Efficient Insurance Verification with Dr. Derek Giddon

The following transcription was from the Bulletproof Youtube channel. Here is the https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oy6hYh8Fb9c

Derek Giddon
0:00:00
I liked practicing and I did like Invisalign and implants and Molarendo and was like not ready to kind of get my hands dirty and enjoyed it all. But again, when I saw that we were, you know, when I saw like got my first taste of software. There was a lot of traction happening quickly.

Craig Spodak
0:00:19
Yeah.

Derek Giddon
0:00:20
Yeah. Well, and it also is, it's a good feeling. I mean, just to see, you know, kind of what you're doing resonating and landing and helping people and how scalable that is. I mean, that's that's kind of what what the draw was. I think that's a term that's on.

Peter Boulden
0:00:35
Let me jump in and and and help here with the explanation. We I saw it honestly, Derek, when I was exposed to your product, I saw it as the ability as a growing empire or growing enterprise. I should say I saw the ability. And again, you alluded to COVID, and we were having this like hiring struggle, right? Like getting actual people to come to work and do things. And so I saw it as an ability to scale without having to scale my HR, so to speak, right? I could actually implement this product and actually not hire the next insurance verification person that I was going to. And I know you guys don't go on record saying like, hey, you can not hire as many people, but I'm going to go on record saying that it truly decreased the overwhelmingness that was going on in our ecosystem.

Peter Boulden
0:01:28
Well, everybody, welcome to another episode of Bulletproof. Craig, what's the name of the title? Bulletproof.

Peter Boulden
0:01:41
Yeah, yeah.

Peter Boulden
0:01:42
For Food to Start With.

Peter Boulden
0:01:43
Derek, Craig used to get the name of the podcast wrong back in like 2017. I never let him let him go.

Craig Spodak
0:01:49
I cannot remember.

Peter Boulden
0:01:50
Well, now it's everywhere, so it's easy for me. He did that just for me. So Dalvin was like, on the monitors. Derek, if you don't know much about Craig and I, my job is to just raz him in perpetuity, and his job is to get upset about me.

Craig Spodak
0:02:14
Get offended. So, Derek, right before we hit record, see how it says Peter, Craig, and Derek on the little name badges? Peter started the video, and it said Peter, founder. Just humble flex way of just putting me in my place. So I told him next time put coattails and rider of coattails for me. Oh, that's what I, that's what I, that's

Peter Boulden
0:02:37
what I heard when I first joined. Yeah. But anyway, good to have you here. Yeah. Welcome to the pod. Let me give you a quick intro. Then you can kind of fill in. So you are the founder of Airpay, correct? You are a dentist though, right?

Derek Giddon
0:02:56
I am. Well, I'm the co-founder of Airpay, so there's another. And I give credit where credit's due.

Craig Spodak
0:03:05
Oh, that's so nice. Do you need a partner?

Peter Boulden
0:03:08
No, does that mean you started the project together

Peter Boulden
0:03:12
though, correct?

Derek Giddon
0:03:13
Yes, yes.

Craig Spodak
0:03:14
Oh, look at that.

Craig Spodak
0:03:15
He's going with the I started the Bulletproof Practice podcast and then you joined it. Episode three. So then into perpetuity, I will always be. No, you were you were a guest. But go ahead. We're not here. We're not here to talk about Peters in my baggage. We're here to talk about air pay. So you were a you were a founder, a founder

Peter Boulden
0:03:31
and a dentist. And so you started out, so basically I'll just give everyone a synopsis, is AirPay is automated insurance verification. The kind of that bolts on. My team loves it, Craig's team loves it. And so we thought it'd be cool to bring you on because, yeah, we wanna help and support and I think you're doing good things. As a dentist who saw an issue with our industry, you did something about it and took action and created a product to solve something. You create a solution to solve a problem that you solve as an issue. Any color you want to add to that before we jump into the nuts and bolts?

Derek Giddon
0:04:13
Yeah. Well, first of all, appreciate it and appreciate your practices. But I'm a dentist. I practiced for about 10 years in Brooklyn. And every day I saw my front desk team struggling with lots of things, but insurance verification was always a real struggle. And I always assumed that fancy offices in Manhattan had a better way of doing it than what we were doing, which was just brute force, phone calls, website visits, fax backs. But it turns out that that assumption was wrong and everyone does it in the same way. Small practices all the way up to the largest DSOs, there isn't a better way of doing it. And so really the North Star with Airpay is a software based product that can help teams do this faster with less waste. The traditional solution has always been overseas call centers or onshore call centers. And there's a lot of, you know, that's not very scalable and there's a lot of challenges with those companies.

Derek Giddon
0:05:27
Yeah, that's super funky.

Peter Boulden
0:05:28
I actually can attest to the fact that I tried to go that route a long time ago

Peter Boulden
0:05:33
and it was actually a company,

Peter Boulden
0:05:33
I was like, I wanna say Zimbabwe or something.

Craig Spodak
0:05:35
But yeah, we did the same one. It will remain nameless. Yeah, we had the same.

Peter Boulden
0:05:41
Yeah, and it's hard. Yeah, I think you're right when you try to outsource it to different, to more inexpensive human capital, if you will, or human, you know, labor market. What am I trying to say? You know what I'm trying to say? So basically when you're outsourcing it to a more inexpensive labor market, there's a lot of bumps and friction along with that, that come along with that. I wanna go back into a personal story

Craig Spodak
0:06:05
just for one second if you don't mind, Derek. So, how, where you, was your family in dentistry? How did you become a dentist?

Derek Giddon
0:06:11
Yeah, my father was, is a dentist.

Craig Spodak
0:06:16
Did he practice in Brooklyn?

Derek Giddon
0:06:18
Yep, practiced in Brooklyn. He's an endodontist. And I went to NYU dental school. Um, what year did you graduate?

Derek Giddon
0:06:30
2012.

Craig Spodak
0:06:30
Okay.

Derek Giddon
0:06:30
And then how many years did you practice, uh, before, uh, incubating this idea?

Craig Spodak
0:06:35
About eight years. Okay. Uh, in, in private practice, what one year in residency, eight years in practice.

Craig Spodak
0:06:41
Cool.

Craig Spodak
0:06:42
And then how, how did you, what was the genesis of it? Obviously you saw the friction and you thought Manhattan, they don't have the problems that they do in Brooklyn. I understand that, but there are different problems in Brooklyn and Manhattan, I do believe that to be so. But what was the, did you have a software propensity or talk to me about like how you knew to make such a big jump like that?

Derek Giddon
0:07:09
Yeah, so my co-founder is a big part of the story. He was there from episode one all the way. Oh, another dig.

Craig Spodak
0:07:20
I got that, Derek.

Derek Giddon
0:07:21
I got that.

Craig Spodak
0:07:22
I like what you did there, Derek.

Craig Spodak
0:07:23
Guys, I'm gonna bounce, I'm gonna let you take over.

Craig Spodak
0:07:26
I like what you did there, Derek.

Craig Spodak
0:07:27
I know, you see what he did?

Derek Giddon
0:07:29
So my partner, Dan, he's a software guy, software engineer. He was the CTO of a big data company called 1010 Data in New York City. His wife's a dentist. She's a practice owner in Williamsburg and Brooklyn. She's got a super nice high-end practice, but she worked for DSOs and kind of like, you know, he was, had a front row seat to her experience. And he, his last company got acquired and he was kind of looking for his next opportunity. And I went to him and I said, dental. There's a lot of opportunity in dental and a lot of just antiquated ways of doing things in dental. And that's really how we got started together. We worked on a few things. But Airpay was a hit from day one. Just again, because it's just such a huge pain point in practices. And if you think about it, there's so much that has gotten better in dental offices, and a lot of things that have gotten easier over the past 10 years, but not this. I mean,

Peter Boulden
0:08:38
if anything, it just gets harder. You mean the automation? There's been a lot of things that have helped from an automation standpoint that made dentistry better, right? Or are you just

Derek Giddon
0:08:45
talking overall? Everything. Digital scanners, getting paid electronically. I mean, just lots of things in the front office in the operatories have gotten better. And the other thing that I'd say is just COVID, I think really accelerated our business just in that there's such a staffing crisis and problem and shortage. And so, you know, this feels harder in practices where, you know, if it just takes such a huge effort to kind of get this done every day, and then you go home and-

Peter Boulden
0:09:28
Yeah, it's a lift.

Peter Boulden
0:09:29
Like no one comes to work and says, man, I cannot wait to get on the phone with insurance companies all day today, right?

Peter Boulden
0:09:36
Yeah.

Peter Boulden
0:09:36
And so-

Craig Spodak
0:09:37
It's like pitting the lowest resources against each other. So the insurance companies are smart. So let's get people in the Philippines that work for $1 a week. And then our answer would be like, OK, well, we'll get people in Zimbabwe that work for $1 a month. And then we'll have the two lowest resource. It almost reminds me, this is super, you might have to edit this out, but you ever see the prank calls when they take two Chinese restaurants and they put the phones next to each other.

Craig Spodak
0:10:03
I've seen that.

Craig Spodak
0:10:04
It's like that's like what it feels like.

Peter Boulden
0:10:05
And they start to put the phones together and they start communicating.

Craig Spodak
0:10:07
Yeah, I'm like, Chinese food, may I help you? Chinese food, you call me, you call me.

Derek Giddon
0:10:11
And yelling at one another.

Craig Spodak
0:10:12
So there has to just be a better way. And I'm just curious, before we get into that better way, I'm just curious about the mechanics of how this all happened. So you're a dentist, you're working, you're making money, you're on the upswing of your career, you're at year five, six, seven, you're starting to make money, I presume. So the software idea comes along, are you, is the software idea so good that you're like, I have to leave dentistry and I love it, or are you freaking hating dentistry? Or are you side hustling, does it become a side hustle? I just wanna know how the jumping off point was.

Derek Giddon
0:10:43
Yeah, we might need to go to the couch for this so I could lay down. Okay, no problem, just tell me about your mother.

Peter Boulden
0:10:49
Yeah.

Derek Giddon
0:10:51
My relationship with my mother. Yeah, so I was practicing and things were stable and I was destined, I got golf clubs, I was like ready for that existence. You were a real dentist.

Peter Boulden
0:11:06
A real dentist.

Derek Giddon
0:11:07
Yeah. And your prescription pad, Andy. Is that too strange?

Peter Boulden
0:11:10
You got the dental starter pack, right? Yeah, I got the dental…

Peter Boulden
0:11:17
I had to get divorced in four easy steps.

Derek Giddon
0:11:18
Benzodiazepine prescription.

Craig Spodak
0:11:19
This is terrible.

Craig Spodak
0:11:20
We can't have this now.

Peter Boulden
0:11:21
Yes, you need to get new chairs, new chairs.

Craig Spodak
0:11:22
It's a starter pack.

Craig Spodak
0:11:23
God, it's terrible.

Derek Giddon
0:11:24
I had all of the above and things were stable. And honestly, I saw the reaction to what we were doing and really just kind of saw a very big opportunity where obviously being in practice every day, I mean, I practice six days a week and for the whole time I was practicing for eight years and really was working my ass off, but there's a much bigger impact you can have with software than you can in a dental office.

Peter Boulden
0:12:03
I mean, it just, it just.

Derek Giddon
0:12:04
But did you like dentistry? I'm just curious, like, did you like it? Was it this, this was so compelling, or were you getting burnt out as well? No, it definitely, I didn't leave practice

Craig Spodak
0:12:14
until I saw that what I was doing was working.

Derek Giddon
0:12:17
So it wasn't like, oh, let me just like, see, find, like, find something else that I could do that. So I could escape this. It was a lot more calculated than that. And I liked practicing and I did like Invisalign and implants and molar endo and was like, not to kind of get my hands dirty and enjoyed and enjoyed it all. But again, when I when I saw that we were, you know, when I saw, like, got my first taste of software. There was a lot of traction happening quickly.

Peter Boulden
0:12:53
Yeah.

Craig Spodak
0:12:54
Yeah.

Derek Giddon
0:12:54
Well, and it also is a good feeling. I mean, just to see, you know, kind of what you're doing, resonating and landing and helping people and how scalable that is. I mean, that's kind of what the draw was for me.

Peter Boulden
0:13:08
I think that's the turn that's on. Let me jump in and help here with the explanation. I saw it, honestly, Derek, when I was exposed to your product, I saw it as the ability as a growing empire or a growing enterprise, I should say. I saw the ability, and again, you alluded to COVID, and we were having this hiring struggle, right, like getting actual people to come to work and do things. And so I saw it as an ability to scale without having to scale my HR, so to speak, right? I could actually implement this product and actually not hire the next insurance verification person that I was going to. And I know you guys don't go on record saying like, hey, you can not hire as many people, but I'm gonna go on record saying that it truly decreased the overwhelmingness that was going on in our ecosystem.

Craig Spodak
0:14:02
So, Craig, do you have?

Derek Giddon
0:14:05
Go ahead. I'll just say that from now having been in market for a while, we work with single, we're probably about 50-50 single practices and DSOs now. And if you think about it just from the DSOs perspective, I mean, they've got the most to gain if they're struggling with insurance verification. It's exponentially a bigger problem across their organization. The scale, yeah. And the scale, yeah, is just massive. So, and again, you can't do that with an outsource call center, you know.

Peter Boulden
0:14:43
Right.

Derek Giddon
0:14:44
It's just more phones and more bodies. And so, again, to be able to do it with software

Peter Boulden
0:14:49
is pretty important.

Peter Boulden
0:14:50
So walk us through, so, you know, because I always think when someone gets introduced to something, they think of three questions, right, subconsciously. Like what is it, how does it benefit me, and then how much does it cost? I think that applies for dentistry, new dental procedure, I think it's anything, right?

Derek Giddon
0:15:02
A car.

Peter Boulden
0:15:03
Sure. Right? People are looking for the understanding of what this is doing or solving, then how's it going to benefit them? And then ultimately I think we talk about like, you know, the price that, the bulletproof price that you're gonna give.

Peter Boulden
0:15:16
Just kidding, Derek.

Peter Boulden
0:15:17
But yeah, can you talk about-

Peter Boulden
0:15:19
I missed the joke.

Craig Spodak
0:15:20
What was the joke there? There was no joke.

Peter Boulden
0:15:22
I was just saying, I said at the end, we can talk about the bulletproof price that you're gonna give.

Craig Spodak
0:15:25
Yeah, I know, I appreciate it.

Peter Boulden
0:15:26
You got that.

Craig Spodak
0:15:27
I appreciate you got that.

Peter Boulden
0:15:29
Yeah, so give like this super sexy explanation of like, what is it? I know you've kind of told and we get it in insurance verification. It's sexier than that, meaning it pops up and it's already done for you and it's real clean like really give this feel. Give it in a sexy insurance verification way.

Peter Boulden
0:15:49
Yeah.

Derek Giddon
0:15:50
So as sexy as dental insurance verification can be. So AirPay is a software based solution for you to automate your insurance verification. So we integrate with Dentrix, Eaglesoft, Open Dental, Dentrix Enterprise, Denticon, and there's a few more coming down the hatch. And you can essentially set your verification.

Craig Spodak
0:16:14
You just named like two practice management softwares I've never heard of, by the way.

Peter Boulden
0:16:18
Oh, really?

Craig Spodak
0:16:19
Yeah. I've never heard of Denticon.

Peter Boulden
0:16:20
The Denticon, you got it.

Craig Spodak
0:16:21
Is that like Comic-Con? But go ahead. I'm sorry to cut you. So you integrate, you have like an API plug-in to all those, right?

Derek Giddon
0:16:27
Yep, so we have a plug in, that's funny. We have a plug in to all of them, and you can set your verifications to run according to a schedule. So you could say, I want my verifications to run three days before every appointment, or seven days before, or I want my Medicaid appointments to run the same day, and my commercial plans to run four days, so you can kind of set it however it works for your practice.

Peter Boulden
0:16:50
You can prioritize them.

Derek Giddon
0:16:51
And when you're team, you can set different schedules according to different circumstances, whether that's pairs or any other inputs.

Craig Spodak
0:17:03
How about new patients, just out of curiosity? Can you make new patient go to different priority and stuff like that as well or no?

Derek Giddon
0:17:11
Not at the moment, but that's interesting.

Craig Spodak
0:17:13
That's an interesting idea because there's a lot of disgruntled people when they show up and they're not verified and they don't have a lot of experience with your practice so it's more charged. It could be a more charged experience.

Derek Giddon
0:17:24
Yeah, well, they'll all be verified. If the insurance is collected in advance, they'll all be picked up in that schedule. So if you have it set to run four days in advance, the new patients are going to be verified just like everybody else.

Peter Boulden
0:17:36
So it's predicated on what your inbound team gets from your getting their insurance back.

Derek Giddon
0:17:41
The insurance has to be collected. If you like to split the appointment and don't collect that, then those won't be verified. But we need pretty limited information, subscriber ID, payer, date of birth, you know, kind of the table stakes information. And now when your team comes in in the morning, they turn on their computer, all of these verifications have happened already. They're all, all these patients are pre-verified and they don't need to sit down and kind of start from the beginning. And so we're getting the verification status of every appointment and then, you know, the breakdown of their benefits. And we present the information in a way that's extremely actionable for teams. So everything is organized in exactly the same way for every payer. So rather than kind of going from website to website, you're just really able, everything is very streamlined so you can really just work through the schedule very quickly. So how does this help the practices? Of course, number one is time savings. You know, we hear that every six patients takes an hour, so 10 minutes a patient to do insurance verification. Now, when I tell that to an office manager, a lot of them will be in shock that I could be so insensitive, because it could take them one hour to get one patient's information, if Delta Dental keeps you on hold for 45 minutes or whatever. So, um.

Craig Spodak
0:19:10
Why are you disrupting this, Derek?

Peter Boulden
0:19:11
Why are you disrupting this? How can you be so insensitive?

Craig Spodak
0:19:15
Yeah.

Peter Boulden
0:19:16
Well, it's also…

Peter Boulden
0:19:17
So they're…

Peter Boulden
0:19:18
Yeah.

Craig Spodak
0:19:19
Go ahead. I'm sorry. I was just… Well, actually, I was going to say it's also like a game because dental insurance market, if you think about it, we are a proxy by we. I mean, the participating providers of the dental insurance at our local level. If dental insurance had to stand on its own, the reviews would be so bad that no one would actually ever use dental insurance ever again. If Delta Dental had its own Google My Business page, we'd get trashed. The problem and the beauty of dental insurance for the dental insurance industry is that we are the customer service proxy to them. So when they go to Dr. Gidden's office and they're not verified and they have to come out of network or their insurance lapsed or whatever, they don't write Delta Dental a bad review. They're like, I went to Dr. Ogid and he ripped me off and blah blah blah. So it's really unfortunate for us dentists because we get the brunt of it and the verification process is step one in that dissatisfaction because if you're not handling, you know, that's the majority of the negative reviews I see like on mass for dentistry are insurance related. I went there and blah blah blah blah blah. Well, you didn't show us your new card and you showed up and you told us you had new insurance three days after you left.

Derek Giddon
0:20:29
Yeah, that's very well said and an interesting way of putting it. I mean, it's true. There's nowhere to review MetLife. So who gets to review?

Craig Spodak
0:20:42
Dr. Jones does.

Peter Boulden
0:20:43
Yeah.

Craig Spodak
0:20:44
You weren't the first.

Craig Spodak
0:20:45
For MetLife's 3D practices.

Peter Boulden
0:20:46
Let me jump in.

Peter Boulden
0:20:47
I don't know if we have a delay, but you weren't the first one in the market, meaning you didn't invent this process of digital insurance verification. There's other players in the space, and there was other players in the space. You're obviously doing it better, but why are you doing it better? There's one that I think runs with like Tube or something like that, the company.

Derek Giddon
0:21:09
Yeah, I'm not sure who you're talking about.

Craig Spodak
0:21:14
I'm not either.

Craig Spodak
0:21:15
But I am.

Craig Spodak
0:21:16
Pete likes to poke the cease and desist bear sometimes.

Peter Boulden
0:21:20
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Boulden
0:21:21
He loves it.

Derek Giddon
0:21:22
Well, here, I'll rattle up some more cease and desist bears.

Craig Spodak
0:21:29
No, don't.

Craig Spodak
0:21:30
Don't, if you don't mind.

Craig Spodak
0:21:31
No, do. Do. Just tell us why you're better. No, don't. Just tell us why you're better than the other ones.

Derek Giddon
0:21:36
All of the major practice management systems, okay, who will remain nameless, but you know who they all are. They all have insurance verification baked into them. There's some button that does, you know, the eligibility button in all these tools. Nobody uses them. We get, we do, you know, dozens of demos every week for practices. They're all on the major practice management systems. And we always say, well, what are, you know, why don't you use that tool that you already have and that you're technically already paying for. And really what it comes down to is a lack of information. There's not enough information for them to truly be able to rely on the product. And so what we've done that's novel. And the reason that we're doing this better than anyone else out on the market is we've got more information than anybody else. And we continue to pack more data into AirPay every single day and every single week. And so we've got more payers, more payer connectivity. If again what you have in your practice management system is connected to some set of payers, they're missing all the other payers. We've got kind of the sum total of all the payers in the United States that have electronic data available in the EOB.

Peter Boulden
0:22:51
The EOBs are a lot more detailed than what you provide, right? Like the explanation of benefits is a lot bigger, better, more robust.

Derek Giddon
0:22:59
So we've got more payers, and then within each of those payers, we have more robust data than you can find elsewhere. So we'll have the most robust data of anything that's available, as long as it's available. So what, you know, again, AirPay is software. It's designed to be used by the folks on your team that are doing this already to save time and stress. It's not 100%. There's payers that we don't have. There's details that we don't have. But our batting average is higher than anything else on the market. We're able to, our mission, our goal is to alleviate 70, 80, 90% of the manual work that these teams

Peter Boulden
0:23:42
are doing now.

Derek Giddon
0:23:43
And that's-

Peter Boulden
0:23:44
Derek, if the company isn't very good, I'm just going to tell you this, Craig's team and my team will crush it. And they will be like, this is terrible. This is a terrible product. And they came back, they love, you're right. So they have their hard judge of good products, because we obviously look at a lot of products and stuff like that. So their hard judge of character is not the right word.

Craig Spodak
0:24:03
But you get a wrong point. Well, we have, Peter and I combine, we have our offices co-mingling in a lot of different ways. And the AirPay conversation came out from Erica talking to Meeks about it. Like, hey, what are you doing? What are you doing for this? And that's how it, so it was an internal referral. What we had been using in the past was, you know, I have this thing in my office where I tell people to go find themselves raises. So I tell people, look at any third-party software or company that we're using for anything that we do. If you can do it better and actually save the company money, I'm willing to pay you as long as you can do it better and save the company money. So we had a company that was working in India, actually, and it was just kind of like the two Chinese restaurants talking to each other. So they VPN into our system and overnight they—

Peter Boulden
0:24:49
Have you ever insulted Indians, Craig?

Peter Boulden
0:24:50
You've already insulted Asians.

Craig Spodak
0:24:51
Yeah, I know.

Craig Spodak
0:24:52
That wasn't really insulting. It was just like… I'm kidding.

Peter Boulden
0:24:55
I'm kidding.

Craig Spodak
0:24:56
It's factual. Two Chinese restaurants. We should do that later. But anyway, so they had…

Peter Boulden
0:25:00
At the end of the call, I was like…

Craig Spodak
0:25:01
Yeah, we'll call two Chinese restaurants and put them through. So one of my people was like, hey, you were spending so much money. I can't remember the actual amount. I don't want to go off of reference, but it was more than $1,000 a month, by the way. Well over that. And she's like, I can do it, and I'll just do it after hours, and we'll spend half. You'll give me a quarter of it, and you'll keep the other quarter, and we'll save half. And it was just exhausting, and it didn't last very long, because when you're using manual labor to do that, human capital is just the worst possible use of time. And it just never worked. So when we found it, it was like almost too good to be true. And then I just want to talk about costs as well, because I couldn't understand how, I know BP, we've got a special result, a special thing with you, we've got an exclusive risk-free for 14 days. And what else did we get for BP? I remember Peter and you talking about like some special pricing that I've zoned out on.

Peter Boulden
0:26:05
It's all listed, we made like just a landing page, it's all listed on, just go to bpairpay.com and typically we do that, Derek, for people just so they can get, you know, so they don't have to call the company and be like, hey, can I get that Bulletproof thing and deal? So we typically, we just do a landing page.

Craig Spodak
0:26:19
So we got 14 days risk-free, but then the pricing is what? Like, isn't it like 250 a month or? It's in the figure.

Derek Giddon
0:26:25
Yeah, 249, 249. It starts at 249 a month. There's two tiers, 249 a month and 399 a month,

Craig Spodak
0:26:34
depending on how much. Yeah, but I was paying like well over a grand. I mean, doesn't that, I mean, I don't wanna say the company that I was working with, but like, I mean.

Peter Boulden
0:26:43
Yeah, we were paying 1,500 for that. 1,500, yeah, I remember my cost for that. And it was not solving anything.

Craig Spodak
0:26:50
It was not solving anything.

Derek Giddon
0:26:51
So, yeah, so we're working now with quite a few DSOs that use these call centers. And again, they're overseas, so they're a lower cost than what they would charge domestically. But now they're switching over to air pay and they're saving, their costs are a fraction of what they were then with those call centers. Because again, like even if it's overseas, it's still human beings making phone calls. And again, to scale that, it's just more phones and more humans to man those phones.

Craig Spodak
0:27:29
Let me ask you something, Derek. Do you think that it behooves the insurance company for people like you to exist as well? That's where I was going next, too. The war on who can last the longest, right? Well, I'm just saying, I think if I were to examine it, I would want, I mean, what do they have? You have 1,800 payers. How many payers do you have? 1,200 payers. So eventually, once you have the system, you just want two computers talking. I mean, I'm sure the insurance company doesn't want to hire their Malaysian.

Peter Boulden
0:28:03
They want to keep friction, Craig, is my point.

Peter Boulden
0:28:05
That was my point.

Craig Spodak
0:28:06
Well, I don't know.

Peter Boulden
0:28:07
That's what I'm asking.

Peter Boulden
0:28:08
Well, it behooves them in their business model.

Derek Giddon
0:28:11
So this is interesting. So I'm a dentist and my partner is not a dentist. So whenever we would talk about this, I always thought that they were evil. And I agree with Dr. Baldwin. and my partner Dan, he's smart, so he just thinks that they're incompetent. And what we found out is that it's more, it's a mixture, but they're certainly.

Derek Giddon
0:28:35
So they're evil and incompetent.

Derek Giddon
0:28:37
Evil and incompetent, what a shit show. Dumb and angry.

Craig Spodak
0:28:41
We've spoken to quite a few at this point,

Derek Giddon
0:28:43
and I believe I'll really look them in the eyes and try to get a sense of it. They want their patients to have a better understanding of their benefits, and they want it to be easier for the offices. And for one top 10 payer, they get 25,000 phone calls a day from dentists. And 19,000 of the 25,000 are about eligibility. And they're like, scratching their heads. They can't want this. Why the numbers are so high. Um, but they think that their website is better than it is. Like they'll, they'll say they're scratching their heads. Why are they getting 19,000 calls? And we'll tell them, well, you don't have this information on your website and your website is difficult to use and whatever. Um, and you think that's a feature, not a bug. That's a feature, not a bug.

Peter Boulden
0:29:32
I think like Craig, I think that's where Craig is going to well. It's also like it's a monopoly

Craig Spodak
0:29:41
So like you go on your local power companies website. It sucks. Oh wait. You know don't use us then live in the dark

Derek Giddon
0:29:48
Florida power and light come on

Craig Spodak
0:29:50
It's true, I mean like yeah, it's a monopoly people are not readily They don't have the consumer does not have the access to choose the dental insurance at the level of the consumer. It's not at the benefits administrator and there's packages and there's blah, blah, blah. So it's not really a free market per se. Like if you're not happy with Taco Bell, you just drive to Chipotle. If Taco Bell and Chipotle did what the insurance practices did, one of them would go out of business. So they're being artificially propped up by their bad practices not falling on their actual business as it falls on the local dentist. And then their access or their lack of user interface, it goes away as well.

Peter Boulden
0:30:38
Let me touch on some-

Derek Giddon
0:30:39
There's certainly room in the market for a better product and a better experience. For sure. Just to bring it back to air pay quickly, I mean, obviously, the biggest benefit or the most immediate benefit is for the office team, time and stress and cost savings. But the kind of downstream benefit of that also is patients that have more clarity when they come into the office about what they held, what the hell they owe and why, you know, which is a mystery to them. And one more downstream, I would say, Derek,

Peter Boulden
0:31:12
is that once the team is empowered to know what the patient, what the benefits exist, it's like you don't have to play this guessing game. Like, oh, we'll find out and do a pre-authorization. And then the patient leaves, and they're not in that emotional state of saying, like, yes, I want the treatment. Now they've gone home. Now they're on to the vacation or something else. So knowledge is power in this scenario. And it really helps the team, whether that's the hygienist enrolling the next treatment, or the dentist enrolling the next treatment, or the coordinator enrolling the next treatment, or finding out there's an ortho benefit when the patient didn't even know, and being like, hey, you should fix this. It's easy, we have a solution for you, and you have the benefit. Like, that diffuses so much of patient enrollment, Mike, and when you can empower it, it's just a game changer, in my opinion.

Derek Giddon
0:31:57
Yeah, the conversion rate of the practice goes up. Totally, yeah.

Peter Boulden
0:32:01
So we're talking about it from a place of like, oh, it's $250 and it helps, you know, maybe it helps the burden of the team. But I think the big, big halo effect of this is the downstream I just spoke of. Like, right, something you can't really measure, but like, there's a lot of upside there.

Peter Boulden
0:32:19
Yep, for sure.

Derek Giddon
0:32:19
And then going back to also what Craig said as well, is now, you know, again, when the patient doesn't understand their insurance, there's only one place for them to leave that bad feedback. And that's on your Yelp page.

Peter Boulden
0:32:32
That's on your Google My Business page.

Craig Spodak
0:32:35
Yeah, these guys are deceptive. They gave me a pre-estimate of $1,700, then it was $1,750 I owed. Deceptive, I'm calling the Better Business Bureau. Shit, it's not my fault. For sure. Let me ask you a question about functionality. I'm sorry I don't understand this as much as I should, but is there a way in your software to actually highlight or batch people into a bulk set, just alert you when people have adult orthodontic benefit, like kind of flag that and send it to you? Like filter it out, essentially?

Peter Boulden
0:33:06
Filter it out so that you can have like a exported.

Derek Giddon
0:33:15
Yeah, yes, there is actually, yeah.

Craig Spodak
0:33:18
Let me tell you how valuable that would be. Because.

Derek Giddon
0:33:22
Yeah, so you can actually do that for ortho or night guards or any. Right, but imagine.

Craig Spodak
0:33:29
Imagine, so like, I don't understand why, but the insurance company feels like the benefit of straight teeth is usually for people that are under the age of 18, when as a guy like me, I'm faculty for different clear liner companies, and I know that crowded teeth lead to premature tooth wear, and it's not just for cosmetics. But imagine how valuable it is if you could send or export a whole file of people that have adult orthodontic coverage. You know, let's say you set the barrier like $1,000. And that just letting people know within it with a well orchestrated, you know, email marketing campaign, not only does it, you know, what the benefits are, and then kind of correlate that rather to people that have been recommended clear aligners, but then put that together in one of your marketing campaigns to say not only have you been recommended, we, our system indicates that you have at least a thousand dollars of benefit. So you have an insurance company that's gonna subsidize it. So imagine that.

Derek Giddon
0:34:24
Yep.

Peter Boulden
0:34:25
Yep.

Derek Giddon
0:34:26
You can slice and dice the information really.

Craig Spodak
0:34:30
That's great.

Craig Spodak
0:34:31
There's no way for us to do that with what we were doing.

Peter Boulden
0:34:34
A drip campaign essentially, right?

Craig Spodak
0:34:35
We had no software. Custom audience, or email. Yes, but you don't use software, Peter. You don't have that. You don't have that. Yes, you'll know that Peter Baldwin has $2,000 worth of insurance coverage, but there's no way. You'd have to manually go through that. So holy shit, total different dynamics.

Craig Spodak
0:34:51
So you're saying, Craig, that's what you'd be

Craig Spodak
0:34:53
at a position that you're gonna offer me on the board. I'm very cheap, you could just buy me dinner

Peter Boulden
0:34:58
when I come to New York.

Craig Spodak
0:34:59
That I'll do, no problem.

Peter Boulden
0:35:01
You're saying, Craig, customizing an audience

Peter Boulden
0:35:04
and then rolling out special internal offers, right, for your patient. It's amazing.

Derek Giddon
0:35:15
So you can't send the communications out right now?

Craig Spodak
0:35:19
No, no, you don't need to.

Peter Boulden
0:35:20
You don't even need that. We have the tools for that, right?

Peter Boulden
0:35:23
We all have the tools for that.

Craig Spodak
0:35:25
But that comes pre-done with everything. If you've got, like, the average dental office has four different tools to get reviews already cooked into the other things that they have. You're just, you know, or four different ways to do an email campaign. But for you, being that your software, the real value proposition, obviously saving time, money, blah, blah, blah,

Peter Boulden
0:35:42
we get all that.

Craig Spodak
0:35:43
But to decode it, like having Dental Intel, for example, it doesn't, you can go through, if you have open dental, and build a report, but Dental Intel batches it for you so you can see who's overdue and you know where to go digging for gold. So you can have this digging for gold campaign to just say, if you have a thousand active patients and 300 of them have adult ortho coverage, holy shit, that's like a massive thing. And I mean, orthodontics is something that people wanna do anyway, and the fact that your insurance company is willing to kick in a grand or more, holy shit, to me that's crazy.

Peter Boulden
0:36:18
I knew we'd find a way to make this sexy, this pod sexy. And there we go, we just come up with this marketing, business ideas, you know, I was like, man, how are you gonna make insurance verification juicy?

Craig Spodak
0:36:27
We did it. Well, in and of itself, you can make it sexy in two ways. Like, can you save, or can you step on the gas?

Derek Giddon
0:36:34
Okay, I thought this, I've had a different perception of this podcast all the time. I thought this was the sexiest thing ever. Well, your background makes it sexy.

Peter Boulden
0:36:44
The real plants makes it fire. I like how you touched that, though.

Craig Spodak
0:36:48
It seems like you do that all the time.

Derek Giddon
0:36:51
There's only one way to do it, yeah.

Craig Spodak
0:36:53
Well, you know what works for you. You're in New York City though, aren't you?

Peter Boulden
0:37:00
Yep.

Craig Spodak
0:37:01
So that's probably the only natural living thing anywhere like in a three square mile

Craig Spodak
0:37:04
radius that you have there.

Derek Giddon
0:37:05
Yeah, it's like green and then the gray.

Craig Spodak
0:37:08
Right, the concrete.

Derek Giddon
0:37:09
Yeah, the gray concrete.

Craig Spodak
0:37:10
So all kidding aside, can you just kind of go through what we got for Bulletproof? Because I know when we talked, Peter was pushing you and I tuned out because Peter was in his get our audience something.

Derek Giddon
0:37:22
Yeah, so you're putting me on the spot on the podcast. But yeah, right now we have the 14 day free trial. Perfect.

Peter Boulden
0:37:28
Hey Craig, I just told you it's on that landing page.

Craig Spodak
0:37:31
Okay, got it. Okay, got it. I just want to hear. I see a picture of Peter and I on the AirPay page here.

Peter Boulden
0:37:38
Well, yeah, I like it.

Derek Giddon
0:37:39
Yeah, yeah. Did you like that?

Craig Spodak
0:37:42
You meet Peter, by the way, I'm looking at this picture. I guarantee you, you Photoshopped this and made me less tall than you. No, you have a micro torso. I know, but like, I'm not, the picture that I'm looking at on the AirPay, bprpay.com, I'm only like an inch taller than you.

Peter Boulden
0:37:59
I think I'm probably sitting down because sitting down with

Craig Spodak
0:38:09
his crack I thought I got a little torso these long legs but we we we did down next to each other we did it on my course and sitting down yeah his no I think your torso is freakishly large I may have less torso than I should but you have you have too much torso you have

Peter Boulden
0:38:48
You look like a Toradont. You're like all root. You're like all crown and no root. Isn't that what a Toradont is? Like my torso to a ratio? Do I have that right guys? Toradont? I don't know. We digress.

Derek Giddon
0:39:03
Yeah, Toradont. You're all like mid-root. You have very short little stomachs. Shots fired.

Peter Boulden
0:38:52
All right, Derek. I think we achieved the goal. We made insurance verification. We gave some marketing stuff. We're giving a deal. I think with that, we wrap. I appreciate you spending the time, bud. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

Derek Giddon
0:39:06
Derek, are you coming to Vegas for the summit? I appreciate you guys. I will definitely be in Vegas for the summit.

Craig Spodak
0:39:14
No way, okay.

Derek Giddon
0:39:15
And it sounds like you guys will be fun to be in Vegas with.

Peter Boulden
0:39:20
Yeah, so August 11th and 12th at the Wynn Hotel. Wait till you get some cocktails in us, then the shots really get fired.

Craig Spodak
0:39:25
It's hilarious.

Derek Giddon
0:39:26
Yeah, I can only imagine.

Craig Spodak
0:39:27
Two minutes before the podcast. So, I'm kidding. But yeah, August 11th and 12th at the Wynn Hotel, early bird tickets are now sold out. So Derek, I don't know. Did you buy your ticket? I

Derek Giddon
0:39:38
Didn't but I I know But yeah, I appreciate it and I appreciate you helping me make it sexy and Look forward to hearing from the bulletproof crew the crew the team

Craig Spodak
0:39:49
Thanks for holding something awesome that helps all of us my team's super fired up Pete's teams fired up That means our audience is gonna be fired up. So we appreciate you making something that's a pain in the ass a lot more efficient and affordable so we can take our hard earned dollars and put it to work versus put it to some bullshit.

Derek Giddon
0:40:13
Yep, it's my pleasure to leave playing golf and all that to just, you know, busting my ass over here.

Craig Spodak
0:40:22
Pete, busting your ass, man.

Craig Spodak
0:40:22
You're doing a good job for us, thank you.

Peter Boulden
0:40:25
All right, guys, see you later.

Craig Spodak
0:40:26
Thanks.

Peter Boulden
0:40:27
Bye, guys. Bye, guys. See you later.

Transcribed with Cockatoo