Secure Dental_Samad Syed: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Secure Dental_Samad Syed: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Welcome to the Secure Dental Podcast. Through conversations with the brightest minds in the dental and business communities, we'll share practical tips you can use to scale your practice and create financial freedom for yourself and your family. My name is Dr. Noel Liu, CEO and Dentist at Secure Dental, and also co-founder of DentVia. I'm your host for the Secure Dental podcast, and I'm so glad you're joining in.

Dr. Noel Liu:
All right. Welcome to another episode of our Secure Dental podcast, where we bring in many different leaders from our industry, both inside and outside. And today, we have a very special guest, Mr. Samad Syed. And this guy is really great at what he does with his M consent. So we're going to dive a little bit more into it. But before we get started, this pod is sponsored by DentVia Dental Administration Virtual Company that actually takes care of all the back-end tasks for your front desk as well as your manager. So, definitely look them up. They do anything from call verification, lead generation calls, and all that good stuff, which our front desk hates to do. It's www.DentVia.com. Again, it's. w w w .d e n t v i a .com. Now, without further ado, I'm going to get started with Mr. Samad Syed, he is the actual CEO and founder of SRS Web Solutions. Mr. Syed, welcome to the show and let's pass the mic off to you.

Samad Syed:
Thank you, Doctor Liu. And interestingly, I just found out you're in Illinois, so I have some good memories of living in Chicago - the cold weather and all that stuff. Since I moved to Dallas, I missed the summers of Illinois. It's pretty nice to be around the lakes and the greenery, and it's beautiful out there.

Dr. Noel Liu:
It's all relative, right? Because it gets so cold and everybody enjoys the summer.

Samad Syed:
And you get away to that.

Dr. Noel Liu:
What better way to enjoy the city than in the summertime?

Samad Syed:
Absolutely, absolutely. So, a little bit about myself. I have a background in engineering. I did my MBA from Indiana University and got into dental well a few years ago, about eight years ago, when one of my friends, interestingly, in the Chicago area, invited me to his practice. My background in the corporate world has been in productivity and efficiency - Six Sigma master black belt. I care about where the money is wasted. So I looked at I used to look at different processes and I say that how can we improve this so we can improve the bottom line of our practices of, of our businesses. And he knew what I used to do. And he called me to his practice, and he said, tomorrow, I want you to come in and see what's happening here and see how can you help me. Long story short, I went into his office, and he took. He showed me a wall. And the wall has all the forms, about 30, 35 forms, where he said that I can't get the patient in without having them sign these forms. And it's a lot. Can you do something about this? This was back in those days where iPad was new and the technology was booming, said that why can't did you try this? And he said I'm giving this as a challenge if you can help me out.

Samad Syed:
And that is one. And I'm proud to say that it took us about a year and a half, and then we were able to transform his office, where we were able to completely change the experience of how patient intake works. We designed an iPad app where basically helps him to collect all his consent forms, medical histories, and all that are digitally and also designed an online intake form where the patients, before they come into the practice, is able to fill out the forms. So that's how it started, and it's all history. Today, we have about 2500 practices where we transform their patient, not only just patient intake. Now, we help them with three different areas in their practice. The number one is the patient intake part, which I just talked about. Number two is the patient communication part where, you know, the practices can text the patients, ask for the images, ask for the forms, ask for reviews, whatever. You have two-way text messaging with the patients' HIPAA-compliant text messaging. Also, we have a partnership with the phone company. Then, the number three is the practice growth. I was looking at a survey that they did last year.

Samad Syed:
And they said that only 77% of practices are able to fully utilize their capacity. Actually, the practices are only able to utilize up to 77% of their capacity in general. So, if you can see 100 patients, the practices are not able to see more than 77 on across across the board. Okay. So that's where we don't help with the digital marketing and all that. But what we help with is that we look at unscheduled treatment plans and say that how can we bring back patients into the practice who have not completed, who have treatment plans that are due? We also help with collecting payments, whether it's sending an online invoice, collecting text to pay, or we help with payment terminals in the office. On-site payment terminals and also the number one thing that we help them with patient reactivation. There are so many patients sitting in the database and people are and the practices ignored, this number one asset that they have, which is their patient database and people are not able to practice is not able to fully utilize what they have that close to them and bring back patients into their practice. I haven't showed up for a long time.

Dr. Noel Liu:
So tell me a little bit.

Samad Syed:
So this is the short of how we help.

Dr. Noel Liu:
So, you started off with your buddy's practice. This was when again? 2004?

Samad Syed:
2014 or 2015.

Dr. Noel Liu:
14 and 15. Sorry. So 14 and 15. And now you've grown it to like a 2500 doctor base, right? Practices?

Samad Syed:
Practices. Yeah.

Dr. Noel Liu:
That's awesome. So, how do you guys differ from some of the practice management software out there? It's like most of them are doing that, right?

Samad Syed:
Yeah, of course, of course. One thing that we take very seriously is our customer support. That's what we take seriously. The onboarding experience, the customer support part. But what we look at is that nitty gritty of things where, for example, if you get if you go into forums, everybody says that, oh, we just digitize forms. But there are so many levels of the digitization of forms. It's not just collecting on-of-the-line forms, but making sure that the medical history integration is there. So, we have deep integrations. We have a partnership with Henry Schein. We are connected partners with Henry Schein. We are a technology partner with Patterson Eaglesoft. We integrate to a point where I see a lot of lacking in other systems where our integrations go deep and we also help with open dental. So our integrations are deep and we help practices at a higher level when it comes to patient intake forms, but also on insurance verifications. We help with the collecting. We have a tool that helps them verify insurance verification When the form comes in, we verify the insurance verification with the form because we all have all the information already. And we show them whether this person is active and active and then give them all the information that they need.

Dr. Noel Liu:
So, for some of the listeners out there, right? They are looking at their software like us, we use Dentrix ascend. So we have a cloud-based. How difficult is it for you guys to tap into their API, or is it something which you've already worked it out?

Samad Syed:
We have a partnership with Dentrix and On Demand. We can build the integration with the APIs whatever Henry Schein can support us with. So there's there are limitations to what they allow you to integrate. And whatever they allow, you'll be able to integrate with.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Okay, okay. And as far as practice management software. So this is not practice management software.

Samad Syed:
It's a no we call it a patient engagement system. That's what it is.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Okay okay. Got it. So what about what is this M consent? Is that the consent forms, too?

Samad Syed:
Yes. So, it does have online forms. M consent is a total patient engagement platform okay? And it has patient intake forms. It has online scheduling. It has an appointment reminder system, a text messaging system, insurance verification, treatment plan reminders, and a complete suite of what the practice might need when it comes to intake, communication, or practice growth.

Dr. Noel Liu:
So let me take my example. I'm gonna ask you a tough question. My example is with Dentrix Ascend. These guys have decks built in. They have patient communications built in. They have all these reminders, all this stuff built in. Dentrix Ascend, some of them are like ala carte, and some of them are extra services. So for someone to say, okay, I want to get onboarded with you, what would be some of the benefits to skip those guys and then jump over with you?

Samad Syed:
So the number one thing I see is our interface with the patients is super easy. The patients love to work with something super easy. We have forms that are easily built for the patients to fill out, sign, and send it over to you. So that's the number one thing. Our Appointment Reminders system is customizable where you can have messages in Spanish. You can have messages built out. We have worked on a plan of appointment reminders, looking at different surveys on how many times the patient should be reminded for them to make sure that they don't forget coming to your practice. So there's a little more data and analysis that goes back into our system when it comes to how different we are with some practice management systems like Dentrix Ascend, which have all the built-in vessels into it. But know that we have spent a lot of time into developing these features. Compared to this, we don't focus on building practice management. We focus on building patient engagement. So that's how it can be different.

Dr. Noel Liu:
And for some other concerned listeners out there, I'm assuming that it's completely HIPAA compliant. Oh.

Samad Syed:
You can't be in the industry.

Dr. Noel Liu:
I just had to like throw it out because some are going to be people that are not HIPAA.

Samad Syed:
100%, 100%. One thing that I did a survey, not I did, but our company did a survey with 250 offices, and we asked them two questions. The number one question that we asked is what are the top three challenges that are faced by your practice? The number one challenge that we saw was that the practices said the amount of administrative time that we spent; the dentist basically said that we want to spend less time on administration time and more time on the chair, helping the patients, taking care of the patients, and about 25 to 30% of the time still the dentist spend on administrative time. And the number two answer was the practice growth. As I said, they all want to fill out fill their chairs, and they're still not able to book the appointments at a level that they want to. So they feel like the practice growth is important. We want to grow our practice. There are some offices that said that we want to grow from one location to a second location and a third location, and then the last one, they said that the third choice was financial management, meaning that financial management is where you have the practices, who are struggling with the insurance reimbursements and are not the way it used to be.

Samad Syed:
So, the cost of running the practices keeps going up, and the insurance reimbursements keep going down. Of course, the gap that's creating, that's where the struggle is that we're seeing. So these are the top three challenges that we see. And based on that, we ask questions like how can we help practices with their administrative time. And that's where M consent comes in. And for the practice growth, one thing that I have been telling practices is that the number one asset that you have in your practice is not your location, it's not your equipment. It's nothing else but your patient database because your patient database is the number one asset. So take care of the patient database. And how do you take care of the patient database? Let me give you an example. Crescent Family Dental in Illinois. We're not very far from you. And they were struggling to the doctor calls me and he asked me, hey, Samantha, I need your help. Give me some advice on how to fill my chairs. I need to fill my chairs. How do I do that? And he was asking like, should I spend $5,000? What's the marketing budget that I should consider? And what I ask him is that how many patients you have in your database and how many patients that you have in your database that hasn't come back for past 18 months.

Samad Syed:
We pulled in the database and we saw there were 2500 patients. That hasn't been back to his practice. We worked with them. I helped him out as a friend. We designed a strategy for email, text messaging, and social media. Everything included direct mailing. And we ran this campaign for six months and the results were amazing. He started to see 40 to 60 patients coming in every month back into his practice just by reactivating his database. And the messages were simple as, hey, Doctor Hahn, want to see you in your practice. I haven't seen you for a long time. Would you like to schedule a cleanup? There you go. You have people responding. Hey, the doctor is asking about me. Okay? Yeah, I've been missing this for a long time, so let me see when can we schedule? So it's a super important thing that if through this podcast, if I can let your listeners know one thing, which is to don't ignore your patient database. And I wrote a book on this, and I'm going to shamelessly advertise this. This book is called The Art of Patient Re-engagement. And the book has strategies on how you can build this patient re-engagement within your practice.

Dr. Noel Liu:
It's called The Art of Patient Re-engagement.

Samad Syed:
The Art of Patient Re-engagement. So now there'll be people who tell you that I already do recalls, though. What does that now? How is that different? So, the recalls, let me tell you that the recalls are the email open rates have gone down, and it keeps continuing to go down. So just the recalls are not enough anymore. What you have to look at is that you have to have a strategy in place because there's a cost of patient acquisition, people have to spend 200 to $600 to bring in patients into your practice. Now that patient is sitting in your practice, and you're not doing anything with that, that's a sin. You have to communicate with them. You have to have a strategy of continuously having a communication in whatever most natural possible way. For example, I tell people, what you need to do is have your patients join your social media, and when you have a baby shower in your practice, or you have a birthday in your practice, or the doctor is celebrating something, put that on social media so they can see the human part of your dentist. They don't have to see the coupons all the time. Just something very simple as this is what's happening in the practice.

Samad Syed:
We are giving away Colgate toothpaste and stop by to pick it up if you're available.

Dr. Noel Liu:
That's a great idea.

Samad Syed:
Building that natural connection is the thing that you have to start looking into. How can I? The patients that I've engaged with and the patients who know me are the ones I need to keep working with. To make sure. Then the cost of your patient acquisition is lower year over year because people look to spend five, ten, 15, $20,000 always looking for new patients. Of course, you got to look for new patients, but know that what you have already in your database is a treasure, and you can't afford to just ignore that treasure. And that's what I would say. And then also one more thing. This is a technical thing, but for your front office, you have to make sure that they're properly collecting the email addresses and phone numbers. If you're not doing that digitally yet, you're probably collecting that and keeping your database intact, making sure that whenever you want to use it and whenever you want to start those campaigns, you have the right data in place.

Dr. Noel Liu:
100%. You just nailed something right there in the head. A lot of times when we are actually just searching for the new patients there. We are just going outside of what we don't have. We're always focusing on what we don't have. And you should be focusing on what you do have. And that is exactly what you just said. That's great. That's great.

Samad Syed:
And one more thing I would say is that I want you to think about this. There are probably like, every practice, have six, or seven competitors around them, and they are willing to put 4 to 400, 300, $400 per patient that is sitting in your database to bring in their database.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Good way to look at it.

Samad Syed:
But don't ignore that. You have to have a strategy in place. Whatever you do, email, you do phone you make phone calls. You send text messaging, you have direct mail. You're trying to spend a lot of money on the patients that you don't have in your database, but you're not doing anything with the patients you already have in the database. So that is something that's needed. And we do help practices if somebody says that, hey, I need help with that. And they raised their hand and we said that, okay, we'll help you with we have an account manager who can help you build the strategy and put things in place for you. So people usually get confused with like, oh, well, how do I put these Excel sheets together? How do I send emails? And we got people in place who can help.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Sure, sure. So how does it work with you? So let's say is it like an ala carte service that you provide like different services? Okay.

Samad Syed:
Yeah, yeah. So if you come to our practice and come to M consent and say, hey, I'm using your forms and I want to see if I can, you know, reactivate my database. Sure. What does it take? Our account manager will sit down with you and help you put a strategy in place. And because every practice is different. Some people have 1500 patients that haven't come back in the past 12 or 18 months. Some people have like 5000 patients. I have a practice that has 10,000 patients who are working right now to reactivate their practice. He didn't realize that. When I asked him, hey, doctor Q, I asked him, how many patients do you have in your database, like, what do you mean by that? Okay, let's go look at your open dental, pull that up, and see how many actual patients that you have seen in the past few years. And his practice has been in a long time. So he had about 10,000 plus patients that, on command he can bring back into his practice. And he doesn't have to look for any new patients. If you have 10,000, if you can get like 5% back, that's 500 patients in a month if you have the capacity to take care of them.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Absolutely. No, I love it briefly. This one thing is how do you guys onboard? What is the onboarding process look like?

Samad Syed:
Oh, for the patient reactivation?

Dr. Noel Liu:
Correct reactivation, or if there's any other services that you provide?

Samad Syed:
So the onboarding process is pretty simple. Our sales team will walk you through whatever service you are looking for. And then we have an account manager that we assign to everyone who wants to be part of the M consent. That account manager is responsible for making sure that we're taking care of your practice. Whether you need forms, whether you need appointment reminders. It's a la carte service, basically. And we do have a great savings plan, or we are very cost-competitive. We don't charge, like $2,000 and we don't charge $1,500 just to get the practice onboard. So usually our onboarding cost is very low to nothing.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Okay. Do you guys like do the reactivation for general population across the board on the database, or is it like specific target patients that we can also like play with?

Samad Syed:
Yeah. We actually look at your database. Whoever you have in your database, we reactivate those patients so that they come back to your practice.

Dr. Noel Liu:
So I'll give you a good example for myself, like me and a bunch of my other associate doctors, we do a lot of implant surgery, right? And we have many consoles that come through the door on a daily basis. And some of these guys, it's been over six months, over 12 months, 18 months, or two years, you name it. Do you guys have something service like that where you can just say, hey, I just want to target Invisalign or maybe just implants?

Samad Syed:
Yeah. Absolutely. So we have something called an unscheduled treatment plan. So what we do is that we educate them or we don't go and tell them, hey, come back for our coupon. We tell them, listen, you are looking to make your smile better. What's a better way than getting it done? During the summertime, we actually have a program for people who get a treatment plan for cavities. They don't come back. We basically educate them. Telling them about procrastinating a cavity doesn't help. It doesn't cure itself. You need to make sure that it doesn't go to a root canal so that now you have bad teeth and you have to remove your teeth itself or get a new implant, which may cost you 15 to $20,000. Procrastination is expensive, so get it done early. So this kind of education messages that we automatically send out. So what we do is that we connect with your system and we read the codes that your procedure asks you. Yeah, yeah. And based on those procedure codes we designed messages that go out to the patients based on those codes.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Got it. Got it okay. No, that's great. That's great. Yeah. Anything else you want to add to how people reach you?

Samad Syed:
Yeah. So the best way for people to reach us as a M content is www.mconsent.net. And if the people who want to reach me for questions. I'm very good at responding on LinkedIn usually. I'll send you my LinkedIn if you want to add.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Yes, we'll have the LinkedIn profile.

Samad Syed:
The profile video submitted is my LinkedIn profile. So people who want to get in touch with me. Yeah. I'm so glad that we connected with Doctor Liu. And it was wonderful talking to you. Thoroughly enjoyed the discussion.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Oh, great. Great. It was such an awesome experience to learn about what you do. And there is another niche that fulfills this market, so I'm very glad that we connected as well. Awesome. Thank you very much for joining us. And ladies and gentlemen, make sure to like and subscribe. And this is going to be the end of our show today. Definitely go out there, crush it all my dark colleagues, and be great and have a great day.

Dr. Noel Liu:
Thanks for tuning in to the Secure Dental Podcast. We hope you found today's podcast inspiring and useful to your practice and financial growth. For show notes, resources, and ways to stay engaged with us, visit us at NoelLuidds.com. That's n o e l l i u d d s.com.

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