OM Ep. 172 - Streamlining Orthodontics Practices with Virtual Assistants

About this Podcast

In this Ortho Marketing Podcast, Dean Steinman is joined by Casey Bull, Chief Operating Officer of MyOrthoVA. They dive into how virtual assistants can transform your practice, from streamlining patient communications and appointment scheduling to managing administrative tasks and improving overall efficiency. Discover practical tips, success stories, and actionable strategies to help you focus on what matters most—providing exceptional patient care. If you’re ready to modernize your approach and embrace the power of virtual support, this podcast is for you!

Episode Transcript:

Casey Bull

Hi, my name is Casey B and I'm the chief operating officer at myor of vaa in this episode you're going to hear all the great work that we're doing here at my Earth of vaa with placing virtual assistance remote Staffing from overseas with dental and orthodontic offices you're also going to hear uh best tips on how to onboard really any remote staff I hope you enjoy

Dean Steinman

well hello everybody out there on podcast land this is Dean styman from orthal marketing and guess what we are back with another podcast for you so welcome everybody welcome welcome welcome it is now January 2025 and hope everybody could say goodbye bye to 2024 and welcome 25 to a brand new year new Smiles New happiness new goals to reach and new ways to take your practice to the next level.

so in 2025 there's been a in the last year or so there's been two letters that have kind of been a buzz out there that's really changing the way people businesses do business and that's VA okay so I have with me today the queen of the VA world in the dent in the dental industry um I have Casey bull with me and she's the chief operating officer at myov vaa and I want we're going to talk a little bit about the VA world and why you need to adapt so Casey welcome how are you today

Casey Bull

oh I'm great Dean thank you so much for having me

Dean Steinman

my pleasure so thanks so much for joining us we're g to jump right into it so tell me a little bit about Casey bull what do you do and tell us a little bit about myo VA

Casey Bull

yeah um I am based in Los Angeles um I've been in the orthodontic industry for a little over a decade now started off working in an orthodontic practice became a practice consultant um and in TW late 2023 um was approached to launch my orth VA I mean at the time we didn't really have a name um but it has been a whirlwind it's been fantastic to figure out how how you can take this concept of a virtual assistant you know which is someone who's from overseas uh who's incredibly qualified but potentially doesn't know the dental World um and how do you get them to be productive in a dental or orthodontic practice and um that was the challenge that we had to figure out how to make you know that Peg fit in this hole um really seamlessly uh so it's it's been a fun year and a half or so

Dean Steinman

awesome so let's do a little bit of ABCs, ABC VA tell us what actually is a VA yeah and how do VA support Dental orthodontic practices

Casey Bull

yes great question so a VA uh virtual assistant oftentimes I get the question of like they're assistant like a dental assistant how they can do how can they do that virtually you know U but a virtual assistant is just a remote staff member um a remote staff member that is coming um from overseas so they work um from that particular country we predominantly um recruit from the Philippines as well as Latin America and and they become an a true extension of the practice they have access to your practice management software they have access to your Void they can schedule patience they can do anything that can be done with a phone and a computer can be done by a virtual assistant

Dean Steinman

so why does somebody need a VA why don't they just hire somebody in in the office

Casey Bull

yeah that that's a great question for a lot of people depending on your ZIP code actually finding someone to come into the office is a challenge in and of itself um the the other reason is you know cost the cost of running a practice is just going up I mean I love like we love this technology Revolution that we're in uh incredible you know ways and tools that we can treat patients and give them a better experience but that does come with increasing overhead um and at the same time we're in this environment where patient expectations are also increasing meaning if you offer texting they're expecting a text back quickly they if they're calling your office they're expecting you're going to answer the phone that they don't have to leave a voicemail and so you have overhead coming up going up and you have this increased need in patients and Staffing isn't always scalable or affordable locally and that is what a VA can provide a really scalable and affordable really affordable solution

Dean Steinman

you know a lot of people when they think overseas or think you know Philippines or Latin America they have a misconception about the education and communication levels of a VA they're like oh I'm not going to hire somebody they don't speak English or they don't how to do what we do so you know how do you you know debunk that myth there

Casey Bull

yes well what we say is you know why don't you interview some of our some of our talent to be honest because as soon as you hear them soon as you talk to them you see their resume this is not you're not trading you know a entry level local talent for entrylevel overseas talent that is not it we're not comparing Apples to Apples here right the the talent that we're recruiting are RNs they're they're Physicians they're dentists they're you know customer service like experts these are really extremely talented people and especially in the Philippines you know they they're growing up speaking English so this is not like they just learned English very recently and to get specifically an our talent pool which um you know we're part of a a larger company called medva so we specialize in all of Health Care virtual Staffing but we have over 2,000 applicants a month and so we have a lot of applicants and they have to go through communication screening by the time they get to our talent pool we have everything from a slide accent to what we consider accent neutral where you their patient can't even tell that they're coming in from overseas

Dean Steinman

H so how does somebody even from let's talk about your your assistants your people that work with you there how are they trained how do they even know this is the world that they were brought up in very different than it is here in the states a dental practice very different in the Philippines than it is here so how do they how are they trained and then how do they adapt or are they trained the American way

Casey Bull

yeah that's a great question so it depends on the the experience that that person is coming in with so let's say like one of our top positions that we placed last year was an insurance kind of coordinator Insurance coordinator um there are a lot of people who worked at United healthc Care at MetLife at at these major insurance companies based in the Philippines you know when you call them to verify insurance benefits likely they're coming from India or the Philippines those are the people that are answering the call so they know this world probably better than your in Office Team and um you know one one doctor put it really uh really succinctly like it United Healthcare is winning out the door as soon as you have someone from the US calling their Filipino you know like they're winning from the moment you you pick up the phone so um these people are experts at it um but even if you have someone we have a lot of success training somebody who came from the medical insurance field Which is far more complicated than Dental um and then we have a lot of people who come from like a clinical background whether it be that there's a dentist that in covid they had to shut down their practice and now they're looking for remote work and a lot of people immediately think oh this would be a downgrade from that but in reality their salary increases um the cost or the the wages particularly in that area are less attractive than what we can offer them here at my VA so this is a step up for them and even amongst the the culture having what's called an international designation it provides a sense of Pride that they are working for a us a Canadian based company

Dean Steinman

you know personally I hire and have about a dozen um vas that work with me at at at atho marketing and and more than three quarters of them a full-time um there it's incredible you know the misconception as I mentioned before is that educate or communicate the way that you expect but that's completely wrong guys you know they um I'd be dead without without my my main VA and mem you know when you listen to this you know my hats off to you my dear because you make my life as as you know as easy as it can because of the work that you do and I've got across the board people that work with me and a lot of our clients are now at the marketing are now bringing in VA to work there because as you said they're educated they know it they and you can get them you get three people for the price of one you know almost there you know um

Casey Bull

absolutely absolutely and and so they have this incredible like loyalty hard work ethic I mean all the the the kind of more like soft characteristics that would that make up your dream team member and then my the vaa we layer in the dental and the orthodontic training right because I was subject to that you know Dr Alex Waldman love you but my first day working in the practice was here's your desk here's your computer and figure it out you know what I mean so that might work okay in an office because you can have people walk around and ask questions but now how do you work with somebody who's fully remote and from another country at that so we train them in those things that potentially a practice would skip over like what is Orthodontics who are the patient groups that we treat how might we treat them so by the time they're done training they know how to read a treatment card they know the importance of sales and marketing specifically in dental and orthodontic practices because you don't always have that recurring um kind of patient experience like you do in in medical side um they they know how to take a fantastic new patient call they know how to verify insurance benefits like they're coming and knowing this so we it's like the 8020 rule we're getting them 80% of the way there and then the practice just has to get them the last 20% Which is what are your practice processes what are the things that they the VA needs to follow to really fit into the practice

Dean Steinman

you mentioned before the round peg in the square hole so as you know and anybody that's a you know dentist listen listens you guys you got your blinders on you stay in your in your lane and change is hard so how does a practice or a doctor Embrace change Embrace bringing somebody else in from outside and how do they learn how train that person and get them on their follow their system and process because it's they don't like to change so now all of a sudden they just start training somebody else and I don't have the I don't have the bandwidth to train somebody I can't even do that so how do how how do you work with with that with that issue there

Casey Bull

well you know it's funny there's like the saying goes is if you're too busy to meditate then you need to meditate twice as often um it's like a sign of yeah your brain needs that you know if you're too busy to train someone then you need a VA right like you need it now what's fantastic is we've seen now consistently over the last 13 months we know that when you find the right VA which we help you with that we help you craft you know the delegation list like what are the roles because sometimes we also if you get the delegation wrong and there's too much on your plate or you don't get specific enough then it it's a challenge for that VA to be effective really early so we really help the team figure out the Sweet Spot there and they're going to be effective by like if they start Monday they're going to be effective on Friday so you know we're talking about having the the discipline and constraint of you need to give this person a solid four days you got to give them four days and what that typically looks like whether you get a VA with us or VA somewhere else what I would recommend is you start off with the software training and the reason for that is this way that they get re reexposed to the software over and over versus just like conceptual I'm going to talk to you about how we do things so give them the tangible this is how you schedule an appointment in my practice management software this is how you're going to check voicemails on this vo you know do that that'll be done in a day right and the beautiful thing about training in um a virtual setting is you can record it you cannot record it when you train in person so now your VA has this Library if have a question they don't need to ask you they can just go back to the recording it's beautiful um but then the second day they are going to do 100% shadowing just like you would in the office right I want you to sit next to Jenny and watch Jenny do her thing take notes it's going to be the same thing but again we get to record it and they're going to be sharing their screen I'm going to be watching how they're navigating the the software in action and then the second or the next two days so the third and fourth day you have Jenny shadowing me you have Jenny shadowing the VA and giving them tweets oh instead of that why don't you do it this way this is going to be a faster way to get to that same end point or what have you after those two days of shadowing man we're we're ready to rock and roll day five it's it's golden

Dean Steinman

awesome all right so now I'm going to put my you know my skeptic hat on here because I'm there are a lot of Skeptics out there so how do we handle Hippa how do we handle privacy how do we handle compliance what you know concerns um what if my computers are hacked you know going blah blah blah so how do you how do how do you answer that

Casey Bull

yes yeah great question so in us especially the Philippines they have like zero tolerance for um any kind of violation of security as a country because so much of the infrastructure of the the economy comes from International placements International um you know jobs so they are really strict locally but we do everything from running an what's equivalent to FBI clearance obviously they don't have FBI there but it's NBI clearance we do all the background checks um and then we have software to assist so we install an encrypted environment inside the device um similar to you know when you go to university or Library where you don't have access to like the device you have certain tools you can use when you log in it's a restricted device um and then for some offices that need even extra layers of security um there are two things that we can do one we actually have a secured facility outside of Milla in Kon city so we can have your VA go into the office and work from an office with a supervisor watching and not a problem we can have that um or we can have them continue to work from home and then there's actually amazing AI tools where you can monitor the webcam and this webcam it's not like there's someone on on the myv team watching them all day it's not like that big brother but it uses AI based off of how we've programed it to look for violations and what would be a violation of HIPPA is if I was having this conversation with you at a coffee shop with people walking behind so as soon as there's a second face it takes a picture turns off the screen and sends that photo to their manager who's on our team so we can coach them through that violation and remind them they need to get to a hippoc compliant environment before they can continue working there's also things about cell phone no cell phone picture of that send it to the manager they're logged out um so yeah so whether you want to you're you're comfortable with the encrypted um digital environment or you need a physical space or you need webcam monitoring we got your back

Dean Steinman

awesome um so once upon a time tell me a story so tell me a story about a a practice that changed that you made a difference in their in the practice for being more efficient more effective you know bottom line or what have you I'm using a VA

Casey Bull

yeah you know it's so hard because there's been a few where it feels really really really good I can I I'm going to do two but I'll keep it short and sy so one of them um there's a practice in um you know in like a rural Texas and they were concerned with how their patients would handle talking to somebody from overseas and um how their patients would react where ultimately the the the staff just like L them and what was incredible that the the managers because it was a six location practice the managers were like every single person has elevated their game because our VA was outperforming the local staff that everybody started to perform better and that there was this one mom who was always kind of you know a Troublesome and uh she came in and was like Hey where's xan I need to thank him and they're like xan is in Manila and she was like no way but Zan could sense that she was a sensitive person and actually called her after the appointment did didn't realize that the mom that was looking for him and said hey I just want to make sure did they take care of you is everything okay so this is the type of like character and dedication that a lot of our vas have which is really remarkable now that was like more so from a a soft like really warm experience that I love to hear um another one was just from Pure practice growth it's one office it's a smaller office love their TC their TC has been there forever they don't have an office manager but she's basically an office manager um fantastic at getting same day starts but if they don't same day start they're never going to get called it's just it is what it is and so they they wanted to find a VA to help so what we've done is we've we've empowered the TC with a TC assistant and now that TC among other tasks but helps with the followup and keeps a relationship with those new patients and has helped actually start patients so the TC does all the same day starts the VA does all the starts that require followup including all the specialist patients that need the coordination of the specialty appointments

Dean Steinman

that's awesome so guys if you have a Batman in your team now you've got a robin to work with it

Casey Bull

there you go

Dean Steinman

so you got you've got the sidekick so that's great um so now I'm gonna ask you to put on your super special glasses that looks into the future all right tell me what you see in the next 12 18 months as far as the future of viral assistance and how is that gonna and how does AI affect that a lot of things you know a lot of things every time I'm reading everybody's gonna be out of business in 10 years from now because AI is gonna take over the world you know so how do you see you know the next year and change and how is V you know VA is going to affect the dental world

Casey Bull

yeah it's a great question because it's something that from the onset you know when when starting my Arthur VA well what about AI you know if you don't need someone locally do you need someone virtually or do you just need an AI tool and so all those questions come up so I'm I'm on demos with all the latest and greatest AI companies in healthcare that you can imagine and there's some really cool ones but they all fall slightly short so what I guess to succinctly say is I think that in 12 to 18 months you still need people right so but I think what and what we're looking to do is to have a VA supercharged with AI tools and so you need a person and you need you know maybe instead of having a team of you know 12 vas you maybe only need a team of six vas because they're working smart they're scaled with AI right right I don't think that the need for the the the Personal Touch especially in in the dental space where it could very easily go commoditized we need that experience that Personal Touch that connection and people are what give you that connection

Dean Steinman

I, I agree you know um listen I have to adapt in the marketing World we're using a lot of AI you know and first obviously everybody is reluctant to do it but you have no choice guys again you have to adapt or die and now adapt you know adapt to change adapt to Technologies Embrace change you have to you have so you know this has been so enlightening casy thanks so much I appreciate it so in closing if somebody wants to learn more yeah you know talk to you about bringing a VA into their office to find out how you could help them what's the best way somebody to reach you

Casey Bull

yeah so myor va.com actually I think if you scroll all the way to the bottom that meeting link is my personal meeting link so book a meeting there uh but you can also reach me at CB my ora.com

Dean Steinman

okay let's see that's b l okay yes all right great great there you go cool all right so now I've got two more questions for you all right these are the most important ones so I don't know if you just if while we're talking here that you just saw I just saw a text that an asteroid's about to hit Earth tonight so you have to basically run after this to the market to get to make your last meal what are you making

Casey Bull

well it's so funny because of course immediately I'm like what will the kids eat and not complain about complain or not they asteroids hitting them yeah exactly probably um salmon with pesto pasta

Dean Steinman

o okay nice okay

Casey Bull

the whole family will eat it

Dean Steinman

all right um so now I'm going to give you a great gift you're going to be able to um have dinner with anybody in history anybody

Casey Bull

oh yeah

Dean Steinman

who you picking

Casey Bull

yeah that is so hard um on anybody in history that is really hard probably which she's still here you know yeah um shell arshambo she's the author of uh unapologetically ambitious and she has just so much determination and grit and foresight and smarts I mean I would just love to pick her brain as a you know uh a young businesswoman myself uh yeah I think Shel arim both

Dean Steinman

excellent good and um one last thing if you have to suggest one show to binge watch for everybody just listen him what are you gonna tell him to watch

Casey Bull

Shogun Shogun is such a good show I think you can stream it on Hulu

Dean Steinman

that's my next onebody to say that that's this weekend I'm gonna hit that one up

Casey Bull

yeah it's the best

Dean Steinman

all right great excellent well Casey thanks so much appreciate it guys out there it's really smart to to listen to it just even just to find more information out it's something you should do um it's it's so expensive to run a practice in a business now and if you can find really good opportunities that could save your money make you more efficient effective why not so um give Casey Buzz she it's definitely worth it and um she work with a lot of our clients we're working on stuff together um highly recommend so thanks so much appreciate it everybody in podcast land thank you so much for listening to watching our podcast um thanks so much for all of the feedback that we get from you guys and um insight and um just keep on smiling everybody enjoy your your year this year and uh keep on following on all our social media thanks everybody byebye

Casey Bull

thank you

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