BOC Winners in Practice: YAPI

Dr. Colin Lathrop, the owner of Lathrop Dental Center in Katy, Texas, explains why YAPI practice software was the perfect fit for his start-up practice.

Dr. Colin Lathrop

DPR: Tell us a little about yourself and your practice.

Dr. Lathrop: I'm a general dentist and I did a start-up seven years ago now, and I am 100% out of network, so I have no insurance contracts. We have five full-time hygienists, myself, and an associate.

DPR: How did you hear about YAPI?

Dr. Lathrop: When I set my office up 7 years ago, I was looking to add some sort of integration with iPads for paperwork to try to be as paperless as possible, and there weren't a lot of options at the time. I actually had gone [online] and I did a search for iPad and credit card. I was trying to be able to process credit cards through an iPad chairside. Since it's a startup, I wasn't planning on having a bunch of employees because I didn't have any patients. There was just one post talking about YAPI and it seemed like it would just fit the bill perfectly for what I needed.

DPR: What made you start using YAPI in your practice?

Dr. Lathrop: When I opened, I hired two dental assistants. They had never made an appointment or checked insurance benefits or confirmed appointments with patients over the phone and all these other things. After the first few years, I realized one of the biggest strengths of YAPI and their real efficient, paperless workflow is you don't have to have as many people doing the same amount of work, so it's a lot more efficient. With payroll, I must have saved probably $400,000 or $500,000 in the last seven years in payroll costs.

DPR: What has it been like using YAPI?

Dr. Lathrop: They're constantly innovating the product. It just makes it even more efficient, more user-friendly. We use them for our post-treatment survey for patients so that we can get good, honest feedback from patients. We use the intra-office communicator all the time with the quick message buttons. That is a huge help when [the team] needs to relay a message to me while I'm working on a patient. Instead of coming in and interrupting us, they can send a message directly to the [operatory] that we're working in. It really cuts down on a lot of running around back and forth and, just wasted time, really. We use it for all of our post-op instruction forms, cutting down on a lot of printing. We were able to pretty much automate a lot of that stuff.

DPR: How has YAPI benefited your practice and your patients?

Dr. Lathrop: There are just so many features that can be used. We have picked quite a few of the core offerings and we use that just every day, day-in and day-out, to make our system as efficient as possible, so that I can maximize the amount of time that my team has a patient and not doing paperwork, not filing things, not searching for things. It's just a really efficient way of using the software package with our iPads. YAPI is the cheapest employee I have every single month and I don't mind paying the fee because we get so much value and so much benefit out of working with them.

For our patients, it means quite a bit of time-savings. Let's say you have a patient who has a long list of medications. We can take a picture of their medication list with an iPad through YAPI and drop it into [our practice management software] very quickly. The patient is not having to necessarily fill out a long list of their medications. Now, during the pandemic, we've changed a lot of our procedures to where we're asking all of our patients to fill all the new patient paperwork online where they have everything done before they get here.