Dreamers & Doers: Vyne Dental – “We’re moving out of being in the background and are more front and center”

Q: As a company, what really drives Vyne Dental and how does this impact the products and services you provide to dental practices?

Lindy Benton – Vyne CEO and President

LB: The company was started over 20 years ago as an electronic attachment service provider. There was an opportunity for workflow improvements regarding how images were sent to the payers to help practices get paid more quickly. That was the anchor of the business in the beginning.

As we grew and expanded our services, we identified other opportunities for workflow efficiencies. For example, how dental offices, both the staff and the doctors are communicating with other dental offices, with other dental staff, or even with the patient. There was not a secure email solution for these types of exchanges, so we expanded our portfolio with a product called Vyne Connect. Vyne Connect brought encrypted email to many of our customers. We’re now one of the leading providers of encrypted email services in dentistry.

We saw another opportunity to continue to expand around revenue cycle optimization and earlier this year we acquired a company called Renaissance Electronic Services, LLC. Their core business is electronic claims processing and a back-end clearinghouse, Tesia Clearinghouse, LLC, for insurance companies. For a dental office, both the insurance claims as well as the attachments are very intertwined. The two solutions fit very well together under the Vyne Dental umbrella.

What drives us is continuing to look for opportunities where we can add value to our customers.

Q: How do you make sure dental practices understand both the need for these types of services as well as why Vyne Dental stands out?

LB:Many dental offices are using our solution anywhere from 200 to 300 times a month. The office staff is familiar with both the claims and the attachment solution, and we’re offering more capabilities within the solution to give the practices more visibility on their claims. For this reason we’re moving out of being in the background and are more front and center for these practices to be able to monitor their revenue cycle management, how effective it is, what the costs are, and their cash flows, rather than seeing claims go unprocessed.

In addition to that, the encrypted email is becoming more important to these practices, which is something they utilize every day.

Q: Do you think the industry understands the importance of this type of revenue cycle management and of secure channels for transmitting this type of information?

LB:I would say that most offices understand the importance of electronic claims. What they may not be aware of is that many companies have transactional fees per claim, per attachment, or hidden fees bundling it in with other services. I’m not sure everyone fully understands the risks of sending communications with standard email, so that is an area where we hope to bring more visibility.

We also do not require long-term contractual commitments from our customers. We stand behind our product. We know we’re delivering great solutions and our customers love them and continue to use them.

Q: How does Vyne Dental keep itself ahead of changes in communications around health care?

LB:To begin with, our FastAttach solution is HITRUST CSF-Certified, which is something we maintain annually. HITRUST CSF has become a widely adopted security and privacy framework across industries globally, so it’s important for our customers to know we hold ourselves to these high standards of software security and privacy.

Another approach we have is to help our customers directly. Many times, practices will be using an old PC, and we can’t communicate on the latest version of a communication protocol. What we will do as a courtesy is reach out to those offices and let them know that they’re running computers that are not capable of using the safest communication protocols. Essentially giving them the opportunity to make those changes and make them aware of it so they can help make sure the office is more secure.

We also provide ongoing education and industry updates, through direct communications from Vyne Dental and via our partners who provide informative webinars to our customers.

Q: How do you manage Vyne Dental as a company that needs to be able to integrate and work with so many different platforms in the industry?

LB:When we began as an attachment solution, we spent those early years really trying to be neutral in terms of our ability and willingness to work with just about all the different systems that are in the market. That gave us a foundation to be able to adapt, evolve, and have the flexibility to serve as many dental offices as possible. This is in our DNA as a company, and it’s an investment that we’ve been willing to make and will continue to provide to our customer base.

Q: Does Vyne Dental see itself as having a role as a potential medical-dental industry convergence happens? And what would that role be?

LB:In the framework of our encrypted communications, we have the immediate capabilities of being able to share things outside of the dental world. We can share patient records, we can share patient images with other medical professionals, and we are already working with the payers. We are evaluating other opportunities across medical and dental that have overlap, in partnership with our colleagues at Vyne Medical. This division of our company works primarily within the hospital and health system market and there are many opportunities for us to collaborate, especially as larger health care IT vendors and EHR vendors move into the dental space.

Q: Are there major challenges Vyne Dental sees coming both to your company and to the dental industry as a whole?

LB:Well everything related to COVID-19 and the way it caught the world off-guard, including the dental market, has been a major challenge. What makes me proud to work in the dental field is how the ADA responded and how quickly we were able to adapt, and then get back on track with dental practices reopening has been very positive to see.

Overall, the dental industry is trying to create products that give dentists more opportunity to practice dentistry in its simplest form. The more confidence a dentist can have in the systems and tools that they’re relying on to run their business are giving them the opportunity to use their time for patient care. I don’t look at those as challenges, but rather as opportunities that we must develop and create those tools.

Q: How has Vyne Dental supported your customers during the COVID-19 pandemic?

LB:As a clearinghouse and claims processing solution, it gave us unique insights into how dental productivity was rapidly declining, as well as how it was coming back. At the start of the pandemic, we redirected our internal teams for outbound reach to customers to explain how our tools can be used remotely, so customers could easily work from home. We also spent time working with our customers to make sure they could track what they had already earned and to make sure those claims were being processed. They were able to continue to manage those historical dialogues from home. As offices, unfortunately, experienced turnover with layoffs and furloughs, we provided additional training on our solutions for those offices since there were many new staff members using these solutions, and we continue to do this as offices reopen. For us, it’s been about how we can help our customers to continue their cash flow because, with productivity down, every dollar counts.

Q: In terms of what’s ahead for Vyne Dental, are there new things in the near-term that people should be on the lookout for?

LB:The most recent thing is that as of August 1, we have come together under our new brand as Vyne Dental. The ability to bring together our claims, attachments, and encrypted email solutions provide a healthy revenue cycle addition to most practices to complement their practice management system. We’re excited to offer these solutions as a bundle called Practice Core, which is a phenomenal value for this level of functionality. We will continue to strengthen these solutions and explore other ways to offer benefits to the market.