Like all other healthcare entities, dental organizations are under increasing pressure to grow and perform financially. To achieve heightened goals, using available data for business analytics is more important than ever.
At Becker's The Future of Dentistry Roundtable, in a session sponsored by tab32, Kiltesh Patel, tab32's CEO, discussed the critical role that data plays in growing and scaling dental service organizations (DSOs). He also shared insights into specific data technologies that will drive the future of DSOs.
Four key takeaways were:
- Among dental organizations, the major obstacle to actionable business intelligence is the lack of data standardization. As dental organizations continue to acquire new practices and consolidate, it's challenging to gauge performance across the business, especially with different practice management systems that have different data standardization models. "The problem with the data is that it is not democratized," Mr. Patel said. "It's not standardized."
- That presents a big conundrum for leadership: implement new software on a just-acquired business or go months without actionable data. Immediately changing an acquisition's practice management system is problematic. "It's disruptive to the practice; it's disruptive to the relationship," one roundtable participant said. But waiting can mean going months without meaningful performance data that can show what's costing the organization and where improvement is needed. "A lot of them . . . will wait six months," the participant said. "But if they do that, then they're kind of flying blind. So operationally, they're not getting the data they need to be successful."
- The solution lies in scalable architecture that fosters decision-making based on more complete data. Plenty of organizations are already using cloud solutions for data storage rather than hosting data on-premise. But if the data isn't aggregated and standardized, it's not actionable. "If you want to centralize your billing team, how do you centralize all of those aspects when a biller has to log in screen after screen after screen to submit or appeal a claim?" Mr. Patel asked. "That's a big limiting factor if we are looking to the future from a DSO perspective."
- tab32's solution has a standardization model for dental organization data. This solution allows the organization to take disparate, siloed data from assorted practice management systems, regardless of where or how it is stored, and standardize the data based on a model that tab32 built with its in-house expertise. That means a large-scale infrastructure that's capable of delivering meaningful business intelligence. Another key differentiator is the aggregation, which allows queries such as how many doctors in the practice are screening for oral cancer, for example. Other solutions would have to write that query; with tab32, business leaders can ask their own questions of the data.
Dental organizations are viewed as being 10 years behind medical organizations in adopting modern business technologies, Mr. Patel said. But this presents opportunities to learn from mistakes made in other parts of healthcare. It's clear that data-driven solutions that provide clear business intelligence will be key to DSO success over the next decade.