- Hello everyone, and thank you for tuning in
to the Becker's Healthcare podcast.
My name is Mariah Mohammed,
and I'm thrilled to be joined today by Paul Bernard, CEO
of inside Desks.
Paul, thank you so much for joining us today.
It's always a pleasure speaking with you. How are you?
- I'm well, thanks Mariah. Thanks for having me.
Excited to be here. Yeah,
- Yeah, of course.
And to get us started,
would you mind please introducing yourself,
sharing a bit about your role and organization?
- Sure. Thank you Mariah.
Uh, Paul Bernard, I'm the CEO of Inside Desk.
Um, been with Inside Desk since, uh, late 2022,
um, and we sell RCM Optimization
and Automation software, uh, to DSOs.
Prior to that, uh, I've been in dental since about 2017.
I spent almost five years at Smile Brands running their,
their RCM and a few other different operations there, um,
and was also Chief Operating Officer at Dental Exchange.
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for sharing.
And to jump right into today's conversation,
the first question I wanted to ask you is,
what specifically in dental did we learn from the change
healthcare data breach?
- So, o obviously I think the, the importance
of effective security processes is the, the thing
that will jump out at, at most people,
but I'm gonna, I'm gonna actually leave that portion
of the topic for, for other experts in cybersecurity.
I'd rather talk about it
and think about it from an operational perspective.
Um, I think this,
this event is a really important lesson in
enterprise risk management.
So the idea that proactively assessing areas of risk
and doing scenario planning
and having mitigation plans in place should,
should be something that, that we do as an industry
and that DSOs and, and other, uh, providers do all the time.
So, I mean, simply put, um,
and maybe to use a football analogy, we, we have
to be audible ready as an industry.
We have to understand our blind spots,
and then we have to build in redundancies and mitigations.
So, you know, those of us that, that were in DSOs
during covid got a firsthand lesson in, in risk management.
You know, for example, the supply chain
for PPE got very tight
and practices who used
to buy all their supplies from a single source suddenly had
to figure out how to multi-source
and, and do it very quickly.
That was a very expensive lesson.
So the change breach in my view, um, is a,
is a another opportunity for us to learn.
And quite honestly,
it was a fairly predictable surprise in my view.
We, we could have predicted this was going to happen.
- Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much
for sharing that take.
And, um, now, now that you talked about blind spots,
where are the blind spots in dental that you can share?
- Yeah, great. Great question.
I think first off, I, I really, you know, as an industry
and, and personally for me, I have to give full credit
to the teams at Dental Exchange
and Vine for, for stepping into the void.
And, and they worked ungodly hours, um, on behalf
of the industry as a whole.
So kudos goes to them.
That said, I'd like to see us as an industry learn
to get better going forward when it comes
to understanding the risks associated with single sourcing
and the importance of process redundancy.
I think we have to think about the, the end-to-end system
as a whole and,
and ask ourselves, really, why is it not as simple
as being able to flip a switch from
one clearinghouse to another?
Now that may be, you know, sort of a, a,
a gross oversimplification,
but it, I don't think it needs to be.
I also think as an industry, um,
we've got a blind spot on system interoperability.
So the ability for, uh,
and ease of which systems can, can safely, quickly,
and effectively talk to each other.
You know, on the medical side,
there's the HL seven standard, which has been in place
for a very long time.
It's not great, but at least it recognizes the need
for the ease and speed of, of data sharing.
Uh, among, um, IT, and,
and HIT en, uh, entities in the, in the medical space,
we have nothing like that in dental.
I think the last point I'd make is,
is really from the perspective of, uh,
A DSO blind spot to, to watch out for,
and that is, um, better advocacy for easy access
to its core RCM data.
In the end, you know, when something like this happens, um,
it's really the docs
and the patients who ultimately get impacted the most.
And so I think DSOs, um, really have to be advocates
for their ability to get their hands on their data,
um, as much as possible.
- Yeah. Yeah, that's very, very interesting.
I'm glad you are aware of these blind spots.
Um, and, and being mindful of them,
what are Inside Desk solutions
and how were you able to help your clients?
- Well, so on the product side, um, inside Desk is,
is purpose built to automate the ingestion of unpaid
or open insurance claims from the PMSs
and match it to payer status and adjudication data.
So, uh, for A DSO, think of it as a central hub regardless
of your PMS and your payer, et cetera.
But equally as important for our business from a cultural,
uh, perspective and how we operate, um,
it's really important to understand how we behave.
And when we say that we're, we're insiders, it's a word
that, that we use to describe ourselves
and our customers, it really, it's got nothing to do
with having a catchphrase,
but it has everything to do with how we behave.
And so, uh, we take our DSO clients' results personally,
um, and being an insider drives every action we take.
So the, the first thing for us to do,
when the breach occurred, the first thing we did was
to make sure our clients understood all the possible
outcomes, uh, with respect
to payment delays so they could prepare.
Um, and we, you know, when it happened, we were proactively,
our customer success team was proactively reaching out, uh,
very quickly to, to customers, um, one, to, to sort
of give them some perspective,
but two, to help them start thinking about what this means.
Um, and I'd say secondly, the, the,
because of the analytics that we run, uh, so, you know,
analyzing the data on the backend,
we could help our clients understand all the possible range
of payment delays outside of normal processing times.
Um, we also really understand our users,
and so we very quickly put in product messaging
and alerts, uh, in the right places in our product
to make sure that they would understand
how the breach was impacting, uh, what they were seeing.
- Thank you, Paul, for explaining
that very important information.
How does Insight desks fit into this picture?
- Well, we're, um, we're data agnostic.
Um, which means as a business, we, we strive to capture
our DSOs RCM data, regardless of the PMS that they're using,
and also, regardless of the payer,
that their contracted risk.
And, and also regardless of the method of submission,
whether it's paper or digital, et cetera.
So all of our, our DSO clients use multiple PMS systems
and have more than one clearing house.
Um, and the truth is that RCM data can be obtained from,
you know, we can get it from a variety of sources.
You can get it on paper, you can get it over the phone
electronically, directly from payers, uh,
from clearinghouses, et cetera.
So our goal is really to provide our DSOs with a comp
as complete a picture, uh, as we can.
- Wonderful. Wonderful.
Well, I wanna thank you so much, Paul, for sharing your time
and insights with us today, as well as inside desk
for sponsoring today's content.
To our listeners, thank you so much for joining us,
and please make sure to check out other Becker's podcast.
Have a wonderful rest of your day,
and thank you again, Paul.
- Thank you.