Episode #376: How virtual assistants help dentists reduce insurance dependence with Timothy Boyle of Reva Global

Naren Arulrajah: This is the Less Insurance Dependence podcast show with my good friend Gary Takacs and myself, Naren Arulrajah.

Gary Takacs: We appreciate your listenership, your time, and most of all, we appreciate your intention to reduce insurance dependence in your practice. Our goal is to provide information that will help you successfully reduce insurance dependence and convert your practice into a thriving and profitable dental practice that provides you with personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Lester De Alwis: Welcome to another episode of the Less Insurance Dependence podcast, your trusted source for strategies and insights that help dental professionals take control of their practices and careers. I’m your co-host, Lester De Alwis, and today we’re talking about one of the fastest growing solutions in dentistry, and that is medical virtual assistance. Joining me is Timothy Boyle from REVA Global, a company that has become a leader in providing trained medical virtual assistants who help practices streamline operations, reduce administrative workload, and strengthen their path towards insurance dependence independence.

So, Timothy is the Director of Sales and Business Development at REVA Global Medical, where he leverages nearly a decade of healthcare experience to help hospitals, laboratories, and private practices enhance patient experience while optimizing revenue performance. So in today’s episode, how virtual assistants help dentists reduce insurance dependence will be the topic. And we’ll explore how virtual assistants can support everything from insurance verifications and follow-ups to patient communication, scheduling, case acceptance, and more.

Lester De Alwis: But before we get started, a quick message from our sponsor. Who is sponsoring this episode today is Ekwa Marketing. They are offering a complimentary marketing strategy meeting for all of you listening in. Their experts will help you attract high-quality new patients, rank number one on Google locally, and grow your practice organically.

So, if you ever want to have a health checkup for your online visibility or for your website, you can visit lessinsurancedependence.com/marketing-strategy-meeting to schedule your session. If you’re looking for mentorship and you’re ready to build a thriving fee-for-service practice, schedule a complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary Takacs at thrivingdentist.com/csm.

Now, let’s dive in. Timothy, we’re excited to have you here. Thank you for joining us.

Timothy Boyle: Thank you, Lester. I appreciate you having me on. I appreciate the kind words. I’m excited to be here.

Lester De Alwis: All right. All right. So to begin, what inspired REVA Global to bring medical virtual assistants into the dental space, and how are they helping practices operate more efficiently?

Timothy Boyle: Absolutely. So we are involved in actually the whole healthcare space, but obviously for this podcast, let’s stick to dental. So when we—when we go to school as a dentist, right, we’re gonna be spending a lot of time, a lot of hours trying to do everything we can to learn everything we know for that patient so we can give the patient the best patient care possible.

But in a dentist office, you look at two different things that the dentist has to deal with. They have to deal with the clinical side, which is taking care of patients, but they also have to deal with the clerical side, which is all that admin work, chasing down insurance and all that stuff that—yeah, you don’t have to go to hours and hours of school to have to do that. You can kind of hire an office admin to have to do that.

Timothy Boyle: So, what really inspired us to get into the dentist world especially was just finding those bottlenecks from those dentists—especially the head dentists at the practice—that are just running out of time. They don’t have any time to do anything. They’re chasing down insurance, they’re trying to register patients, they’re scheduling everybody. At the end of the day, there’s not enough time in the day to do all the tasks that they have to do.

So what we do here at REVA Global is we provide a virtual assistant, which is—we call it MVPA, Medical Virtual Professional—who will be able to handle all of that admin work: chasing down insurance, patient scheduling, communicating back with the patient, all that stuff, just to make that dentist’s job so much easier.

And like I said at the beginning of the podcast, we stream across the whole healthcare industry, but especially in these dental practices—you know how much those crowns cost, man. It’s expensive. So you want to be paid out for all services that you do render. So it’s important that you’re on top of everything, especially communication and trying to chase down insurance information at the time of the patient being there. So that’s where we kind of came in, and that’s what inspired us to get into the dentist world.

Lester De Alwis: Wow. That’s a great foundation. Now, one of the biggest pain points in dentistry is insurance-related administration. So many dentists feel overwhelmed by administrative tasks tied to insurance. How can virtual assistants help reduce that burden and free the team to focus on patient care?

Timothy Boyle: I feel like that’s a pretty good segue from our last question there, right? So that admin overload is because admin tasks are tough, and you want to deal with that patient care, and you want to make sure that your patient care is top of the line, right? So you want to be spending as little time on that clerical work.

Chasing down insurance information is tough. And if I can just bring you through a story, or if we can walk through a situation of someone going into a dental practice where they have to go into that dental practice—and if you don’t have a virtual assistant or a couple different office admins working that dental practice—it’s gonna be tough to be able to schedule everybody, be able to handle all the communication they have to go back and forth with previous or upcoming patients, as well as chase down insurance information while they’re kind of with you.

Timothy Boyle: So what we do is we provide a virtual assistant that is able to handle that work of an office admin for a fraction of the price. So the office admin right now, and especially in dental and healthcare, costs are skyrocketing. So we’re doing whatever we can to cut costs and increase revenue.

So, by adding a virtual assistant, you’re able to add somebody at $12 an hour to handle all the admin tasks: chasing down that insurance information, handling the scheduling of appointments, patient communication—all across the workflow—for just a fraction of the price that you’d usually have to handle those office admins.

So that’s kind of where we come in at REVA Global Medical. We’re able to add that virtual assistant, that MVP, to put on your workflow. Obviously, they’re not going to be onsite with you, but they’re going to be answering the phone, they’re going to be making those dials, they’re going to be reaching out to patients just to make sure that your communication is great, so that patient experience is also great.

Lester De Alwis: Alright. Okay. In terms of following up on that same point—in terms of the admin work—what percentage of admin work can the virtual assistant actually cover?

Timothy Boyle: We can sit—we can sit anywhere along the workflow. Yeah. So we’re able to—if we look at a workflow, whether it be at the very beginning, there are four phases when you look at a hospital, dentist, any kind of healthcare workflow. It’s before the patient is even seen—so that patient communication, the calls back and forth, right? Then when the patient gets there—when we’re registering that patient. Then when the patient is currently being seen by the dentist or the doctor. And then at the end—when the patient leaves—how are we communicating back?

So those are the four phases of the workflow that we can kind of sit in, and we sit anywhere in that. And what we do is we ask the dental practice, what are the biggest bottlenecks? Is it the back-end billing? Is it chasing down the insurance information that you’re struggling with?

Timothy Boyle: Or is it that front-end appointment scheduling, where you’re not able to find out if someone’s going to be a next-day no-show because you don’t have someone following up to make sure with that patient if they’re able to make their appointment? So we’re able—that’s the very front end. And then obviously that billing is at the back end.

And on top of the chasing down insurance on the back-end billing, we’re able to clear out any AR backlog that you might have. So if a dental practice has a bunch of claims that they haven’t been able to get to, that’s where our VA can kind of go down a list—especially if it’s a batch file—they can go down that list, they can just start making calls and get you paid out for all services rendered there.

So we’re really—it’s not really a niche for us. We can kind of sit anywhere. We’re flexible. It all depends on what the bottlenecks of the practices are.

Lester De Alwis: Amazing. Amazing. I think this is a big help for the front office, and great examples as well. And how do virtual assistants help improve patient communication and case acceptance, especially when presenting high-value treatment options?

Timothy Boyle: Well, so the patient communication and case acceptance—this is funny because it’s kind of all segueing into the same thing, right? It’s just—basically communication is everything, and you want to be on top of it from the very beginning, right?

So if you’re not able to do the admin work at the time of point of contact—pretty much when they get to the office—yeah, that’s important that you have someone else do it. So how we’re able to improve all this communication, improve basically just the patient experience entirely, is just by adding someone there to take care of those tasks that aren’t being taken care of or are having to wait in line to be taken care of.

Because if you’re dealing with a patient experience, right, and you’re asking questions about a crown that you have to get, or about medication that you need to get after a surgery or anything like that—that’s very important that you communicate with them right away, but also often, just to make sure everything’s going well and to add that human care touch to it a little bit more.

So just to add—I guess it’s just elaborating a little bit more about that patient communication—we’re able to sit wherever you need, and we’re there for you, and we’re able to make that patient communication, patient experience great just by having that virtual assistant.

Lester De Alwis: Alright. Okay. Now, following up on that—in terms of success stories—do you have any case studies that you could share about how REVA has, you know, changed the way things, uh, a practice has taken?

Timothy Boyle: Yes, absolutely. So we deal with a bunch of different practices. We are a land-and-expand type of business, I guess you could say. And that’s not even from us, ourselves. We’ll get in with a dental practice and we’ll see that they’re having trouble with patient communication or scheduling, where they’re having no-shows that I was talking about earlier, right?

So we’ll add a VA at that front end, and then by the time we work with them for maybe six months, they’ll have two or three. So we actually have—that’s kind of how our business model works here at REVA Global. We’ll add one VA, and then by showing the work that that VA can do and how much time they can free up for the practice, you start to see adding one for insurance verification, adding one to chase down the back-end billing.

So what starts with one usually ends up with three or four down the line. So, right. Okay. It’s pretty cool stuff there. Yeah, absolutely.

Lester De Alwis: Amazing. Amazing. Now, for practices concerned about quality control or security, what safeguards and training systems does REVA Global have in place?

Timothy Boyle: Oh, absolutely. And we are obviously HIPAA compliant, HIPAA certified. So security is everything to us. We spend a lot of time vetting out our VAs first. For every hundred VAs that we interview to be a VA for a dental office, we only hire five of them.

Because we want our MVPs—we call them—to be medically trained and to be top-of-the-line proprietary, right? So we want to have the best of the best. And in order to do that, it takes kind of a long vetting-out process, usually three to four weeks.

So in that three to four weeks, we’re also able to make sure that we are able to train them, we’re able to get them caught up in HIPAA, and really make sure—before we are able to give them out to our practices that need a VA—that they’re ready to rock and hit the ground running with all certifications.

Lester De Alwis: Alright. Yeah, I think that clears out the worry about quality and security. Yes. Now, for dentists considering virtual assistants, what are the first steps to getting started and seeing a return on investment quickly?

Timothy Boyle: Yeah, so I can give you a personal story for this one. I guess to answer your question at a very high level, it would be—let’s look at our practice and ask a couple discovery questions. Like, what are the biggest problems that we’re dealing with? Where is it? What part of the workflow are we dealing with? And then let’s attack it from there, right?

Are we dealing with that patient communication or the scheduling? Is that the really tough part that we’re dealing with in our practice? Are we having a tough time getting paid out for services rendered because the insurance is coming back denied? Do we need somebody to go chase down that insurance? Is our back-end billing—does our rev cycle management in our company—need work?

Timothy Boyle: There’s a lot of different questions that I like to ask the practice, because at the end of the day, it’s what’s going to save you the most money, and how’s it going to save you the most money quickly? So what we’ll do is we’ll just have a conversation.

And personally—so I’ve been in the medical industry for ten years now. I started in a reimbursement software, which was a SaaS platform, then went over to PerkinElmer, which was lab equipment, and now over here to REVA Global. Little backstory—Bob was a hockey player, I was a professional hockey player—so he brought me over here, and we kind of—the reason why he brought me over, he was telling me about the bottlenecks that he was hearing in these medical spaces.

And I had a conversation with my sister Jennifer, who’s a primary care physician.

Timothy Boyle: And I know this is a dental podcast, but this will definitely resonate, I promise. My sister is a primary care physician, and her husband is a primary care physician. They own their own practice, right? And they were dealing with a lot of patient frustration because of communication errors. They weren’t able to register as many patients as they wanted. They weren’t able to track down billing insurance, so they weren’t able to get paid out, which made them not able to see as many patients because they couldn’t afford it.

So what we do is we just have conversations with people to see—where is the biggest bottleneck? What are you dealing with that is hurting or hindering your business the most? And how can we fix that? What do you want to do to try to get in front of that?

Timothy Boyle: How do we not let this happen in the future? And most of the time, it’s just plugging in one of those VAs, and it kind of just takes it from there. Because like I told you, we have that month-long vetting out process. We train them, and we also train them on your EHR and EMR as well, so they know exactly what they’re doing from the moment they get in there. So once we get that VA over to your practice, those bottlenecks are going to start to be cleaned up from day one.

Lester De Alwis: Alright. Okay. So of course this podcast is about taking action, and if anyone listening in wants to get in touch with you, what is the best way that they can reach you?

Timothy Boyle: Absolutely. So we are online at revaglobalmedical.com.  We are also on LinkedIn, we’re on Instagram, we’re on TikTok as well if you’re into that. So if you want to see a couple of short reels—we bring the hockey into it—we try to be different, we try to be fun, but we also know what we’re doing. We really, really need the medical industry to—to be like, as everybody does—it needs to be fixed, man. And there needs to be change, and we’re trying to be the front runners on it.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. Amazing. Amazing. Timothy, thank you for joining us today and sharing how REVA Global’s virtual assistants are transforming the way dental practices operate.

Timothy Boyle: Alright. Thank you so much, Les. I really appreciate it.

Lester De Alwis: So the key takeaway is—virtual assistants are not just about reducing workload. They help practices run more efficiently, reduce their reliance on insurance-driven processes, and create space for stronger patient relationships and higher-value care.

So, as always, this podcast is about taking action. Just like I mentioned earlier, if you’re looking to do a health checkup on your website, schedule a complimentary marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa Marketing at lessinsurancedependence.com/marketing-strategy-meeting.

And secondly, if you are looking for mentorship or coaching, book your complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary Takacs at thrivingdentist.com/csm.

Now, all these sessions—both these sessions—are designed to help you create a stronger, more independent practice. And more importantly, this is complimentary.

So thank you again, Timothy, for an insightful conversation, and thank you to all our listeners for tuning in. Until next time, keep moving towards a thriving and independent practice.