In an interactive session at Becker's Fall Future of Dentistry Roundtable, two leaders — Dan Parsons, Co-Founder and Chief Experience Officer at Thoughtful AI, and Cara Perry, Vice President of Revenue Cycle Management at Signature Dental Partners — discussed the impact of AI in the DSO space, focusing on how technology can streamline administrative tasks and improve efficiencies.
During the session, Parsons shared his vision for Thoughtful AI, which aims to bring enterprise-grade agentic AI Agents and automation to mid-sized and enterprise healthcare organizations. Perry, with 15 years of experience in the DSO and RCM space, highlighted her work at Signature Dental Partners, where she centralized RCM functions to improve efficiency and reduce overhead.
The conversation covered the complex challenges DSOs face, such as increased demand for healthcare services, complexity in payer relationships, and high staff turnover rates for RCM teams. The panelists highlighted how AI can address these issues by automating tasks like claims processing, prior authorizations, and payment posting, leading to faster turnaround times and reduced denial rates. Perry shared her hands-on her positive experience with Thoughtful AI, which led to significant improvements in claim processing times and overall efficiency.
Key takeaways:
1. The healthcare industry is facing a 'perfect storm' of increased demand and complexity, which is putting a strain on staffing and operations.
According to Parsons, Thoughtful AI is closely monitoring industry changes, including growing demand and patient volumes across specialties — especially in dentistry. With an increase in number of claims as well as their complexity, continuously evolving regulations, and challenging payer-provider relationships RCM teams are looking for new solutions to maintain efficiency and profitability.
"We're looking at all of the macro shifts that will be impacting and changing how healthcare providers and DSOs operate the core administrative parts of their business," Parsons said.
2. Denials and inefficient RCM processes are costing healthcare providers significant time and money.
Parsons emphasized the operational and financial burden of denials for DSOs, noting the cost of working a denial is sometimes as high as $118 per claim. "It's a very costly exercise, not just from the actual revenue impact but also from the staffing perspective," he said.
An upstream approach is key to alleviating the added strain on DSO teams.
"Nine out of 10 denials are actually preventable," Parsons said. "We need to go in and look at what is driving this. If something was handled correctly, if somebody was trained properly or if there were the proper systems in place, nine out of 10 times you'd be able to solve that denial before it happens."
3. Implementing AI-powered automation tools can help healthcare providers scale their operations and reduce overhead without sacrificing quality.
Perry described her "ground-up" approach to building an RCM team at Signature Dental Partners. This process, coupled with the organization's imperative to grow, prompted change and partnership.
"We needed to scale our growth without adding continual overhead," she said. “I interviewed about five different AI companies — I knew we had to find a solution with how the world is going, and to be able to grow from 100 to 200 practices and not have my team consistently grow."
Perry said the partnership that ensued with Thoughtful AI has helped Signature Dental Partners decrease denial rates by more than 50% so far and speed up claim turnaround time from 45 days to 17.
4. Implementing AI using an iterative, use-case-focused approach can help healthcare providers see quick wins and build confidence in the technology.
Rather than applying new technology to myriad processes at once, Parsons and Perry emphasized the benefits of identifying high impact use cases where significant value can be realized quickly.
"We start with data collection, and we want the data to represent the priority," Mr. Parsons said. "For example, if we can see 30% of your denials come from eligibility or prior authorization, we can peel back the onion and understand that actually most of that is from five payers. We start there and organize around the problem and the impact."
Ms. Perry shared how this approach applied to Signature Dental Partners. "I was able to convince our executive team to do one process, and that was clean claims because that was our biggest obstacle. Claims were going out 'dirty,' and they weren't getting paid on time." This strategic, focused approach resolved immediate challenges and laid the foundation for expanding AI capabilities across Signature Dental Partners' operations, enabling even greater efficiencies and innovation in the future.