How Kare Mobile Is Modernizing Mobile Dentistry with Henry Schein One’s API Integration
In our latest episode of Spilling the Teath, Dr. Ryan Hungate, Chief Clinical Officer, Henry Schein One talks with Alan Rencher, Chief Technology Officer, Henry Schein One and Joe Guster, Chief Technology Officer, Kare Mobile, about how Kare’s mobile-dentistry DSO has been innovating the marketplace with the help of Henry Schein One’s API program.
Kare Mobile has transitioned over the years from just an application connecting patients in dental deserts to same-day service to being the people that actually deliver that service in a mobile van. To optimize care, they started looking at everything from productivity to ensuring they were sending the right dentist with the right equipment to the right patient.
Kare Mobile uses their internal scheduling app, DentaFlo, which takes both scheduling and productivity into account. “At this point, DentaFlo is all about patient self-scheduling and saving time from the operational standpoint. Some things that we're doing with Henry Schein One’s APIs – being able to get somebody onboarded for just a cleaning or an emergency or a consultation appointment – are really easy,” said Guster. “But we were able to actually use the treatment plan endpoints to visit endpoints and be able to grab that data, and we're allowing patients to self-schedule those complicated treatment plans as well. Those are a couple of things that we've been able to do with the APIs within DentaFlo.”
By integrating their Dentrix Ascend cloud-based practice management system with DentaFlo using Henry Schein One’s API program, they’ve streamlined scheduling and managed over 1,500 appointments, saving substantial time in the process. Productivity is up. No-show rates are the same in most cases or lower in certain markets. And it's been amazing for them to be able to continue to deploy and develop on top of these APIs.
“I think instead of looking at the practice holistically, we're able to look at the practice at the operatory level and at the chair level. Now I'm optimizing chairs instead of just optimizing my practice, which gives me a lot more control through my customer discovery,” said Guster. “Practices will have a chair dedicated for hygienists, so we want to make sure that hygienist chair is productive. And there's different levers that we can pull to make sure that chair stays busy. Same thing with the dentist chair. There's an operatory end point so I can get all the data I need for each operatory, sync it, and have it in DentaFlo so that now we can look at it and schedule each chair as needed.”
When asked what drew Kare Mobile to Ascend, Guster said:
“First of all, you have one of the best cloud solutions on PMS out there. The API was just icing on the cake for us. But I did do my research because we needed DentaFlo to work with multiple practice management systems. We couldn’t depend on some of those solutions for many reasons, security being a big thing and also the speed of synchronization.
“For us, we're all about availability. If somebody books an appointment, I need to take that out of the picture for somebody else to do it, right? Fifteen, twenty minutes, that's forever for us when keeping things in sync. Being able to integrate directly with the SID and then also integrate with the streaming API, we get almost real-time synchronization in the most secure way, and I can feel comfortable handing out our application link to every patient to literally schedule.”
Guster also brought up that they’ve started building out their data pipeline. They have some data going into Snowflake, a data warehouse tool, and they’re building dashboards from that data. Because they own that data, they're able to do different things with it, which is such a huge benefit.
Asked for what he’d recommend for anybody getting started, Guster said:
"Come in and do it the right way. The program is easy to get integrated into. The team is making the investments to make it even better than what it is now. All I see is great things in the future for what we're building connected directly to us then. I love the future-thinking innovation that's been occurring even with the Dentrix server. I'm really looking forward to it. I would just say, 'Hey, do it the right way. Come in and get the keys and start making those API calls.’"
Watch the full interview and check out our full list of API integration vendors.