Vajahat Yar Khan, BDS - Co-Founder of DentTracks & Pediatric Dentist in Houston, Texas

Eva Sheie (00:01):
Whether you're visiting a dentist for the first time or considering a new one, the more you know about who's behind the chair, the better your experience will be. I'm your host Eva Sheie, and on Meet the Dentist, we feature professionals sharing their expertise so you can feel confident about who you trust with your smile. Thanks for listening to Meet the Dentist. I'm excited to bring you Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan. He's a board certified pediatric dentist in the Houston area, entrepreneur, inventor, and all around problem solver. Welcome to the podcast. It's nice to meet you.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (00:37):
Thank you, Eva. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.

Eva Sheie (00:40):
Maybe let's go into a little bit of the what are you working on today that is so useful to your colleagues and to the patients who are out there wondering, where are we in dentistry and how do we get it to be less difficult?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (00:55):
To give you a little background, I mean unfortunately dental industry has not been able to adapt to the changes that are happening around us as far as the technology is concerned, as far as the processes are concerned, as well as what the medical industry has done. But it's time now. So I just came back from an dental innovator conference where I was able to get an exposure to a myriad of problem solving capabilities that people are developing. You would be surprised that I came across something that was developed by three clinicians, and it's about to hit the market where they have created a robot to actually do procedures in a patient's mouth, cutting the time of the patient, being in the chair by almost 50% and improving the accuracy and efficiency of a procedure by 3000% compared to human beings. I was blown away by that technology. I've been offered by the inventor to utilize that technology as a beta tester in my offices, and I'm excited about that opportunity. So there's a lot happening finally, and we are in an area where dentistry is embracing a lot of these latest trends that are occurring in the tech space.

Eva Sheie (02:26):
Have you always been a problem solver?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (02:28):
I am, yeah. So I mean, when I started my first practice, my wife helped me with a process in a dental office that's called credentialing. She would fill out the forms and I would sign them and attach my credentials to them and send them to the insurances for credentialing purposes. We began like that and then I was the one who was contacting my patients on my own, had to keep a lien budget, so the number of staff members in the office were very limited. I would submit my own claims, I would follow up on my own claims and finalize my account's receivable process, post the payments in the system and make sure that those monies are actually received in the bank account. So I mean, I made a system for myself and I was pretty diligent and a disciplinarian about that. But when I started talking to my colleagues, I started realizing that a lot of people do not follow the basic tenets of a business, be it related to the finances, be it related to what kind of reviews you are getting for your offices, offices or whether the patient satisfaction scores are there or not.

(03:41):
All of these things are an important aspect of running a successful practice. So when I started listening and hearing people out, I was like, okay, this is a rampant problem and every one of these issues that people are pointing out can be solved with certain level of accuracy, and with now AI being in the space affecting every single business, these things can be solved with a hundred percent accuracy. So that's when I started implementing AI into my technology that I've created, and sure enough, I've been able to find solutions for practices and solutions for business owners and solutions for patients, which will make their life easier and cut out all the frustrations that go with running a business.

Eva Sheie (04:37):
How long have you been working with AI and understanding how it works?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (04:42):
So the journey began, like I told you with the first practice. So first practice was my own learning. Then when I expanded to the second and the third, I realized that insurances are in the business of not paying. So if insurances start to pay everything that they're required to pay right away, then they would go bankrupt. So whatever they're able to misguide us with as business owners and as clinicians and entrepreneurs, if you're not on top of our game and we let it slide, or if the office manager lets it slide, that is a loss for us, but the gain for the insurance company. So I quickly realized that it was important for me to have a team of people who are only doing back office stuff. So what I did was to keep my margins fair, I started a team in India, so that was an offshore team because I realized that I cannot add four more people in my employee list and still keep a healthy profitability.

(05:54):
So I had some contacts in India, so I hashed out those contacts and I was able to create a team that was able to help me just take all the back office operational stuff offshore, and we maintained our margins. So when we got to seventh or eighth practice, I already had quite a lot of people, like 50, 60 people that were working for me, not only for me, but when my friends and colleagues saw my success, they asked me to create a team for them, and I was able to create a team for them, and they found good growth, they found better profitability, and I found that I was having difficulty with maintaining those people honest and getting the maximum out of their work. I thought, okay, it cannot be done on spreadsheets anymore. We have to come up with some kind of a better method where we are able to track their metrics.

(06:56):
We are able to show them where they are faltering. We are able to show them there are certain other colleagues that are working with you that are performing better than you, and we put them, pair them together so that they can get training from each other. So all of these methods that I thought could be used not only just in a dental office environment within the four walls, but also outside of the dental practice environment with your back office team or a managed services team, I started implementing those and I saw a good response. I mean, their job became easier. We were able to empower them to become better professionals and provide us with better results. And one thing led to other, and basically we created a monster. So I would like to share my screen because this technology became so big, I started with one single module and anytime I have a client that wants to look at the demo of this module, we block out the time for 30 minutes and it never gets finished in 30 minutes.

(08:05):
But because it's so enthralling, people stay on and they look at the demo for one and a half hours by which time I'm able to finish it somehow without showing them all the features. So it's a big software and it has taken about seven years to answer your question, to complete it to a level that we have completed it to so far, and as far as the AI is concerned, we have been able to implement AI in it starting from late 2023. We began with document processing ai, and then slowly we transitioned over to Agen ai, agentic functional ai I call it because it's not just conversational ai, but it's functional in the sense that my AI is able to fetch a slot in the schedule or a specific doctor that the patient is requesting and see whether they're able to honor the time that the patient is requesting.

(09:06):
If not, then it'll guide the patient to the next available slot and it'll make the appointment for the patient in there. So it's not just conversational where the transcription is being made and then summarize what the conversation was about, but it's actually functional. It goes into the patient management software and it is able to make an appointment, reschedule an appointment, cancel an appointment, and also not just for the incoming calls, we are working on the AI agent being able to make outgoing calls to a specific patient who was not able to make an appointment when they were in the office.

Eva Sheie (09:43):
I'm curious because online booking across all of healthcare has been a challenge for a very long time, and we've had lots of workarounds. You could make an appointment, but then a human has to call you and confirm that you made the right appointment. It doesn't really speed up the process. It's still complicated.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (10:07):
Just like a pay placeholder, right? I mean, it's just a placeholder and someone has to confirm. So we haven't made it that way. So what we do, okay, whenever we are onboarding a dental office, we give that capability in their hands and we have people who will guide them, handhold them, and let them do that onboarding in the precise and the correct way. So it's very comprehensive and it's drilled down to the details of individual offices' schedule and individual offices', timings of the office and which doctor works in which office, on which particular chair, and how do they do their treatments, which means that there is a doctor X that takes two hours to do a root canal, whereas a doctor Y can do it in one hour. So it's very individual and you can basically just not cookie cutter approach towards it. So that capability, if it's given in the hands of the dentist themselves, they can define, okay, if I'm going to do a root canal, I want two hours. So all of this information we capture on our end and we train our model for that particular office to be able to provide them the services the way they want it.

Eva Sheie (11:28):
Because of the training, it can actually handle the nuance of scheduling.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (11:32):
Yes,

Eva Sheie (11:32):
And it can make exceptions based on the information it's getting?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (11:36):
That's absolutely correct.

Eva Sheie (11:38):
I've been training my own for maybe six months, and just in the last couple of weeks, I noticed that it was being extremely helpful in a proactive way.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (11:51):
Yeah, I mean you'd be surprised with what these little agents just deploy a personal assistant agent that chat GPT has created, and it'll do wonders for you. I mean, it's really powerful.

Eva Sheie (12:05):
I think the takeaway is if you haven't started using it yet, that the next step is to be open to trying.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (12:13):
Yeah, you'll lag behind. If you're not using it, you'll lag behind because the next generation and the millennials and all the generations that are tech savvy are going to adapt and they're going to recognize that you're behind and you may have attrition of patients. So it's very, very important to stay ahead of the curve and then start adapting.

Eva Sheie (12:41):
I think some of the danger, if you're in practice and you think everything's going fine and you don't think that you need to do this or start paying attention is your patient base. And especially in peds, I think parents speak as one of the pediatric patients are moving, if we're moving faster than you are and our expectations are changing faster than you are.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (13:06):
I read about a study where it was a university study, and I'm telling you, this was a study that was done seven years ago. That's a long time ago, right?

Eva Sheie (13:17):
That's like a million years ago.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (13:19):
Where they evaluated and asked patients on a survey if they would be comfortable doing the dental work with a live dentist or a dentist assisted robot. You won't believe like 55% of the people opted to get the work done with a dentist assisted robot. This was like seven years ago. So imagine if you do that same survey today, it'll be a completely different number. So it's coming. I mean, either you embrace it or you get left behind.

Eva Sheie (13:56):
When you combine that human element with the technical debt of older software not being able to clean itself up, if that makes sense. I know.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (14:08):
Yes, you're right. I mean, I'm not saying that the human element has to go away. I'm saying that's our tagline with the DentTracks. Our tagline is, okay, keep the human element, but keep it efficient. So that efficiency comes from taking away the menial jobs from them and giving it to a robot and have them do proper interactions with patients. Have them spend time with patients where you can allay anxiety and fear from the minds of the patients. Give them better customer service, talk to them and educate them about the treatment plan that has been made by the doctor. Explain to them properly how the insurance is to work and that this can be handled. Help them with financial arrangements and stuff like that. This is true work that you're doing. Instead of putting the phone on your head like that and talking to the insurance company and then just dealing with the customer like a number. So okay, give those tasks to robots, give them the capability to do it very efficiently and as perfectly as possible, and provide the human touch that is necessary In this industry, every patient that walks through the door of a dentist is somewhat fearful unless they're just coming for a cleaning appointment. So if you have that human touch and human voice helping patients to be comfortable, then that'll go a long way in improving the reputation of the business and the practice.

Eva Sheie (15:48):
So the software's called DentTracks?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (15:49):
Yes. It's called DentTracks. Let me share my screen with you. So

Eva Sheie (15:53):
Yeah, Let's see it.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (15:55):
I can show you what it's, so DentTracks is basically a complete business management software, which takes into account the fact that every single office has a patient management software that they're using. So we are not agnostic to the patient management software. We basically like that. The office already have patient management software, so we work with them and then we integrate with the major PMSs and all these PMSs are very, very useful for us. So once we integrate with them, so we are able to provide you with all these modules with the patient management softwares don't have. So we are doing stuff that the patient management software doesn't do. So we are an aggregator, and then these are the different modules we have. The patient's journey begins in a dental office with the first call that comes to the office office. So how does that first call come?

(17:07):
It comes either from a referral by an existing dentist or the marketing that you're doing online, whether it's your website or a webpage or it's the Google Business ads or Google Business pages or Instagram or Meta, wherever that lead is coming from, we are logging that lead into our Dent com module. And when the lead comes in in the form of a phone call, our voice AI agent is able to answer that phone call. And if the patient wants to really make an appointment and it'll make an appointment for the patient, if the patient wants to speak to a specific staff member in the office, whether it's billing related, whether it's insurance related, whether it is the dental assistant that they just saw and they forgot to pick up their prescription, they can specifically ask for the person and the voice AI agent will be able to guide them and get them, have a conversation with that specific person in the office.

(18:10):
And once that patient is seen in the office, for example, that call came in and then the patient made an appointment and the patient makes an appointment, the dental insurance needs to be verified. So once the dental insurance is verified, now the patient is in the chair and the patient is seen and the services are performed for that patient. So whatever services are performed for that patient have to be billed to the dental insurance. So this is our module that will send the claims out and follow up the claims in real time to make sure that claims actually reach the insurance companies and they are in the process of adjudication. Once the claim is sent and say you receive the money, what happens? The staff in the office or your offshore team is supposed to look at that check and the explanation of benefit that comes with the check and post the payment in the system system.

(19:08):
I mean the PMS, once they post the payment in the system, the check is taken to the bank to be deposited, right? So this Dentaccounts module will match everything that has deposited saying the bank and whatever is posted in the PMS automatically, it will show you the discrepancies if there is any kind of discrepancy in what was posted in the PMS versus what is posted in the bank. And that discrepancy report has the details of what is required to be checked, and then the individual business manager can go into individual items and see what is over posted, under posted and try to resolve it. So we have created true integrations with 250 banks in the US and true integrations with six major patient management softwares in the dental industry to capture almost like 90% of the market share. And this is a very powerful tool where we have other methods of cash management where we give them specific details of how they should manage the cash so that they can prevent any kind of embezzlement or return checks.

(20:27):
After the patient goes home, they may dishonor the check or if there is a credit card payment that not go through, or if there is a third party payment that did not go through and things of that nature. So we have, if you have orthodontic patients that you are seeing in the office, whenever the orthodontic contract is made, we capture it at the front end and we are able to give them a proper guideline as to how to track their orthodontic payments without having to change their software. Because most of the patient management softwares that are for general dentistry, they don't have a mechanism built in them to track orthodontic payments, which are on a month to month basis. So all of that is inbuilt here, which is only one of the modules. It's very comprehensive tool. So after the payment is received, say for example in the bank as well as in your PMS, it's posted, there are certain claims that, for example, were not paid at a hundred percent.

(21:32):
When you go to a dental office, your doctor performs say five procedures on you, and the dental insurance paid three procedures, but they need more information about the remaining two procedures. So how do you deal with it? It becomes very difficult. Your team posted the payments for the three procedures that came in, but the two procedures sometimes get lost into oblivion and you'd never get that money. So we track it until the point that the balance on that particular claim becomes zero. So we give you a workflow in your office to be able to manage that claim in a way where you're able to preserve all the notes and the version histories of every single time that the claim goes to the insurance company and you're able to have a proper mechanism to get all your monies paid. Okay. So after this happens, we say that, okay, now the whole cycle has been completed, and if you have some kind of a method in your office to reward your employees, we've created a very cool tool by the name of Dentcentive and we have gamified running a business of dentistry with your staff in this tool.

(22:51):
So what we say in this tool is, okay, you have a team of people that are making your business run. Let's identify within that team who are the best performers and who are the people who need more help. And we are able to track all of that. So we have divided roles in this particular tool where these roles have been clearly specified as lead dental assistant or treatment coordinator, subordinate, dental assistant, front desk and all of that. And every role has detailed outline of what they're supposed to do.

Eva Sheie (23:29):
I am not sure that I'd want to see her at the front desk. I appreciate your sense of humor with these Game of Thrones names. It is very funny.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (23:41):
You can basically just do it in a customized way. You can definitely change it how you want to change it, and we've given them complete autonomy to do that.

Eva Sheie (23:53):
Have you ever gone through and tried to calculate how many hours you save for a practice by using this instead of doing things the old way?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (24:02):
I have not done the number of hours saved, but I've done the math of how much money you save. So basically, if you are utilizing our technology, and one thing is that it motivates the staff that you are looking into doing a bonus structure in a very innovative way where in a sense what I tell my staff is, okay, I'm helping you create your own business within my business, which means that as long as you are performing your roles properly and there are no errors, so what happens is, say front desk has been tasked with 10 items that they have to do on every single patient. So if they're doing those 10 things on every single patient, these errors are zero. But if they're missing out, my AI will go in and it'll check what thing they missed out, and that error will be counted here.

(25:02):
When they log into their dashboard, they're able to see what error on which patient needs to be resolved, and they get 48 hours to resolve it. As long as they resolve the error, they're still eligible for a bonus. It's when they are willing fully not resolving the error, then they lose their bonus. So what it does is nobody has to pull them anymore. Nobody has to be on top of their shoulders watching them. They will correct those things on their own because everybody wants to make a bonus. So I've observed that over a period of time, they become better and better. And we've also created gamification in the sense that, okay, it's not only just related to the business growth effort you're making for that practice. You're hitting the practice breakeven and you're making a practice a profit and your doctor decides what percentage of that profit he wants to share with you, and then those numbers start flowing in their dashboard.

(26:03):
So they see that. But then apart from that, what we have created is a method for them to make points. So for example, if there is a person who has brought in five new patients into the practice from their friends or family or from their Facebook page or from their Insta accounts, there are very creative people in the world these days. So if they're bringing traffic to your office and they're able to prove it, then they get points and these points eventually turn into dollar value. So for somebody to have a dental patient come into the office for a regular cleaning appointment and that person making an effort to talk to the patient, tell them about what kind of shade they have on their teeth, and we can actually lighten the shade of their teeth by two colors, and the patient gets interested, that's a lot of education they provided and spent their time and they were able to convert the patient into a patient that wants bleaching today.

(27:07):
So that person should get points. So we have built a system in a way where they do get points. If they bring in a high ticket value item to the office, a patient that needs full mouth implants and a fixed denture, they get points for that. They get points for posting TikTok videos through our platform onto the social media or get a video testimonial from a patient or get a review from a patient or is able to remove a bad review from a patient. So all those things I've thought of very futuristically and incorporated that into this particular module, which really, really is being received well by the dental community. So once you incentivize them, you pay them, okay, now the whole cycle is completed. Now you can look at, okay, what are the analytics of the practice? Where are the opportunities we can find after we run these analytics?

(28:04):
So are divided into different forms of analytics, whether it's marketing, compliance, scheduling, what kind of demographics of the patients that I'm getting are, which is zip code is getting me the maximum number of patients, what age range, how many total patients I have? What is the retention rate of the patients? All of those KPIs, patient communication, KPIs, where are we dropping the ball in terms of how many missed calls we have, how many outgoing inbound calls we have, what are the call statuses? What is it that we are getting maximum in terms of completed leads or confirmed patients or no status at all or status not defined. I mean, we are able to see all of that and guide the practices as to which patients we are not getting the status on. All these KPIs are very important in our dentally tool and it helps the practices do better in terms of making an impact on their bottom line and making an impact in the experience of the patient.

(29:10):
And then the last module we have is something called a DentCompliance, where we are able to track the compliances of a dental office in a way that it helps the practice not get out of compliance. That means that, okay, say you have five staff members and one staff member has a situation where their CE credits are about to expire in three days. We send you a notification and you help that person become compliant by taking the CE credits and then stay on top of that game if their HIPAA certification is expiring or the OSHA certification is expiring. If there is an incident in the office related to like a needle stick injury or somebody had a fall and they had to be taken to an emergency room, we are able to log in all that information in the system and make sure that people can answer the questions if it arises out of work workman's comp or if it arises out of state board, or if there is a backflow preventer valve that needs a replacement or an inspection or if there is a filter or if there is a fire extinguisher that needs recertification or recheck, all of that is logged in into our DentCompliant platform.

(30:39):
And people can get notification. Exactly. I mean these are little things, but when an audit comes, these little things become monstrous and give you grief and a lot of stress as a business owner. So we just make sure that we are covering all the bases for the office and are able to give them a system which is completely integrated. And then the biggest point I want to make here with our system that we have is that the data in every one of these modules, it talks to each other, which means that, okay, nowadays some of these modules are not even available in the market, but some of these modules that are available in the market, one particular company is providing you a CRM. Another company is providing you with analytics. So whatever data you have in this analytics portion is not talking to the data you have in the DentCom portion.

(31:37):
So for example, missed calls or how many calls were answered by the AI agent and stuff. All that information is not getting transferred over to these analytics because this is something that's happening outside of the PMS analytics are coming from the PMS. So I'm able to put all the data that we are accumulating on each one of these modules, which is critical for business management into analytics. So everything is talking to each other. So that's why I call this AI powered integrated ecosystem, which will help the business owner to do what they need to do, focus on the business.

Eva Sheie (32:15):
Out of curiosity, when you have someone onboarding into DentTracks for the first time, will it pull historical data and give you reporting on that, or is it only from the moment you start? Yeah,

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (32:31):
So we are working on that in the tech industry. There is a term to it, I can't recall it right now, but whatever you have

Eva Sheie (32:39):
Headache, it's called a headache.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (32:43):
So whatever data you have from your legacy systems, we are able to capture that. So yeah, we are working on that.

Eva Sheie (32:53):
I love software. I really appreciate you showing us this whole world that you've built and it's very impressive. Before we wrap it up for the day, I want to ask you how do we find out more about DentTracks? And if we're in a practice, is there a place where we can request a demo that's more personalized?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (33:12):
So the demo is on my LinkedIn page. I mean my profile on the LinkedIn page has a demo link and my calendar and the website. We have a website, www.DentTracks, D-E-N-T-T-R-A-C-K-S.com. And apart from what we have built Eva, we also have a managed services team. So that I mentioned to you when I began my practices, I created a team of five people. Now that team is 350 people and we are catering to 175 practices in the us just providing them with managed services. So when we deploy this software in a dental office, we can provide a full-time resource for you at a fraction of a cost that will help you to not just navigate through the intricacies of this particular platform, but our resources are trained to work on your PMS, your patient management software. They're trained to run the processes, which means that when you hire a person from us, that same person can help you with DentTracks and PMS and they will be able to help you with your eligibility or with your payment postings or with your accounts receivables or your credentialing. You can assign tasks to them and they will fulfill those tasks.

Eva Sheie (34:39):
That's very impressive.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (34:40):
Thank you.

Eva Sheie (34:41):
It's evident by the growth that you've had. If it wasn't working, you would certainly not have gone from five to 350.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (34:48):
Yes, yes. We got a lot of support from the community and I'm grateful for every one of my clients.

Eva Sheie (34:56):
Is LinkedIn the best place to reach out to you?

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (34:58):
Yes, LinkedIn and then the website. So website have call to action buttons where they can fill out a form. My team will reach out, and then my demo link where I go on the demos myself and do the demos is on my LinkedIn page.

Eva Sheie (35:13):
I'll make sure we put that in the show notes so it's easy to find.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (35:16):
Fantastic.

Eva Sheie (35:16):
And I just want to thank you for the amazing conversation today. We learned a lot and I really appreciate you.

Dr. Vajahat Yar Khan (35:23):
Thank you for having me and looking forward to connecting again and stay in touch.

Eva Sheie (35:29):
There's no substitute for meeting in person, but we hope this comes close. If you're considering this dentist, be sure to let them know you heard them on the Meet the Dentist podcast. Check the show notes for links to this dentist's website and Instagram. To be featured on Meet the Dentist book your free recording session at meetthedentistpodcast.com. Meet the Dentist is made with love in Austin, Texas and is a production of The Axis, theaxis.io.