Medical & Dental Solutions

There is a number that every dental and medical practice owner knows but rarely says out loud: how much of their day has nothing to do with patient care.

For most practices I work with, it is somewhere around 60%. The morning starts with insurance verification calls — four hours of hold music and payer portals before a single patient walks through the door. The front desk is fielding 50-plus calls while simultaneously checking in walk-ins, printing intake forms that patients will fill out by hand for the third time this year, and texting the hygienist about a no-show in operatory two. Somewhere in the back office, a stack of denied claims sits in a folder marked “follow up,” and the office manager — the only person who knows the password to the payer portal, the recall system, and the supply ordering account — is already thinking about updating her resume.

This is not a technology problem. Practices already run five to ten pieces of software. Dentrix or Open Dental for scheduling and charting. Solutionreach or Weave for patient communication. A separate system for insurance verification. Another for online reviews. A spreadsheet for tracking the recall list that nobody has time to work. And Gmail, always Gmail, for everything that falls between the cracks.

The problem is that none of these systems talk to each other in the ways that matter. When a patient cancels, someone has to manually check the waitlist, call the next patient, update the schedule, and adjust the day’s production targets — a four-system process that takes fifteen minutes and happens three times a day. When a claim is denied, someone has to read the denial code, pull the original submission, figure out what went wrong, resubmit, and calendar a follow-up — if the claim does not simply join the 65% of denials that are never resubmitted.

The dental industry’s answer to this has been consolidation. DSOs now own over 8,000 clinics and employ 100,000-plus dentists, growing at 16% annually. They achieve 50-55% overhead through centralized operations. And yet, most dentists who sell to DSOs describe the decision the same way: they did not want to stop being independent, they wanted to stop drowning in administration. On the medical side, only 42% of physicians remain in private practice — down 18 percentage points in a decade — driven largely by the same administrative exhaustion.

The practices I consult with do not need another platform. They need the workflows that connect their existing platforms — the multi-step, multi-system processes that currently live in their office manager’s head. The insurance verification that should trigger automatically when tomorrow’s appointments are confirmed. The recall outreach that should launch when a patient hits 30 days overdue, escalate at 60, and flag for personal follow-up at 90. The review request that should go out two hours after a positive visit, but route to a private feedback form if the patient had a complaint.

That is what automation means in healthcare. Not replacing clinical judgment. Not handling protected health information carelessly. Not adding another login to the front desk’s already impossible morning. It means connecting the systems you already trust so that the administrative work that consumes 60% of your day happens without someone having to remember, manually trigger, and follow up on every step.

The articles in this section walk through the specific workflows — with real numbers, real tool names, and the operational reality of running a 2-5 provider practice without a dedicated IT department. Because the front desk already knows what needs to happen. They just need to stop being the human middleware that makes it happen.