Challenge:
Lumio is a 69-location, dentist-owned and dentist-led DSO headquartered in Tulsa, OK that offers both general dentistry and specialty services. Known for embracing technological trends and making data-driven decisions, Lumio caters to a top-down RCM philosophy, with a centralized approach to billing policy.
During a period of rapid expansion in 2023, Lumio’s RCM team noticed that many new acquisitions lacked either the bandwidth or an effective process for collecting aging A/R. It was reported for many practices that up to 85% of patients that called in were disappointed that they hadn’t been billed for over 120 days.
To add to these challenges, Lumio was also stymied by post-COVID front office staffing issues, which further limited the capacity of offices to collect on past-due balances.
Because follow-up billing actions were sporadic at best for most new locations, Lumio wanted to establish standardized patient billing and A/R management processes for new practices, while centralizing billing SOPs for all locations.
Other prioritized objectives for Lumio’s RCM staff included increasing cash flow velocity from new acquisitions, and shoring up their collection efforts for existing practices.
Solution:
When identifying an appropriate RCM solution, Lumio had a list of functionality requirements:
- A centralized hub for managing all location billing settings
- Follow-up triggers to automatically send statements to responsible parties with delinquent balances
- Time-saving mechanisms to increase the bandwidth of limited RCM staff
For Lumio Dental, Pearly’s RCM automation software checked all of these boxes while providing a cost-effective solution for establishing a robust billing system.
Because at the time of onboarding with Pearly 80% of Lumio’s practices were new acquisitions, Pearly was quickly rolled out to 65 locations to address many practices’ ad hoc billing processes.
With an ambitious goal of both designing and implementing a culture of collection for all of their locations, Lumio put Pearly to the test.
Impact:
From the outset with Pearly, Lumio leveraged Pearly’s DSO-specific features to successfully centralize all of their locations’ billing processes. Over the course of a year, Lumio then systematically reduced their old, persistent patient-portion A/R (balances over 60 days past due) by $950k, representing over 20%. They also reduced the average days to pay in this bracket by 14 days.
Across the board, their collection efforts became more efficient, with 42% of all payments being made within a week of the first instance of outreach.
Internally, their practice RCM staff were saving 33 hours per office, per month crediting Pearly’s automated billing outreach.
Because of the success Lumio experienced with Pearly during its first year, their RCM team expanded their use of the Pearly platform by adding their Letter Automation functionality, which now allows them to automate the sending of physical statements which are included in their billing workflows.
Lumio Dental continues to onboard new practices with Pearly, lauding the platform’s capability to operate automatically in the background and minimize dependence on office staff to consistently and accurately perform meticulous billing actions.
