Spring Dental, founded in 2014 by Dr. Creed Cardon and Mike McInelly, announced today that it has rebranded to Lumio Dental. Rated as one of the fastest-growing dental groups in the nation for the last three years, Lumio Dental is a dental partnership organization that owns and operates more than 60 dental offices throughout Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska.
Spring Dental has existed as both the name of the parent company as well as the name of one of the company’s more than 25 regional brands. In order to have a name that encompasses all of its regional brands, the parent company has been rebranded to Lumio Dental. Spring Dental will remain as one of its regional brands.
“As we continued to grow, we recognized we needed a parent company name to represent all of our regional brands,” McInelly stated. “We’re excited to have this name grow with us throughout the coming years.”
“We derived the name ‘Lumio’ from the word ‘illumination’,” noted Dr. Creed Cardon. “The name signifies our goal to light the paths of our partners, associates, and team members in both their personal and professional lives. We’re excited to see what the future has in store for Lumio Dental, and thankful for the hard work of our incredible team for helping us achieve this exciting milestone.”
Headquartered in Tulsa, OK, Lumio Dental is passionate about providing the communities they serve with exceptional, affordable and convenient dental care. Lumio Dental employs over 500 dental professionals and offers comprehensive family dentistry, including cosmetic and restorative, pediatric dentistry, prosthodontics, endodontics, oral surgery, and implants. Learn more at LumioDental.com or linkedin.com/company/lumiodental.
Vyne Dental, a leading provider of revenue cycle, claims and practice management solutions, and electronic health information exchange for all-sized dental practices, announces sweeping, comprehensive enhancements to its Vyne Trellis platform.
Vyne Trellis, one of the dental industry’s most comprehensive revenue cycle and communications engines, provides a robust end-to-end dental billing solution for dental claims management, including simple, integrated electronic attachments, batch and real-time eligibility and benefits verification, all in one intuitive, easy-to-use solution.
A few of Vyne Trellis’ most innovative enhanced features include:
Batch and real-time benefit plan eligibility verification to reduce the time practice team members spend on the phone with payers — office managers and billers receive verification of patient benefits within seconds through the Vyne Trellis web-based platform;
A robust electronic attachment submission solution, that’s connected to more than 800 payers across the country;
A feature-rich portal that integrates a practice’s submitted, processed, and paid claims, supporting attachments and documentation, and eligibility status — to each patient and their respective payer; and
Intelligent validation engine to identify potential errors, such as missing subscriber IDs, claim form information, attachment requirements, and patient and provider detail, before electronically submitting claims to a payer — reducing rejected claims, creating efficiency in the billing workflow, and accelerating reimbursements back into the practice.
Vyne Trellis continues to evolve and, in so doing, redefine what “revenue cycle management solution” means to the dental practice. Throughout 2021, Vyne Dental strategically expanded its portfolio to add simple, customizable electronic forms, text and email reminders, online reviews, and secure communications, including email and inter-office chat portfolio.
This strategic shift allows dental practices on Vyne Trellis to initiate the electronic, automated interaction with their patients much earlier in their journey, thus ensuring a timely resolution to all revenue collection attempts, while simultaneously improving patient experience, reducing friction, and cutting costs.
Marquee Dental Partners announces the launch of its consumer-facing dental brand, Marquee Dental. The Marquee Dental brand will be used to directly expand Marquee’s industry-leading approach into select communities. The new brand operates with the belief that better smiles lead to better health and that better health leads to better lives.
“I am proud of the work our branding team did to create and launch Marquee Dental,” said Fred Ward, Marquee Dental Partners’ chief executive officer. “We have an ethos at Marquee Dental Partners of healthiness and happiness that gets passed onto patients. We are proud of that. More functionally, this branding work will help inject numerous efficiencies into our De Novo strategy.”
The first Marquee Dental office will open in late December 2021 in Smyrna, Tennessee; a bedroom community of Nashville, TN. The office will be led by Dr. David Dewberry and a team of highly trained dental professionals. Dr. Dewberry joined Marquee Dental after practicing for several years in Southern California.
Marquee Dental also launched its consumer-facing website, MyMarqueeDental.com. The site focuses on providing its users an easy and efficient way to access their dentist.
“We want an experience that makes our patients feel welcome and cared for. We also want a culture that acknowledges and honors the great work that dental professionals do every day. With the Marquee Dental brand, we get to do both,” said Marquee Dental Partners vice president of marketing, Rich Palumbo. “We are excited to be able to speak directly to these patients and communities through this new brand.”
The new Marquee Dental office in Smyrna is scheduling appointments now.
Marquee Dental Partners now operates nearly 60 dental offices across five states and supports more than 100 dentists.
Vyne Dental, a leading provider of revenue cycle, claims management, and electronic health information exchange for all-sized dental practices, announces that it has acquired Onederful, Inc., a suite of APIs that connect to hundreds of dental payers companies for eligibility and benefits, claims and electronic remittance advice (ERAs).
The Onederful solution set provides dental practices the ability to efficiently verify patients’ insurance coverage levels, determine eligibility and benefit levels and follow up with payer’s real-time statuses through its API.
Most importantly, Onederful solutions will be paired with Vyne Trellis, a comprehensive, web-based dental billing platform designed to help dental practices improve and manage their revenue cycles and exchange encrypted health information.
Onederful’s solutions connect to more than 240 payers. Its strength lies in its ability to collect eligibility benefit information from payers in a standardized and structured manner no matter the payer’s information formatting or how it is conveyed to practices.
With Onederful, providers receive the same formatted response from payers in the structured manner in which they hope to consume data that otherwise would be an unstructured and copious mess.
By utilizing Onederful’s API ecosystem, dental practice leaders enjoy each payer’s fully digital experience when they service patient plans. The solution’s benefits include patients not receiving a surprise bill, practices collecting payments faster, and payers not receiving phone calls from practices.
According to Stephen Roberts, president of Vyne Dental, Onederful standardizes and files patient eligibility data in a synchronized way no matter the payer, patient, or practice. Similarly, every payer’s data is standardized for the practice so that every patient’s data is in the same format.
“By adding Onederful to the Vyne Dental portfolio, we’re continuing our mission of becoming the foremost provider of fully automated revenue cycle management solutions in all of dentistry,” Roberts said. “Onederful joins a successful roster of innovation, alongside our other, recent acquisitions, including Renaissance Electronic Services, Tesia Clearinghouse, and OperaDDS. With Onederful, we are one step closer to accomplishing this goal.”
By acquiring Onederful, Vyne Dental continues to establish itself as the industry leader in end-to-end information exchange and communication management solutions for healthcare, serving more than 74,000 dental practices.
“Onederful is a special technology that normalizes the response data and maps it into structured fields,” said Vance Taylor, Vyne Dental’s vice president of sales and marketing. “Regardless of how much or how little information a payer gives a practice, that data is parsed, mapped, then rendered in the same format for all payers regardless. So, if I’m tracking eligibility responses, I know exactly where to go to discover exactly the information I need.”
Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics, one of the fastest-growing multi-disciplinary dental group practices in the country, has several major achievements to celebrate as 2021 comes to a close. Though the COVID-19 pandemic created significant challenges for the dental industry, Rodeo Dental never wavered in its commitment to provide high-end dental care and community support for underserved communities.
Rodeo Dental was founded in 2008 in the heart of Fort Worth, Texas, with a mission to provide every child and family the key to access high-end dental care—regardless of status, means or location. That mission has been the catalyst for major growth this year, as Rodeo Dental expanded operations into regions in Colorado where access to high-end dental care is a challenge. The group opened six new locations in 2021, including three practices in Colorado, with plans for further expansion in 2022.
“It is truly our mission that makes Rodeo Dental stand apart from the rest. We strive to be the one-stop shop that provides high-quality affordable dental care and an exceptional experience for the entire family,” said Dr. Yahya Mansour, Chief Dental Officer at Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics. “Our award-winning team members do everything we can to deliver on this mission, from volunteering services and teaching proper dental care to offering flexible payment options and more.”
In addition to giving every family the key to access high-end dental care, the Rodeo Dental partners are also committed to running a practice that allows for the betterment of their local communities. Since its inception, the group has made it a priority to use its business as a force for social good by supporting charitable organizations such as Dentists Who Care and the LEAP Foundation.
Aspen Dental announces a partnership with MyLabConnect – in an effort to continually advance technologies, improve processes, and bring better dental care to more people across nearly 1,000 Aspen Dental locations nationwide.
The partnership with MyLabConnect, which goes live on Dec. 6, 2021, will allow every Aspen Dental practice across the country to communicate and collaborate with their preferred dental labs, through a simple, common front-end interface software platform, in real-time.
“Aspen Dental is continually improving its technology and innovating in the clinical setting,” said Gina Bruzzichesi, chief operating officer at The Aspen Group. “This partnership with MyLabConnect will allow better, faster, and more efficient internal and external communication and collaboration between Aspen Dental practices and their preferred dental labs – resulting in better care for more people.”
The new cloud-based platform offers a single source for Aspen Dental doctors and staff to:
Electronically order and track the status of Rx
Manage integrated IOS digital and chairside service workflows
Digitally integrate with their preferred dental labs
Track and manage communications with dental labs and design centers
“Having a single platform to manage the flow of communications will allow the doctors to spend less time on paperwork, so they can have more time to focus on what matters most – patient care,” said Bruzzichesi. “And, what makes the MyLabConnect platform even more convenient is that it is a multilingual platform that doctors and their teams can use on desktop or on mobile.”
“When we set out to create this platform, in partnership with The Aspen Group, we knew we needed to make it convenient for the doctors,” said Niranjan Ramakrishnan, CEO of MyLabConnect. “This is a major milestone and proud moment in the MyLabConnect journey, as we work together with Aspen Dental to break down barriers and bring simple yet comprehensive communication solutions to more than 3,800 doctors at nearly 1,000 dental practices across the country.”
The new platform from MyLabConnect will allow Aspen Dental doctors and staff to communicate more effectively and efficiently with external dental labs by creating a single platform that is simple to use.
“Dentalle believes in being at the forefront of change and revolution in dentistry by leveraging the best materials and technologies,” said Warren Su, President of Dentalle. “As Aspen Dental’s longest tenured preferred lab, we are extremely excited to have worked together with Aspen Dental and MyLabConnect to pilot the program throughout the past year to ensure a seamless integration with our Lab Management Systems to facilitate the launch of this new technology. This new end-to-end interface for Aspen Dental will continue to drive The Aspen Group to new heights under its visionary leadership team.”
“The new MyLabConnect platform will provide a seamless bi-directional integration with Intra Oral Scanners,” said Chris Lauro, president of Healthstar Dental, another key lab provider and preferred partner of Aspen Dental. “This improved process will allow our team to spend less time on booking cases and more time on providing better quality customer support to the Aspen Dental practices across the nation.”
Between patient registrations, treatment-plan sign offs, payments, and patient check-outs, a lot of signatures are required at East Carolina University’s School of Dental Medicine. So, you can imagine how Phillip Allen, director of informatics and tech services felt when his team was sending five or more signature pads out for repair each week. And then there was the time they lost electronic signing capabilities altogether—for a year—while two software companies and the signature pad manufacturer blamed each other for the outage.
In addition to hardware issues like inconvenient watch-batteries used in the pens and a weak connection between the USB cord and the unit that caused breakage, there were software and support issues. The school uses iMacs, Apple laptops, and iPhones throughout its 188,000 square-foot teaching facility in Greenville, NC and eight regional satellite offices. They run axiUm’s EHR in a Citrix environment, and the signature pads they purchased in 2010 didn’t work well with Citrix.
Allen explains that setting up a pad required a technician to initially plug it into a blade server in the main data center. Once it was moved into production in the clinical unit, each pad had to be unplugged and plugged back in each morning. Additionally, if a unit was unplugged while in an axiUm session, you had to log out of the session, plug the unit back in, and log in again.
The electronic signature system was unwieldy. Some students became so frustrated they began stashing a signature pad in their laptop bag in the hope that using the same device would allow easier hardware recognition…but it didn’t. This led to a shortage and the remaining students started competing to get their hands on a pad. Allen and his team knew they needed a new solution.
Leading dental support organization Pacific Dental Services(PDS) has announced a new partnership with the American Diabetes Association to increase awareness of the link between periodontal disease and diabetes, and how oral health providers can assist patients in preventing and managing this chronic health condition. The timing of this announcement coincides with American Diabetes Month, a month-long campaign that recognizes all forms of the disease – including Type 1, Type 2, gestational diabetes and prediabetes – along with the millions of Americans living with diabetes today and those who remain undiagnosed.
Educating others on the link between their oral health and overall health – what PDS and its supported practices call The Mouth-Body Connection – is a priority for PDS. Research shows that harmful bacteria and inflammation in the mouth can indicate and even cause systemic conditions throughout the body.Maladies of the mouth, including periodontal disease, may be linked with other medical conditions including diabetes, oral cancer, cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis and more.
According to the American Academy of Periodontology, people with diabetes are more likely to have periodontal disease than people without diabetes, probably because people with diabetes are more susceptible to contracting infections. In fact, periodontal disease is often considered a complication of diabetes.
Pacific Dental Services (PDS) announces the launch of its College Advancement Program, making it the first in its industry to offer eligible employees 100% up-front college tuition coverage toward an undergraduate degree of their choice.
In partnership with InStride, the premier global provider of Strategic Enterprise Education, the new program will allow PDS operations managers, benefits coordinators, and dental assistants the flexibility and satisfaction of advancing their careers while earning their education debt-free – all while remaining employed full-time. PDS will measure the program’s success and hopes to extend this offer to other positions in the future.
“Pacific Dental Services is a recognized leader in the dental industry, and we are proud to be the first dental support organization to offer our team members the opportunity to pursue their passion while removing the financial barrier that oftentimes keeps adult learners from reaching their educational goals,” said PDS founder and CEO Stephen E. Thorne IV. “We believe that by investing in the growth and development of our team members, we are investing in the future of our company.”
“We are excited that Pacific Dental Services has made this industry-leading commitment to their team members,” said Vivek Sharma, InStride CEO and co-founder. “Stephen Thorne and his leadership team have recognized that providing fully-funded strategic education opportunities results in both business and social impact for their company and the communities they serve.”
The Pacific Dental Services College Advancement Program initially will be realized through InStride’s partnership with Arizona State University, ranked most innovative college by U.S. News & World Report for seven consecutive years. PDS will not only pay 100% tuition, but also cover book expenses and any associated mandatory fees for the duration of the degree program. Classes for the first semester begin January 10, 2022. Academic partners from within InStride’s network will be added to the list of institutions where employee-learners can apply in the future.
In addition to the College Advancement Program, PDS helps employees advance their education through a traditional tuition reimbursement program up to $5,250 per year, over 1,000 free continuing education courses offered through PDS University, and a professional development program focused on specialized training and certificates.
By Dr. Suzanne Ebert. Dr. Ebert built a successful dental practice from scratch. After selling her practice, she became the dental director of a federally qualified health center where she provided high quality care to underserved populations. She joined ADA Practice Transitions as the ADA Advisor to provide real and tangible benefits to dentists as well as helping to address access to care issues across the country. She is currently ADAPT’s VP of Dental Practice & Relationship Management.
The answer to “what does it actually cost to sell a dental practice?” is as you’d expect – it depends.
Numerous factors play into selling a dental practice and make each sale unique, impacting the total cost. This article will discuss some of these factors, offer a range of costs, and explore ways to minimize or avoid those costs.
First, let’s consider an example I’ve encountered of a very low-cost and frictionless dental practice sale:
A dentist in the Midwest was starting to think about owning his own practice after working as an associate for a few years. The first step he took was attending a CE event about an hour away from his home, where he spoke to some supply reps about his interest in owning a practice. They mentioned that a nearby practice had been closed for about six months, which he checked out on his way home before calling the owner dentist. Both agreed it seemed like a good fit and decided to see if they could come to an agreement. In the following weeks, they negotiated a price, drew up all necessary documents, and completed the transaction without needing a broker or valuation. The negotiations were collegial and both sides were satisfied with the outcome. The buyer spent an estimated $2,000 on legal fees and the seller relied on the documents that the buyer and his lawyer created.
Having described his story as a “fluke,” the buying dentist is unaware of any other dentist who shares his experience. He considers himself very lucky for how smoothly his acquisition played out. Despite being on opposite sides of the transaction, taking the risk to trust the selling dentist resulted in a valuable mentorship opportunity. Meanwhile, the selling dentist was relieved to find the right person to carry on his small-town legacy.
I’ve also heard of situations where trusting the negotiating partner didn’t end well. The vast majority of dentists say that transitioning practice ownership is complicated and full of uncertainties. Unsettling questions arise, such as “Is this the right decision for me?” “Is this a fair price?” or “Are these numbers accurate?” As a result, many dentists end up going to companies like ADAPT or a broker for help. And most also engage some combination of lawyer, accountant, and bankers.
That being said, the primary cost drivers for an owner when selling a practice are consistent no matter the approach.
Vyne Dental
“I am proud of the work our branding team did to create and launch Marquee Dental,” said Fred Ward, Marquee Dental Partners’ chief executive officer. “We have an ethos at Marquee Dental Partners of healthiness and happiness that gets passed onto patients. We are proud of that. More functionally, this branding work will help inject numerous efficiencies into our De Novo strategy.”
Vyne Dental, a leading provider of revenue cycle, claims management, and electronic health information exchange for all-sized dental practices, announces that it has acquired Onederful, Inc., a suite of APIs that connect to hundreds of dental payers companies for eligibility and benefits, claims and electronic remittance advice (ERAs).
By Dr. Suzanne Ebert. Dr. Ebert built a successful dental practice from scratch. After selling her practice, she became the dental director of a federally qualified health center where she provided high quality care to underserved populations. She joined