... There there is some application to this. The estimate... The economic estimate is that Americans will spend more money this weekend on Halloween than any year in the history of our country.

Halloween has, like, exploded as this, like, thing.

I think... Have you ever been into a Spirit Halloween store? Of course. I think they're they're close to the $1,000,000,000 mark in sales.

That's amazing.

It's crazy. So if you if you have any thought that Americans are not spending, well, they're spending on Halloween. So there's the... That is the whole deal. So here's the construct of this today is we're gonna walk through... I'm gonna walk through 10 things that I think should be in your end of year playbook, your strategy for the end of the year because things are gonna shift. After Saturday, I think, in my mind, things shift. We're gonna walk 10 things that ought to be front of mind for the next two months to have a great end of the year to finish on a high note to finish in crescendo, not in diminuendo. Are you a music person, Sheela?

I am. Yes. I'm following right along.

Okay. So piano lessons were mandatory at our house growing up. We had to we had to play piano. It wasn't about the music.

It was about discipline and accountability. So I got all those terms drilled into my head. So we're gonna finish in crescendo. So I'm gonna I'm gonna share my screen, and we'll go to work on these 10.

And then, Sheela, as we go along and and as I get through my 10, Sheela's gonna share tech...

How you can use technology to leverage some of the 10 things that ought to be in your end of your playbook. So 10 things. You can walk through these to create your strategy for the next two months.

So with that, here we go.

And let's see if we can get it going here the right way.

Bam.

Alright. How do I look? She looked pretty good. Not me, but Both. You like you?

Looking good, and, you know, your your presentation is spot on.

We're ready to go.

My little football diagram here? I do. O's? K. Here we go. Alright. 10 things.

So these are... To some degree, they are in order. They're all priorities, but here is number one.

Number one playbook rule is to resist the after the holidays mentality. So this is... Sheela, this is one of my peeves. If you follow me on Instagram, the steven j anderson, I have this whole ongoing series of Steve's peeves. So my holiday peeves are coming up, if you're following me on Instagram.

And and the biggest holiday peeve is, well, we'll take care of that after the first of the year. After the holidays, we get into this. If you're not careful, you get into the after the holidays mentality.

Could I suggest that instead of after the holidays, it's we're gonna ramp it up during the holidays? Here's why. There's two things that we have going for us. There are a lot of things, but two primary things when we get into holiday season, November and December.

Number one, people are in a giving mood, and that's a good thing. Right? Generous giving mood, thinking about others. So people are typically in a little better mood in the holidays.

And number two, they're in a spending mood. Right? Everybody's spending for Christmas, so it's in the flow of things. And part of the things that are gonna be on their list this year is their teeth.

Right? So we're gonna have a white Christmas this year, and it's all gonna start right here. So my...

Here's my recommendation. Priority number one, we're gonna banish after the holidays from your vocabulary because we're gonna take advantage of all the assets, everything. So anything that stands in the way of having a great year. So if there's chatter in the office about people are too busy and they're going to parties and they don't have time to come into the office, oh, yes.

They do.

Right? So take advantage of everything we have going into the next two months, the giving spirit, the spending money, the better attitude, and there are so many things in dentistry that we'll talk about that are positives for the end of the year that November and December have the potential to be the two best months of the year.

So let's talk about how... That's the first mandate for your end of your playbook strategy.

Know after the holidays. It's right now.

Alright. End of your priorities are the same as the priorities throughout the rest of the year. So these are the top three priorities. Schedule, produce, collect. So every day, it's... Are we maximizing the schedule to make sure that we're taking advantage of every opportunity right now?

Sheela's gonna share with you some technology tools that'll help you leverage the schedule every day, but let me just suggest a couple of things. Number one is to maximize same day treatment.

So that is looking at every opportunity coming in today on today's schedule, and looking at unscheduled treatment that the patient's coming in on today's schedule, unscheduled treatment, and undiagnosed treatment. Sheela, you got some cool tools for this that you'll share with everybody, but part of your morning meeting should be this whole focus on who has unscheduled treatment coming in today and who has unpotentially undiagnosed treatment as well to maximize today's schedule. Here's why.

We've gone through this shift in our culture where forty years ago, we used to spend our time to save money. We do everything ourselves. We do our own laundry. We do our own cooking.

We do our own cleaning. We'd even go pick up our own groceries. Imagine that. Today, we spend our money to save time.

You got, you know, Uber everything. You've got same... In other words, we spend our money today for convenience to save time. So for most patients, they would much rather get things done today to save time in the future than have to schedule multiple appointments. So if I've got unscheduled treatment and, Sheela, you're my patient, it's like, Sheela, while you're here today, one of the first things we're gonna do is I'll give you an update on things we talked about in the past so you're always in a position to make a well informed decision.

And if it makes sense, if there are some of those things we can take a look at, maybe taking care of some of those things today while you're here and it's convenient, right, depending on what their situation is. So the morning meeting becomes a strategy session to say what available time do we have today, and what more can we do beyond what was originally scheduled to make today a day where we produce more than scheduled. So when you combine that with the next point, which benefits remaining. Right?

This is an obvious one, but a big part of the end of your playbook is really maximizing the benefits remaining. And, Sheela, I don't know what your...

What numbers you all work off at Pearl, but my understanding from all the estimates I've seen is that, the average patient in America that does have dental benefits, that at a minimum, 40% of those benefits go unused. Somewhere between 4060% of the benefits go unused every year. It's probably how the insurance companies make most of their money.

Yes. Is that pretty spot on?

Yes. And it's also our awareness. Right? As we're moving into the end of the year, we're moving so quickly as managers and and support team, and it's really challenging to think of all of those opportunities and then pair that with remaining benefits.

Yeah. So there's some great technology Sheela will share on how to maximize, how to identify those, how to maximize those benefits remaining. But, clearly, this is a big part of the end of your playbook. Now whether you're in or out of network, doesn't matter.

Right? Because if patients have insurance, here's what we know. They value it, and they wanna maximize their benefits. You may not like it.

I get it. Sometimes it's a hassle deal with...

And they value it, and most people wanna maximize their benefits. So here's the verbal skill, we're big on verbal skills at Total Patient Service is, Sheela, if you're like most of our patients, you like to maximize your benefits. Am I right? Yes.

You paid for it, you want to make sure you get good use of it. So could I share with you, and according to what your insurance company has shared, what we know about your benefits that remain for the year, and what we can do to help you maximize those?

Yes please.

Right? So again, staying on top of this, so this is with patients coming in as well as patients that are not on the schedule yet for the next two months to pack the schedule with patients that have benefits remaining. Those that maybe even haven't taken advantage of their, you know, their cleanings for the year, their regular exam appointments, pack the schedule with benefits remaining. So, again, common sense, but not always commonly practiced. So there's two things I'd recommend here. One, yes, message out to these patients by email, by text message, your preferred method, and always remember the six multiple.

So the six multiple, Sheela, is that you can get a six times greater response if you follow-up with... So if I send you a text message or an email, I'll get a six times response to that effort if I follow-up with a phone call or follow-up in some way, shape, or form. So the messaging is great.

That's what I call preheat and follow-up. So the end of year strategy would be this, is to set an activity goal.

So here's here's the worry. We set goals, and, usually, we set goals around what we want the result to be. So we wanna add 20,000 in production, or we wanna add this many appointments. K? Typically, that's how we set goals. You can't control the outcome, but you can control the activity.

So the challenge would be to set an activity goal that is, okay. Yes. We'd like to add this number of appointments or this amount of production, and the way we're gonna get there is we're going to make x number of outbound attempts a day. That I can control. So whether it's 20 or 50 or whatever it is that set an activity goal so... Because you can control that.

So get this dialed in. Know who your target is. Yes. You can set a results goal, but set an activity goal of what you're going to do every day that will lead to that end outcome that you want.

Alright. Next one. Collect. Right? So we said schedule, produce, collect. K? So we've talked about the scheduling.

So we can produce. Let's talk about the collections part. Get the money.

So I I...

Sheela, I'll share with you two experiences I had just this last week. I talked to a practice when we ran their numbers. We did a practice analysis. They had over a $500,000 in AR, And this is a practice that's not doing a 500,000 a month in production.

Right? The AR had gotten completely out of control. Why? So here's what I say is AR is never the problem.

If you if if you have accounts receivable, whether it's claims or patients, AR is never the problem.

It's a symptom. What's the symptom?

Financial arrangements. So if AR is out of control, the problem is financial arrangements, how things were set up in the beginning. So recommendation for here.

End of year, the last two months is a great time to really get your financial house in order. Run all your reports, claims outstanding, claims unattached, all those things, and Sheela will show you some great tools to do this.

But get your your financial house in order and say, wow. Where where are we, like, over the ninety day mark? Right? If we've got claims or patient portion that's over the ninety day mark, what do we have to do to get that dialed back in and get our financial house in order? It's a great time to reevaluate where are things out of alignment and where do we need to get things back dialed in.

Okay. This one is special for today.

Now, Sheela, I don't know about you, but I have been bombarded the last two weeks with phone calls, multiple days. Like, Steve, things are kinda slow. Are you hearing that from other people too? I I can't tell you how many I've heard.

And here's what's going on. 100% predictable. It happens every time. When we get into an election cycle like we're in right now where there's a lot at stake and there's a lot of uncertainty, k.

You take those those two things, uncertainty and a lot at stake, consumer behavior changes. Consumers are distracted, and they're nervous. They're anxious. So when people are distracted and they're anxious, they're gonna pull back on their spending behavior because I don't know what's gonna happen.

So if you've experienced that in the last month or so, 100% totally predictable.

It happens almost every election cycle when there's a lot at stake and there's a lot of uncertainty. So here's the good news. Election day is on Tuesday.

Now here's what typically happens is it doesn't matter how the election turns out as far as business is concerned. Because once the election's over and the results are in, we hope we hope the we hope the results come in soon after the election, then we know what the outcome is, and then most people go back to their regular consumer behavior. So if you've experienced that, take advantage of post election relief. Right?

After Tuesday, pour it on. Right? It's time to crank up the activity and really get going. Start now.

You don't have to wait till Tuesday, but just know that's a trend. It happens every time. It is totally predictable, and you can combat that with more activity.

Right? So just know that's coming for this year, for your end of year playbook, pour it on, especially post election. It's coming up on Tuesday. Okay. Part of your end of year strategy is what I call the state of the practice meeting.

So this is similar to the state of the union meeting that we have every year. It's mandated by the constitution. I think it ought to be mandated for your practice.

So schedule your state of the practice meeting. You can do this in December. You can do it in early January. But, basically, here's the agenda is what were our biggest victories for the year? What did we do in 2026 that worked that we wanna build on?

Where are our biggest opportunities for improvement in the areas where maybe we need to tighten things up? But, basically, it's a strategy meeting for the year to work on the practice, get the whole team pulled together, and map out what did we do and what are we going to do. Now I'm gonna wax biblical with you here for just a minute. I go, this is not religion, but this is just one of one of my favorite quotes is where there is no vision, the people perish.

Right? You gotta have the vision. So where are we going in 2027? That ought to be a big, big part of your end of year playbook is schedule that meeting, what worked, where are we going, and what are we gonna do.

So those...

That's your basic agenda. What worked in 2026, where are we going for 2027, and what are we going to do? Here's the focus of the things we're gonna do that's gonna move us forward.

Alright. Celebrate the victories. This is one of my favorite things and and one of the most overlooked things for end of the year. There is a thing that I adopted from Chip and Dan Heath. They're behavioral economists.

A behavioral economist is someone who studies human behavior and how it impacts economics at the micro level as well as the macro level. And Dan has a thing that he calls bright spots, which is identifying things that are working and focusing on doing more of those.

So here's part of your end of end of year playbook is what were all the bright spots in 2026? What worked?

Celebrate those victories. That may be a focus on particular team members who made a difference. It might be some of your patients who were were key to your success for the year, but look at the bright spots and celebrate those victories. And that might be part of your state of the practice meeting is to really highlight the bright spots because that's an indication of where we're going to go next to build on those bright spots.

So here's how you do that as part of that is focus on the 8020. Now, Sheela, you know I'm a big fan of natural laws. Right? What really is the foundation of what makes things work?

So 8020 is a natural law. 80% of everything comes from 20% of something.

So that eighty twenty, it changes every year.

Right? So in other words, let's take a look at... This is an analysis I believe every practice should go through, which is where's your practice 8020? So 80% of your production for the year came from 20% of your patients.

So if I had an active patient base of, say, 2,000 patients, that means that 400 of them, 400 of the 2,000 made up 80% of my production.

So it might be useful as a team to look at who they were, what did they have in common, what procedures did they have done, right, what are the commonalities in that 20% that made 80% of everything happen. Where did they come from? Right? What was their referral source to really focus on the eighty twenty? Identify the 20% because that's really what's making everything happen in the practice. And then what does that tell you about where you're gonna focus for the next year?

How can you leverage that eighty twenty to do even more. But make no mistake, there is always an eighty twenty in everything.

Alright. Next.

Next item on your checklist for the end of the year... Oh, that's 10. I think... Oh, no. This is... Okay. Excuse me. We're not... That's, I think, seven. So here is a a recommendation.

Sheela, one of the things we do... Our team does at Total Patient Service is what we call a practice growth analysis, and part of that is helping identify the eighty twenty. So it's it's taking a look at your practice data, and then we go through and we identify bright spots. We identify opportunities in areas where there is potential for growth. So it's part of that, and our team will do a select number of these for free. So if you're interested in that, you can scan that QR code. Our team will be in touch with you. We'll get connected with the data, and we can do a growth analysis so you can see what's working, where the opportunities are.

That'll help you recap your year and start looking at where where you're gonna head in 2027. So that's a that's a free benefit for watching today.

If that makes sense for your team, you are... You're welcome to scan that, and our team will be in touch to to have that conversation with you.

Alright. Recognition is the next piece of your playbook.

So if you've done your eighty twenty, there are two things I'm gonna I'm gonna recommend here. Number one, one of my favorite things that we recommend, Sheela, is what I call the patient of the month. Now it can be the patient of the week, the patient of the day, whatever it is. But to look at your eighty twenty and say, okay. Who are the top 20% patients that refer us the most business? Who are the top 20% patients who had the most work done? That merits some recognition in whatever way you do that.

Right? Recognize the people that are making things happen for your practice. So that's part of your state of the union, state of the practice conversation is how can we recognize the patients that are making the most happen for our practice?

And then the second piece, this is gonna be a little counterintuitive, but for the general practices, I would also look at the specialists that you are referring to that are part of your team. Meaning, if you're referring to them, they are a reflection of you.

So I know specialists are always doing stuff for the general dentist, but what can you do to work more closely with the people that make you successful? What are your... What... How can you work with your specialist? Recognize them for what they do for your patients because they'll treat your patients a lot better if you treat them differently. And then the second area, your lab.

What can you do to dial your lab technician more closely into what you do? Recognize them.

Typically, they're some of the most underappreciated parts of the whole dental equation. Most lab guys never hear from a dentist unless something's going wrong.

So recognize them because they have a huge, huge part in what makes your dentistry successful.

Alright. Number 10 is relook at your technology, what's out there, and what you can do to leverage patient relationships with technology. Well, let me be clear here because she was gonna talk about how to leverage technology. Here's my general rule.

I wanna look at technology through the lens of patient service. Meaning, I wanna look at anything and everything that will free me up and free the team up to be more patient facing.

So all of the nonpatient facing tasks like insurance verification, right, would be an example of that. That burns up a lot of personnel time. I wanted... I wanna take as many of those tasks as possible to free up the team to spend more time with the patients, be more patient facing. Dentistry is a relationship business. So I want, as much as I can, everybody front of the house, right, patient facing to nurture those patient relationships. So anything that technology will do to free up time to be more patient facing or... And or to help us build a better relationship with the patient.

So for example, decades ago when intraoral technology first came out, that was a huge patient relationship additive. Right? Because it helped us have better quality conversations. It really facilitated that whole piece of it. That added to the patient relationship. So how can you take technology, free up team member time to be more patient facing? It's all about relationships.

So as Sheela starts talking about relation... Or technology, here would be my second recommendation is our team at Total Patient Service does what I consider required education for every member of the team in terms of case acceptance and patient relationships. So it's in our course we call total immersion. We do it online as well as in person.

So you're welcome to scan that QR code for information about that. But I consider it required for everyone in dentistry to be more patient facing and be more effective at patient service and case acceptance.

Alright, Sheela. Those are my top 10. For starters, I could have done a 100, but that would have been excessive. So top 10 for end of year playbook. There's a lot more, and you're gonna share with us how you can leverage technology to have a better end of the year.

Yes. Excellent. Thank you for that, Steven. I always learn so much from you, and, I loved what you talked about when you are meaning to meet with your team.

It's oftentimes as managers and owners, we will lean into the negative or the areas that we're we're not really doing well. So where's our production or where's our collections? And I think it's important to take that step and really celebrate the wins. That really changes that entire meeting, and so I'm thankful that you brought that up.

I'm going to jump into kind of what we were talking about here, which is in a world that we all live in with not enough time, not enough hours in the day, not enough staff members, and also the elephant in the room, the fear of technology. Is it gonna take my job? So we want to really talk about aligning the existing patient journey with technology to free up your time. Right?

There's so much we do before the appointment, so much we do during, and so much we do after that it's hard to stay present. We know when we look at research, we look at what builds a practice, and it is relationships, and it is how the patient felt from the first phone call through the exit, and we are all part of that. So if we look at technology, it has definitely secretly been woven into our world without us even thinking about it. You have AI for phones.

Right? You have the ability to...

Now we fear that. We think about, oh, I don't want a robot answering the phone.

But, excuse me, in my practice, we noticed we had 400 missed phone calls last month. Right?

Wow. So That's a lot.

Right? And that is not serving your patient. So although the human is better, having something answer the phone and facilitate a callback is definitely improvement.

Excuse me. I cannot speak. Taking my breath away here. When we move into scheduling the patient, right, we have a lot of statistics that talk about online scheduling.

Now at Pearl, we don't have phone answering, and we don't have online scheduling. But what I think is powerful here is to think about we're fearing technology. When I put in online scheduling, I was worried that I was gonna have patients pop up everywhere. In reality, that would be great, but you do have control over scheduling specific patients in specific areas in your practice.

And when we look at the statistics, sixty seven percent of patients are booking online, and, technically, they're booking after hours.

The nice thing about online scheduling is as you control it, we have one column for hygiene, one for doctor, you will have about a three percent cancellation rate. Why? Because they're scheduling at a time that works for them. So utilizing ways where, again, we feared technology in the past.

How can we use it where we're still in the driver's seat? We're still the captain, and the AI is really the copilot.

We all struggle with insurance verification and auditing charts. We spend so much time preparing for that patient's arrival.

Oftentimes, where we're missing out on the moment, we could add an extra smile today, sit next to the patient during a treatment plan in the operatory. These are the things that are going to make the difference in your practice. So how do we buy back time?

Automating insurance verification is nothing new. It might be new to some of you on this call. And I think the process begins with being open minded to being able to have all of the information verified, the ability to look into a portal to say, what's the missing tooth clause? It's available for you here. Search by code. To Steven's point, being prepared ahead of time allows more same day dentistry.

And in the next sixty days, this is the time to be able to remove these friction points in your patient journey. We wanna know the insurance is verified. We wanna know what the percentage of coverage is, but all of you want to be mindful of the remaining benefits.

And that's where we talk about the morning huddle and the the chart audits. Think about this. You wake up in the morning, and all of a sudden, the chart audits are done. In fact, they're done for you the minute an appointment is made.

Not only do we talk about the remaining insurance benefits, we're also gonna tell you if there's a claim action here, which is don't forget to take that X-ray because we've looked into your system, and we noticed that one of two things are happening. One, it's 12 old, which is a problem, and the second is maybe you're missing a root tip. To have the whole team focus on treating the patient clinically really well with what's unscheduled, what's the AI finding, that's the win of practice growth. Right? And, again, think about it. Every day, you can print this out, and you can give this to your providers so that the whole team is aligned with opportunities at 7AM. The office managers are crunched in the moment to add same day dentistry because you have awareness.

We know this patient, excuse me, at 08:00 is coming in.

We can actually be mindful. On the upper left, they're numb. Do we wanna maximize insurance and do that crown today? And you're giving the team awareness of the remaining benefits.

So this is what Steven was talking about is using systems to do the mundane task so that you can serve the patient better. And that's where we all shine is when that patient arrives. Right? We're ready to go.

It's kinda like we've been rehearsing, and now it's game time. And the important part here is we do so much to get them on the schedule, but we've gotta give them that number. And if you can present areas of concern and color, that's a big win. We've all seen X rays with AI, overlaid directly and so does imaging, but we've moved beyond AI in X rays.

It's an entire patient system where the agents are running around in in conjunction with the patient journey and in preparation of what your team is doing on a daily basis. So all of these things happen within your workflow. You're just taking an X-ray. The AI will analyze it, and you can share it with your patient.

We love this one because it reminds you which images not to share with insurance, right, and which images you don't want to. Well, unfortunately, you have to retake them, but it'll tell you those at acquisition. But if you can change your case presentation into something like this, that's gonna allow more patients to understand and accept more dentistry. We're not diagnosing more. That is not the goal. That is actually a great way to get rid of your patients. If you start increasing your diagnosis because it's end of the year, their patients are... Your patients are gonna know that, and none of us on this call are part of that.

And again Hey, Sheela.

Can I add add something there? This from a patient's perspective, and for those who don't know, I'm I'm not a dentist. I'm a patient.

I got pulled into dentistry a long time ago. But from a patient perspective, I love this when it's used right because this isn't about AI. This is about patient communication. So when I was talking about how do you leverage technology to build the patient relationship, Then this becomes a great ad because then if you said to me, Steve, you've probably seen dental X rays, you know, your whole life, and if you're like most of our patients, it just looks like a gray blob. So we've got some things where now we can look at the X rays together, and you'll be able to see what I see. So you now get to put on dental school glasses, and you're gonna be able to see what I see when I look at X rays so that we can all be on the same page together. That to me, you don't even have to mention AI.

Right.

It's just like, here's here's a way to look at it. So we want you to be able to see what we see.

Yeah. And that's exactly right. That's that's really where the case acceptance improves overnight.

I had to introduce my sugar bugs because I love them. They are so cute, and I just...

If I'm having a bad day, I go look at this X-ray because it just makes me laugh. But, anyway, this is a fun way to interact with your patients. And quite frankly, you're interacting with the moms of the patients that are paranoid that are...

We have been told our kid has a cavity, and we think it's just gonna fall out. Well, no. We need those teeth there, so your your kid is gonna have to have a a small filling. Printouts are great.

That's helpful. But this is the key point that Steve was talking about, which is sixty five percent of people are visual learners. They're not understanding what you're showing them in an X-ray. So why not simplify it and give it some color?

That's really the bottom line here, bringing in your CBCT images directly into second opinion so you can have more chairside information there to talk to the patient. I think this is where we can all win here is the perio charting and the voice documentation.

We're looking on average about two hours a day of giving teens time back. And guess what? Your narratives and your documentation is done before you leave. Your perio charts are there. Forty percent of claims are denied the first time because we don't have adequate documentation.

There's no longer an excuse if you're using automated voice notes. So that's the big win of being able to go through the complete patient journey and having AI along the way. You talked a lot about follow-up, Steve, and I wanna lean into that just a moment. But when you look at this slide, you think about that patient visit.

I simplified this into 19 tasks. Right? We know there's about 1,900 tasks if we brought the dental assistant in and talked about what they do to set up and the hygienist in the front and the insurance team. But I encourage you to think about 11 of these can be done for you.

And we know AI is not perfect, but if it can do 11 things at about 95%, it might be something you think about having in your practice.

I love this book. I think it's really a great read. It's something that we all need as managers, as teams, as, maybe a fun book club. But this is a great way to think about what you're doing in your day.

And is it really what you should be doing? Right? And that's something important. What should the office manager be doing? What should the assistant, the doctor? And, you know, we're all doing a thousand jobs at once, but are we effective?

And that's where we think about how do we lean into technology to save your team time. Two hours with insurance verification per day, sixty minutes with chart audits, ten minutes you don't have to retake your images, Eight minutes on perio charting per patient. You're looking at about an hour for clinical documentation.

If I could give you four hours back today, I think that's a game changer.

Be huge.

So we encourage you to take a quick image, picture, screenshot, something here. Sit down with our team. Find out if it's a good match for you. I think saving time is key.

If patients could accept the dentistry that the doctors are recommending earlier and more often, we have less invasive, less expensive dentistry, which creates better patient outcomes and a more retained Now I'll end with this. We are following up with an actual playbook that will be coming out online. We encourage you to look out for that. It'll be on every social media.

It came out yesterday on LinkedIn. And what it does is it walks you through all of the things that Steve and I went through today. The most encouraging part to know is it's not too late, and you can start today. With the follow ups, I think that was a real key point here, which was we do reach out, but do we follow-up?

And our team has noticed that even in in all of your follow ups that you might do personally in your own, spreadsheets, you can use AI to create follow ups for you. You can use AI to say who came in in the last fourteen days that didn't schedule and who has crowns outstanding with remaining benefits.

AI is here to help you do your job so that you don't have to do so many things that are behind the scenes and so we can get you out in front of the patient. So I wanna thank everybody today for joining us. I do wanna open this up for questions. I saw quite a few here, and let me see what we have for questions. Steve, I'll turn it back over to you for some closing thoughts.

Got it. So one of the one of the questions, you know, maybe you can address this. Yeah. Is amazing, and it's not perfect. I know you guys are constantly working on accuracy.

Can you speak to the accuracy of insurance verification based on what's happening now?

Yes. It's a great question. I... That's a... I almost should have planted that for you. It sounds that way.

We are moving into a space where, you know, dentists looked at AI in the beginning, they thought, oh, it's not perfect. I don't need it. And the reality was, as they used it more, they thought, oh, I'm glad this is here. I'm glad this is reminding me of this little small lesion when I'm focused on this big one.

So they started becoming more reliant on having that second set of eyes. However, dentists work within a 99% accuracy. Right? One micron off, and and that's a concern with the patient's bite.

When we look at insurance verification, as managers, we feel the same way. We want it a 100% because we're standing behind those quotes.

I would tell you industry standard for most insurance verification is about an 89 to about a 92%, and that's mainly because most insurance verification companies are focused on, grabbing the information from the portals and being able to feed that back to you. Exciting news at Pearl is that as we move into January, we have a new platform that will take your 89 to 92 all the way up to a 100% by employing additional agents and humans to customize the verifications you need, call the companies that are not online, and that are also giving you incomplete information. So that's gonna be the game changer as we move into that daunting task in 2027 that I think, Steve, you and I are gonna meet and have another webinar about how to set the teams up for success in 2027, discussing the new codes.

But if the insurance team is on today, I encourage you to reach out and understand what this looks like for you because it's a great question. How do we use insurance and feel confident when AI is actually doing it for us?

So... And I... I'd go back to, again, eighty twenty.

Most everything's eighty eighty twenty. So if I can get 80% of the job done for me and save that much more time, I may have to check on the 20%. Nothing's perfect, but that's gonna be a huge, huge game changer. So I...

And, Sheela, thank you for all of the technology updates. I think that the key to this, as I continue to look at it, is, you know, I I think back just a year ago or even less, it's like AI is gonna take over the world. Nobody's gonna have a job. Well, I I think dentistry is pretty safe, and there are some great technology tools that can help us, again, be more patient facing and build better relationships.

That is dentistry is about relationships.

Technology can't replace a relationship, and it can add to the equation to make it a better relationship and to be more patient facing. So everything that Sheela's talked about combined with great team training.

One of the things I'm excited about with everything that's going on, Sheela, is if you can free up three to four hours, then that gives the whole team more opportunities to interact with the patient and you better be trained.

Because patient service skills and great communication skills, they don't come naturally.

They are learned skills. So leverage technology to free up the time so you can be more patient facing and get the entire team trained. I'll end with this. When you think about it, dentistry is the number one frontline healthcare profession.

We see in dentistry more of America more often for a greater quantity of time than anyone else in healthcare.

So I believe it's incumbent upon us to do it better than everybody else so that when your patients go everywhere else in health care, they say, I wish you all would treat me like they treat me at my dentist office because they've got it dialed in. We've got the opportunity to do that, to lead the way in health care, to be the most patient facing, best patient service segment in health care. And it takes work and effort to do that. Part of that's technology, part of it's training. It takes both.

I can't even add to that. That was so well stated, and I love this whole presentation we've been able to work on together, Steven. I'm encouraging all of you to reach out to myself at Pearl and even. I would love for you to have a meeting with Steven and his team.

Why not start the year right? And we look forward to seeing you all next year. Look out for the playbook, and look out for the 2027 webinar. We will be meeting you again in January.

Thanks, everybody.

Thank you, Sheela.

Bye. Great to see you all.

Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah. Beautiful.

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