Dental Support Organizations: Emerging into a Crucial Aspect of Modern Dental Industry

The number of professionals joining the dental industry is growing at a rate of approximately 5.5% annually and the growth rate of individuals joining Dental Support Organizations (DSO) are growing at a rate of 18%, annually, according to Dental Care Alliance. DSOs work towards enhancing the dental industry by improving access to care for all patients while streamlining the administrative processes. To keep up with the demands of rapid expansion, the key to success is having a platform that can keep up with this growth.

How Patients and Practitioners are leveraging the Present DSO Framework?

DSOs primarily are designed to handle non-clinical tasks, allowing dentists to focus on their patients. The most common responsibilities that fall under the DSOs include billing, marketing, human resource management, provider data management, payroll, accounting, purchasing, credentialing, and ongoing maintenance of providers with payers, etc.

DSOs greatly affect the dental industry and impact both the patients and the practitioners.

Advantages and efforts include:

Separating Back-End Office Functions

The dental profession has become more of a business model rather than a service industry. DSOs today work towards enhancing dentistry by separating the business functions from the dental services allowing dentists to remain clinically focused on patients.

Better Patient Experience

DSOs focus on improving the dental industry by raising the expectations of members and reducing the limitations of access to care. Typically, patients are able to walk out of an office where all of their dental needs are met in one location, sometimes by multiple specialists. The overall patient experience is improved by provider network enrollment and quality care delivery.

Lowering Financial Barriers

Reduced practice income is due to decreased chair time and high lab costs combined with lack of preventative health care leading to expensive treatment plans that often go undone. Dentists that work with DSOs have the advantage of offering quality care by the use of better technology, back-end procedure processes, and process efficiency improvements, resulting in greater savings at the group level that is passed down to the patients. These savings result in a greater number of patients completing treatment, with the goal of preventative dentistry as opposed to reactive treatment. DSOs are also able to market heavily, filling chair time for increased income as well.

DSO Challenges

As per Health Resources Institute of the ADA, DSOs are growing at an alarming rate of 13–14% annually and keeping up with this growth is a challenge to any administrator.

1. DSOs are quickly growing across state borders with multiple specialties and to succeed, need a platform to keep up with their growth effectively managing provider/payor affiliations for a maximized revenue cycle.
2. DSOs find challenges in provider recruitment and onboarding process, such as missing required documentation and communication tracking.
3. DSOs face challenges in managing numerous payor contracts, documents, re-credentialing, and expirables.
4. DSOs lack visibility of the provider pipeline from recruitment to payor enrollment ensuring patient scheduling is being done with the most up-to-date payor status for correct claim payments and patient satisfaction.
5. DSOs struggle with the manual and time consuming credentialing processes with the result of claims being denied or delayed ending in a loss of revenue.
6. Multi-carrier credentialing issues incur high cost besides claim issues, including huge administrative burdens and negatively impacting the payor/provider relationship.
7. DSOs struggle to effectively manage their documents, whether it be recruitment, contract, fee schedules, or expirables, all must be managed and easily obtainable at any point in time.

I-Enroll: Helping DSOs Streamline Operational Activities

Streamlining the operational process is a tough job and managing provider management activities can be a huge operational hurdle if not handled with the right technology. Santech’s highly efficient provider management solution I-Enroll helps DSOs intuitively streamline management processes across an enterprise. It helps DSOs support unlimited locations, tax IDs and state-specific credentialing requirements while reducing paperwork. I-Enroll’s intuitive electronic provider and document management simplifies and strengthens compliance. Overall, I-Enroll can be tailor-fitted to meet each organization-specific requirement and the individualized workflow of a DSO.

I-Enroll integrates provider onboarding, credentialing and payor enrollment onto one Provider Management Platform. It improves contract management by assisting DSOs with their credentialing to expedite enrollment and accelerate reimbursements with the ability to easily submit multi-carrier documents.

The DSOs are unique initiatives taken for the betterment of the dental industry. Having high hopes and goals, DSOs need solutions like I-Enroll to bring the kind of change in the dental industry that will bring large advancements to the dental community as a whole, impacting both the providers and patients.