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Irene Iancu: Financial Mistake
85 Plays1 year ago
Do you want to avoid Costly Mistakes in Dentistry? Irene Iancu RRDH shares an essential lesson: The critical importance of implementing systems in your dental practice. Learn from her experience and prevent unauthorized and unwanted write-offs that can impact your bottom line. It's time to safeguard your practice's financial health!
About the Guest:
Irene Iancu is a passionate and skilled restorative dental hygienist based in Toronto, Canada. With 16 years of experience in the dental field, Irene has developed a diverse set of skills, working in various specialized practices including periodontics, pediatric dentistry, orthodontics, and cosmetic dentistry. As the owner of her own practice, she goes beyond typical dental hygiene duties by also performing restorative work such as direct and indirect restorations. In addition to her clinical work, Irene is active in the dental community as an educator, social media influencer with 30,000 followers, and host of a popular dental podcast. Her journey and expertise have not only shaped her career but have also provided her with a platform to share her knowledge and experiences with a wider audience.
Episode Summary:
In this enlightening episode, dental professional Irene Iancu shares her candid experience of transitioning from clinical work to owning and managing her own dental practice. Amid the backdrop of the business's nitty gritty, she delves into the financial missteps and lessons learned while building her business from the ground up. The conversation exposes the often unaddressed aspects of dental practice management that go beyond patient care, offering valuable insights for peers in the industry.
Key Takeaways:
- There is often a gap in business training for dental professionals, requiring new practice owners to learn management skills on the job.
- Essential systems and checks need to be in place to monitor employees' work and optimize the practice's operational aspects.
- Unanticipated issues like the complexity of insurance claims can lead to costly financial oversights if systems are not well-established.
- Irene recommends listening to industry podcasts, attending conferences, and utilizing available resources like operation manuals to help create practice systems.
- Differing practices and regulatory environments between the U.S. and Canada can pose unique challenges in insurance processing and management.
Connect with Irene Iancu: @toothlife.irene
Check out Tooth or Dare Podcast: @toothoredare.podcast
Connect with Ignitedds: @ignitedds
Connect with Tanya Sue Maestas: @tsmaestas.dds
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Transcript
Intro to Dental Fuel & Unspoken Dental Practice Topics
00:00:00
Speaker
Dental Fuel, the podcast that focuses on what no one else is talking about. Mistakes. The dental world is full of before and afters and no one is talking about the middle. Dental Fuel brings you the unspoken in-between. Dental Fuel is brought to you by Ignite DDS Masterminds. Masterminds is a program that helps provide you the tools you need to take the next steps in
Financial Mistakes & System Building
00:00:22
Speaker
your career.
00:00:22
Speaker
We are back with Irene Iancu, who shares a financial mistake she has made and the importance of building systems in a dental office. Let's tune in. Speaking of business, and you must know finances really well because, you know, you're running your practice and probably something that you had to learn as you started to build and grow. But what are some financial mistakes that you've made in your journey, especially with starting your practice that you've definitely learned from? Financial mistakes.
00:00:52
Speaker
I've learned financial mistakes in the essence of not having systemization in order to check on other employees. Now, this is going to sound really bad if I don't elaborate. I mean, I don't mean micromanage people. I just mean that as a startup, right? So nobody is really taught how to be a business owner when they come out of school, whether that's dental hygiene school or dental school, I think.
00:01:19
Speaker
We both equally received some form of informal training. And then you're kind of just led to, well, choose from the experiences that you've had working in previous practices, take what's worked from them, implement it. And then, you know, you figure it out as you go. You learn from your mistakes and from other people's mistakes.
00:01:40
Speaker
But when you work as an associate or as an employee or whomever in a practice, you're not really privy to the behind the scenes stuff because that goes into like HR stuff. That goes into deep HR that nobody talks about because you want to keep things confidential and private. So you may have never seen an employment agreement or you may have never conducted an interview for somebody
00:02:01
Speaker
or you don't even know what the day-to-day job of an office manager or a treatment coordinator is and how to set specific KPIs in order to ensure that they're being efficient with their time and also with your resources.
Impact of COVID on Dental Systems
00:02:16
Speaker
So fast forward to me deciding to open a practice and then COVID happens where everything shuts down and
00:02:24
Speaker
we went through this like weird phase of like nobody really knowing what was going to happen. I realized that I didn't have some of these core systems in place. So I operated my office for a year without an office manager or a treatment coordinator. And then, you know, systemization needed to be made, you know, following up on treatment plans, checking in with breakdowns, calling patients, all of those like little tiny things that I didn't realize were broken until
00:02:54
Speaker
you know, a year later or two years later when you hire someone to take over that role and they're like, okay, so where's the spreadsheet for this? And it's like, I don't have one. I just like print off the list off of Yappy or print off the list off of open dental. So what I learned now recently in the process of hiring a new person,
00:03:15
Speaker
because if you don't create these KPIs or systems and people take liberties, like the liberty that one of my office managers took one month with writing off almost $5,000 worth of collection,
00:03:28
Speaker
because there was no system in place to follow up on secondary claims that were sent to insurance companies. Now here we don't have great coordination of benefits. So you'll send something to a primary, they'll pay you. Then you have to physically mail in with a stamp, a signed copy of a claim form to an insurance company with the proof of the EOB from the primary insurance company that will tell them how much they pay. So then the secondary will pay the difference.
00:03:54
Speaker
That's ridiculous. I spend hundreds of dollars a month in stamps. Postage is so expensive. So if there's no system in place of like, OK, so we mailed this, then what? We're just like hoping that Harry Potter's owl returns with a paycheck. And yes, there are still checks. There are paper, physical paper checks. So the office manager was like, OK, well, we didn't receive anything. These claims are now stale.
00:04:22
Speaker
They're not going to get paid, so I need to go in and write them off. That was a system that I didn't have, and it cost me $5,000 to learn it. That's just one.
00:04:33
Speaker
Well, aside from learning systems as you went, did you take any courses or anything? No.
Learning Through Podcasts & Conferences
00:04:39
Speaker
Well, I kind of did. Just the course of life. Kind of did. So I'm a big fan of listening to podcasts as a podcaster. So I've been listening to Dr. Mark Costas' podcast for a little while. He runs an organization called DSI and DSN, Dental Success Institute and Dental Success Network. So I'm not a member of their organization because I'm just not quite there yet.
00:05:02
Speaker
But I listen to a lot of the podcast and I go to their conference every year I bought their manuals on Amazon so like they have an office manual office manager manual office operations manual hygiene manual so we kind of follow those loosely in some elements a little more tightly but
00:05:21
Speaker
But that's, that's kind of what I've, I went to a dental economics conference the year that I opened. Um, DE runs something called the principles of practice management and they use their KOLs and they talk about scaling and stuff. But again, it was a little bit more advanced. I needed just entry level. Yeah. This, this is the, this is what you do when someone calls in sick stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, this is what you do when two people request to be off at the same time.
00:05:50
Speaker
This is what you do when your compressor fails. Like I needed that level of hand holding. Yeah. I would feel the same. So I don't think, at this point, I don't think owning is in my trajectory, but I mean, I would need the same kind of hand holding. I need like every, like how do you open the door? You know, step one, one at a time and kind of guide me from there.
00:06:12
Speaker
And unfortunately, it exists, but it also doesn't exist. And it exists and it's quite expensive, but we don't have the time. So I think if you were to say to me, okay, I need you to work with me for six months and I'll get you on board. I need bite-size morsels of information that I can adapt immediately, which unfortunately didn't happen right away.
00:06:38
Speaker
That's, that's, I guess that's understandable. I mean, yeah, all that takes time and there's like, I feel like, uh, it's not really streamlined. Um, well, I guess in the States you could take the ignite masterminds course and that could help. But, uh, uh, I think that it's hard. There's just so many different pieces of information. I mean, there are very different pieces between Canada and the U S even on the insurance side. I don't know if anything I just said made, made sense at all. Um, yeah. Yeah. But there's some insurance is a mess here and there, you
Closing & Social Media Links
00:07:04
Speaker
know? Yeah.
00:07:04
Speaker
Thanks for tuning into this episode of Dental Fuel. Join us next week as we talk about a team mistake Irene has made. You can follow her on Instagram at toothlife.irene. You can also follow us on Instagram at dentalfuel and at ignitedds. You can learn more about Ignite Dental Masterminds at ignitedds.com slash masterminds.