In today's episode of The Millionaire Dentist, we have dental billing specialist Dr. James Anderson who has built nine dental practices from scratch. While building his empire, he identified a need in the marketplace and created one of the largest dental billing companies in the nation.
Announcer:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Millionaire Dentist podcast brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry, finances, and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised. We do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work. Now here's your host, Alan Berry.
Alan Berry:
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Millionaire Dentist podcast. On today's show, we have Dr. James Anderson. Dr. Anderson built nine dental practices from scratch. And while he was doing that, he saw a need in the marketplace and created one of the largest dental billing companies in the nation. One quick show note, this is not an info commercial for eAssist. No one was paid to be here. Please be smart. Do your own research.
Alan Berry:
Hello, Dr. Anderson, and thanks for coming on the show.
Dr. James Anderson:
You bet. Thanks Allen.
Alan Berry:
Dr. Anderson, take me back to when you started eAssist, what problem were you trying to solve?
Dr. James Anderson:
One of the biggest problems we have when we're starting dental practices is finding an office manager who not only knows how to be a good people person, present treatment plan properly, and ask for patients' copay at the time of service. Like that's a certain skillset in itself. And now you're asking someone to have that kind of personality to also be someone focused on debits and credits, posting ledgers, following up on insurance claims, it's a different personality and skillset. It's awfully hard to find someone that has both of those. And when you do, you never want to let those people go, they're superstars. And you can find them, but usually they already work for another dentist. We realized if we had to centralize our billing somehow, and we didn't want to do this ourselves, we just wanted to find a dental billing company that would do it for us. I went onto Google, couldn't find anyone. They were just all collection agencies. There were medical billing companies, but there weren't any dental billing companies. And we thought, "Well, let's just start our own."
Alan Berry:
So now you have eAssist, the company that you needed when you were a younger entrepreneur and then you created. What is the top three things that eAssist does for its clients?
Dr. James Anderson:
There's three things we do. One is getting the claim posted properly. Number two, setting all the claims, setting all the attachments, making sure it's received by the insurance companies. If they have a portal, we want to use the portal if that works best. If they need attachments and x-rays, radiographs, whatever, they got to get it all. And then finally we follow up on all the denied claims. We want to make sure that you're being paid for what you're doing. We're like an assistant for the front office person. That's often how we describe ourselves.
Alan Berry:
What do you find is the most significant pushback you hear from a dentist that is a new potential client for you?
Dr. James Anderson:
What we normally find is that if an office is humming and has an excellent office manager and everything is fully under control, and the office is not growing, then there's no need for us. It's when they start to grow and there's pressure put on the front desk to perform. As you produce more and more and more and more, your office manager has to make more and more and more half an hour follow up claim calls with supervisors, asking for the money to be paid. And that takes more and more time.
Dr. James Anderson:
So you got to add an assistant for yourself. You got to have an assistant at the front. And so the pushback we get is, "Well, we don't really need you. I don't have a problem with my billing." And that's great. Don't. If you don't have a problem, we're not your solution. But when you have a problem with your billing, with insurance companies, then please. You have two options. You've got to hire someone else to work with you, or you can pay us and you only pay us for what we collect for you. So that's the vision. I think we sometimes see pushback from office managers who feel like we're going to take their job. And that's probably the number one.
Alan Berry:
Yeah. But to be fair to some of those, if you're a good office manager you have nothing to fear, but if you're a bad office manager, I would think you should fear a company like yours. Because if I'm running a practice, why would I want a subpar front office person if I could go with you guys and get the Cadillac of front offices? So I get what you're saying that front office staff shouldn't worry. I would agree with you on good front office staff. But what about bad front office staff? Shouldn't they worry a little bit?
Dr. James Anderson:
Well, I think if you're an office manager that's embezzling. Yes. Then you're worried. I'm serious.
Alan Berry:
Oh, really? Okay.
Dr. James Anderson:
Yeah. I got a phone call from a doctor who said, "I owe you an apology, Dr. Anderson. I just discovered that my office manager has been embezzling from me for 17 years." She said, "I've lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I used to have my office manager babysit my own children." So yeah, if you're an office manager that's embezzling, then you need to be afraid that we're there. But if you're a good office manager or even a subpar office manager, and you recognize you need help, we're going to make you look really good.
Alan Berry:
What questions should our dentists out there be asking themselves about their dental billing?
Dr. James Anderson:
A question to ask right now as a dentist, what is your over 90 insurance outstanding right now? Is it zero? It's probably not. Most of the time they don't know what it is. And often front office managers will just write difficult claims off because it requires a half an hour or 30 minutes, multiple attempts to talk to supervisors, to see if they'll pay whatever, why they're denying the claim for whatever reason. So you've got to give your office manager the time to do that. And one way to do it is you just hire another person.
Alan Berry:
Dr. Anderson, as I'm sure you probably know, in the year 2018, to get people to our websites we typically have to give them some type of a sample or free goodie from our services to get them to consider us. What are some of the freebies that you give away to entice potential customers to come over and see you on your website?
Dr. James Anderson:
We have a monthly newsletter that goes out and we hope that people subscribe to it. Free information on how to get your insurance claims paid. So have your office manager sign up for it at dentalplan.com and every month there's tips on certain ADA codes that we found, if you do a certain thing and you plan it just right or you frame things in a certain way it's all legal, that more than likely they'll get your claim paid. One of my favorite topics in that newsletter is our worst claim stories.
Alan Berry:
Give me one, what's a big one?
Dr. James Anderson:
This is my favorite one. One time we had a claim that wouldn't get paid. We sent the information, sent the claim, sent the x-ray. And the insurance company kept saying, "We have never received the x-ray. Claim denied." We appeal it again. You send it, you fax it. "We never received the x-ray. Claim denied." So after going on back and forth for about three weeks of this, our eAssister put the fax on auto dial and started faxing for two hours straight. I'm serious, two hours straight, the x-ray. And all of a sudden she got a phone call, "All right, all right. We got the x-ray. Cut it off."
Alan Berry:
Oh, that's good. That's great. And the claim got paid.
Dr. James Anderson:
Claim got paid.
Alan Berry:
Nice. So why is dealing with insurance companies so tricky? Do you think that the insurance have nefarious reasons? Are they really trying to hopefully keep pushing back and saying no and hope that you go away? Or is it just lawyers in there? Why is it so complicated?
Dr. James Anderson:
That's a good question. That's a good question. You'd have to ask their internal systems.
Alan Berry:
What do you think?
Dr. James Anderson:
Well, I'll get to that. I got to be careful here. I used to think there's nefarious things. I don't anymore. I just think that they have these million dollar companies with people that are making minimal amount of money doing a desk job. And there's no incentive for them to get it right. I mean, there are times where I still get checks from other associates that used to work for me 10 years ago that should have gone to their office, but are coming to mine. But because their systems were unorganized and there's no incentive for the clerk to really have attention to detail and to be efficient and to get it done. And there's some insurance companies that are the worst, they're so slow. We have to threaten the state's insurance agency now and again, if they're not doing. I've seen that once or twice. It's rare, but I've heard stories like that.
Alan Berry:
Say someone wants to give eAssist a chance, tell me about the pricing structure and where do they start.
Dr. James Anderson:
But it all depends on the volume. So we charge a flat rate of a percentage, 3.5% if your office does between 40 and 100,000 of insurance collections. And then any collections after that, it drops down to 3.0, and then any collections after 150,000, drops down to 2.5%. So the idea is that we're about the same price, a little bit less maybe, than it would be for you to hire someone full time to do your billing for you. And it's kind of ironic that in business, sometimes you have to spend money to make more money.
Alan Berry:
Sometimes.
Dr. James Anderson:
Most of the time, most of the time. But for a dentist, it's hard to do, this is a new concept, you don't know. But if you spend $1000 and we bring in $2,000 of extra revenue that you weren't bringing in before, well then it just makes sense that you stay with us.
Alan Berry:
In San Francisco, do you do the same pricing as you would, let's say, in Indianapolis? Because San Francisco's cost of living is much higher than Indianapolis is. So that front office person would have to get paid more in San Francisco than what they would in Indianapolis. Does that make sense?
Dr. James Anderson:
It does. And that's why it's the same price everywhere in the country. And we do have lots of customers in San Francisco.
Alan Berry:
Well, what I'm saying is that the people that have higher cost of living, they're going to benefit much more from your company because they would have to pay their front office person a lot more than they would in somewhere like Indianapolis. Right? So that makes complete sense that you do well in San Francisco.
Dr. James Anderson:
We do. In these areas where there's higher numbers, we do. But we have customers in every single state. And that's because it's hard to find office managers that know how to do all this, even in small towns, especially in small towns.
Alan Berry:
On that note, I think we're going to wrap it up. Just in case you've been listening and you didn't get to write down some of that information that Dr. Anderson put out there, I will make sure to put his contact info in the show notes. So take a look at that in case you want to reach out to him. Dr. Anderson, I can't thank you enough for giving us some of your time today. I know how valuable that is. So I really appreciate you hopping on the phone and sharing some of your wisdom with us.
Dr. James Anderson:
Thanks, Alan. I appreciate you having me on, I just enjoy the practice of dentistry. And what we're doing here to help other dentists, that really jazzes me. So keep doing the good work you're doing.
Announcer:
That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener, for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why year after year they retain over 95% of their clients. Thank you again for joining us and we'll see you next time.
