Episode #374: Setting Your Team Up for Success When Reducing Insurance Dependence with Callie Ward

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 are diving into one of the most important elements of reducing insurance dependence, and that is preparing your team for success.

Joining me is Callie Ward, a respected dental practice operations leader known for helping teams navigate big changes, build confidence, and stay aligned during transitions. Callie has extensive experience helping practices reduce their reliance on insurance and create patient-centered systems that support sustainable and independent growth.

So in today’s episode, the topic is Setting Your Team Up for Success When Reducing Insurance Dependence. Callie will share how practices can communicate change effectively, empower team members, and strengthen trust with patients throughout the process.

But before we begin, a quick message from our sponsor: Ekwa Marketing is offering a complimentary marketing strategy meeting where their experts will show you how to attract high-quality new patients, rank one on Google locally, and grow your practice organically. So if you ever wondered about your online visibility or you want to do a health checkup, you can go visit lessinsurancedependence.com/marketing-strategy-meeting to book your meeting.

And if you’re looking for coaching or mentorship and you’re ready to build a thriving fee-for-service practice, you can schedule a complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary Takacs at thrivingdentist.com/csm.

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

Kelly Ward: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.

Lester De Alwis: So, to begin, what inspired your focus on supporting dental teams during the transition away from insurance dependence?

Callie Ward: You know, it was practical experience. So, having worked in a dental practice for years and watching the amount of money that we wrote off or lost, essentially— I mean, what other business is there that you write up to 25% of what you’re producing off due to a relationship? And it’s a relationship that I think a lot of doctors think is going to equate to patients in their practice. And there are some situations where that is the case, but it’s mind-blowing to me that a dentist comes out of dental school and thinks that they have to sign up for every single solitary plan out there.

I think there are strategic moves where you need to have some of that, but watching our practice write off so much of the value that we presented— I believe that it impacted our patient care in a negative way.

I felt like we had to see so many more patients to hit the profitability point, and that didn’t lend to the best patient care when you’re cramming patients in there. So, it really was a necessity. I mean, dentistry is healthcare. That’s our number one— that’s why we’re helpers. We want to help people. But it is also a business. And when you look at the business and you work on the business, you realize that we need to tighten that up.

It doesn’t mean that we can’t participate with some plans as a public service to our community. Maybe it’s a big employer in our area, but I think you’ve got to be very strategic and you’ve got to be very thoughtful about those relationships that you sign up for.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. And speaking about relationships— like a relationship, a healthy relationship is something you give and you get. But this is where you keep giving, you keep giving, and you don’t get. So that is something— that’s why many, many dentists feel so overwhelmed when staying up in insurance.

Callie Ward: So, it’s really a game, right? I mean, I think back to 2008 when we had the crash, and that is when Delta came in and reduced the agreed-upon fees by like 25%, and they’ve never increased them.

The ability of a dentist to go in and negotiate their fees is so limited, and it’s not realistic. Each dental practice is not apples to apples. We may have a dental practice where a general dentist is providing specialty services, and yet they’re not getting any increased value, and yet the patient is being better served by having a dentist who’s able to do those procedures.

So there’s just— I don’t want to make it that insurance is the bad guy. As a consumer, when I look at what I pay for my dental insurance and the benefits that I get out of it, I would much rather pay a membership fee to a dentist because I know what I’m getting for my money. Like, there are some guarantees there.

And I think we as consumers have to be smart. We as dentists and dental offices need to be smart and really analyze the pros and cons of the relationship.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. I mean, a great way to start this conversation. And now let’s talk about the team’s perspective. What are the most common fears or misconceptions teams have when the doctor decides to reduce PPO participation?

Callie Ward: It really comes down to knowledge. There’s a lot of practices— and I’m not the dentist, I don’t own the practice, right? Everybody has that right to share what information they want to. But in my experience, the teams that have knowledge of how much are we writing off, what is the impact on the business, the financial stability of my employer— when I know the true facts of that, I’m more likely to get behind changing it. Because I’m not seeing it as just a money ploy for the dentist to make money. I’m seeing it as the impact on our patient value.

The impact that— if we’re a PPO provider with all these different insurances and we write off 25%, and that means that we have to produce an additional 25% to hit our numbers to collect— you start to understand the business side of it. It helps me get behind it.

But there’s also— we want to be able to support the team, and they know the why, that they understand we have a game plan and a strategy, how to do this in a kind way, to walk alongside our patients and help them through the transition so that I can feel good about my communication with my patients.

So it takes a lot of planning, it takes strategy, and it’s not something that you just do overnight. You don’t go in and say, "Okay, next week I’m dropping all my insurances." It doesn’t work that way, or at least it shouldn’t work that way, because that is not the best way to set your team up for success.

So I think we tend to hire people that we trust. We tend to hire people that we think know how to do their job, but this is a journey that we as a team have to craft. What are we gonna say? How are we gonna say it? Why are we gonna say it? What is the change that we’re looking for? So that we’re all feeling very safe and supported.

A lot of teams don’t enjoy role-playing, but this is one specifically that we should. Because I need to prep for what we think the top ten questions are gonna be that the patients are gonna ask us. I’ve got to be prepared to know the answer. And my answer might be different from Susie’s, which might be different than Dr. Johnson’s.

And so we have to start with what Dr. Johnson wants communicated, and then we find our spiel that fits that. And it has to be genuine. It has to be real. So scripts are great to kind of give me the foundation of what I want to make sure that I’m covering, but it has to be human. It has to become my spiel.

I can’t memorize what it is and spout it off. It’s like— you ever had a waiter or a waitress and they’ve got the daily specials and they just read them to you off their list? It’s nowhere near as genuine as, "Gosh, we’ve got this amazing special today. It’s so good. I love X, Y, and Z." Like, we have to have it— it has to be personalized.

So for your team to be able to do that successfully, you’ve got to have conversations. Which means you have to have regular team meetings. We have to share some of the data, some of the numbers to get behind it. We have to provide opportunities to practice and find what our spiel is. And then we have to support our team and celebrate the positive that we can.

So, as we’re starting to have these conversations— let’s say we’re prepping, in six months we’re going to drop the insurance— we should start having conversations with our hygiene patients if they are going to be affected. We need to have that in place six months in advance.

So, it’s a long game of getting prepared for this and setting your team up for success. But we have to— when you hear somebody on the team share a conversation, we have to celebrate that. Because we want it to be an environment where we’re finding our footing. And when we do something differently, it’s really uncomfortable. That is growth and that’s change.

So we have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable change, and we’ve got to celebrate the people who are willing to step out there first. And that builds the confidence of the rest of the team. It’s something we have to be very intentional with.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly, exactly. I mean, those concerns— and yeah, the concerns make a lot of sense. And it’s all about leadership as well.

Callie Ward: Absolutely.

Lester De Alwis: You have to take the leadership on this. So, and now you spoke about the why. So how can the practice owners communicate the why behind reducing insurance dependence so the entire team feels aligned and confident?

Callie Ward: Right? They have to know what their why is. They have to know their numbers. They have to know their overhead, they have to know their profitability. They have to know what the impact could be by dropping this insurance.

So there’s always that fear, and you have to— there’s numbers associated with, like, how much revenue did we get from this insurance plan last year? That’s what’s in jeopardy. And could those patients leave? So we need to have things in place prior to that.

I want to know that we’ve got an in-house savings plan that my team is educated on, that they’re able to speak to and offer to patients who may be out of network. They need to understand that even though they may be out of network, they can still be seen in our office. We have to get all those pieces into play.

And doctors need to just understand their data. They need to understand what their why is— why do they want to make the change? What is the impact going to be? How to strategize? How are we going to counter what could happen?

So we want to up our value. We want to up our customer service. We want to know that we are stellar in all of these areas. And that includes running on time. We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got these things in play.

But if the doctor is only working in their practice and not on their practice, they may not be as comfortable with knowing that. And so this isn’t a journey that I would recommend to do cold turkey. It’s not a journey that I would recommend doing alone.

You need to have an expert in the PPO negotiations. Because sometimes we can drop our direct participation but become in-network under an umbrella. Those are well done with people who offer the service of fee negotiations and getting your strategy in play for dropping which insurance plan when. And we do it in small increments.

I also recommend having a coach. There are doctors that can do it without a coach, but there’s a lot of doctors who need that little bit of help— with getting the team on board, with getting everybody to feel confident and supported.

And so it’s not a long-term thing. You look at: this is our strategy, this is our game plan. I look at— if I’m doing my coaching right, they don’t need me forever. Right? It’s like raising teenagers. I want to send you on your way. I’m honored to be a thought partner, but it isn’t— to me, I’m not doing my job right if you need me all the time.

My goal is to get that independence. So docs just really need to be strategic. They need to know their data. They need to have a game plan and admit— if that isn’t their specialty— to hire somebody that it is.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. Exactly. So knowing the why is important in order to take that decision if you can do this or not, right?

So now, let’s look at systems. What training or systems should be in place to help team members handle insurance conversations, financial discussions, and patient questions effectively?

Callie Ward: Well, I think these apply whether you’re dropping insurance or not, right? Do we have systems in place? Is our accounts receivable healthy? Are we collecting at the time of service? Are we estimating correctly so that the estimation— we need to know what the difference is going to be if we drop the PPO, right?

So our team up front has got to be very educated on that so that we’re correctly estimating, we’re updating our payment tables, we know we’re making correct estimates. We need to have a solid recare system in place, and that our hygienist is healthy. We need to know that we are working unscheduled treatment on a regular basis.

Yeah, phone calls to patients are different now than when I came into dentistry. In the 1990s it was all phone, we paper-booked— you know, like, times have changed. So making those patient calls are not nearly as dreadful as they used to be, but it still isn’t high on everybody’s list. But we have to ensure that we’re scheduling time proactively to fill our schedule and not just reactively.

So we need to have that. We’ve got to have the in-house savings plan set up, and everybody needs to understand that. I do recommend my clients have a financial options worksheet that shares what and how patients can pay.

So do they pay— you know, can they break it into three payments? What do we offer here? What outside lenders are we offering? And you need to do it legally. If you’re not offering every patient financing and you’re picking and choosing which financing, you are breaking the law. We just didn’t know what we didn’t know years ago, but we need to know that we’re offering every patient financial options.

So we need to be comfortable with those, and we need to monitor those and have those in play. And then— how are we following up with the patients who don’t get scheduled? Are we getting clarity with them in the chair? How do they want to move forward?

So when we have systems in place for this, when we have scheduling to goal in place, we tend to have fewer openings in our schedule. We have more of a prioritized schedule, and we’re able to fill the schedule more often because we’re working on it all the time.

These are all systems that every dental practice should have in play, whether we’re dropping insurance or not. The other thing that we want to know before we drop insurance is that we have these all geared up and ready to go— on top of marketing.

So, the potential is we could lose those patients whose insurance we’re dropping. My experience— what I’ve seen happen is we lose some of them, they disappear for one to two recare cycles, and then they start coming back to our practice because we do have value, we do take great care of them, and they see that customer service now because they’ve gone to a provider that is just a PPO provider.

So we want to know that we’ve increased the value, that we’re having a really strong patient experience, and that we do provide exemplary customer service. Those are all things that a healthy practice should be working on.

And to work on those things, we have to commit to having time set aside on a regular basis for team training— that helps our culture, that helps conflict, that helps us implement new strategies, it helps us implement new gadgets and things that we’re offering. Because we’re working on the practice, not just in it.

Lester De Alwis: Yeah, yeah. Great insights. And now, another big part of the shift is, like you mentioned, the patient experience or the patient trust. How can the team improve case acceptance and patient trust during this transition— especially when presenting fee-for-service options?

Callie Ward: Right. I think it’s communication— absolutely. In dentistry, we’re usually really, really good at asking questions to the patient. “How was your day?” “What do you like to do?” “Did you go on vacation?” And we keep notes so that we know they went on a cruise last year. Like, we know all these things about the patient. But what we don’t do is let the patient know about us.

And so when you think of that, we have to be very intentional with making connections. So as I’m talking to patients, I’m wanting to know— are they from the area? Are they from somewhere else? Did they go to school here? Where can I find a connection, a link, right? And then I’m gonna go to their interests. What do they like to do? “Oh, they love to boat. I love to boat.”

You know, you get those connections, and now we’re genuinely connected as human beings. It’s not just me knowing about the patient. There’s a difference when it’s a shared value.

What that also does is— most patients are nervous to come into the dental practice. That means they’ve got cortisol oozing out of their body. When we connect as a human being, we lower that cortisol. That shuts down their fight-or-flight. That opens the opportunity for their frontal brain to listen to reason, to process. And they’re more likely to build trust because we’re connected.

And when we are connected with our patients, they show up on time, they do us favors by paying their bills— like, they are our friends. And that’s where we have to make that connection. And if doctors aren’t doing that with their team as human beings, they’re missing the link.

Because when I’m connected, I’m more loyal. I’m gonna show up. I’m gonna take care of you knowing that you are going to take care of me. And it’s a symbolic relationship. So communication is huge. Intentional communication.

We also need to work on handoffs so that the patient hears what their need is, what’s most urgent, what’s next. It’s not always education— it’s helping them solve that problem.

Most patients don’t move forward because of time, they’re afraid, they don’t have the money, or we’ve confused them. So if a patient comes in with existing treatment, we need to be comfortable asking them, “Gosh, can you help me understand what’s kept you from moving forward?” Now I can help them solve that problem. Now I’m their friend.

Just like it would be if it were my family member or my next-door neighbor— I would dig down a little bit deeper to help them say yes, to help them move forward.

And I don’t do that if I’m just very professional and very, you know, check-in, check-out. Like, that’s great. We need to be professional. But we need to dive another layer. Because it’s a really intimate setting when you’re working in somebody’s mouth, and we have to earn their trust to move forward.

And that takes a little bit of one-on-one communication. That means that dental exams are done, and then the dentist is face-to-face with the patient. Or we’re communicating. I don’t know how many times I’ve gone in and watched exams where the doctor is behind the patient, and there’s no one— like, they don’t feel seen. They don’t feel heard. And yet, we do it time and time again because that’s just what we do.

So think about that from the patient perspective— through the whole process. The patient perspective: from the phone call, to the parking lot, to the waiting area, to the room. Where can we enhance that comfort?

And it’s by connecting as humans. It’s by perceiving what their need is gonna be before they need it, and being prepared as a team to do that.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. No, the psychology of understanding your patients is basically the key here.

And for a practice preparing to drop or reduce insurance plans, what are the top three steps the team should take right now to ensure a smooth transition?

Callie Ward: One, get team meetings scheduled for the next year.
Two, pull your data—know exactly what the facts are. Communicate that with your team, role-play, plan, and get the whole “what if” prepared.

What if a patient asks this question? What if— you know— how are we gonna estimate the insurance? Plan it out strategically. Ask for help from the experts.

And then communicate through the process with your team: what’s working? Where can we improve? What can we celebrate? That’s how we grow. Then challenges become opportunities.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly.

Callie Ward: They’re not a failure.

Lester De Alwis: Mm-hmm. Exactly. So to anyone listening in— of course, we want our listeners to take action and take their next step in order to, you know, get things moving forward. So if they want to get in touch with you, where can they reach out to you, Kelly?

Callie Ward: Absolutely. So, my email is dashdentalconsulting@gmail.com. I have a website, I’m on social media. They can reach out to me via text message at 303-720-5016. I would love to help. I’m happy to have a conversation with no ties— help them kind of see, is this a reality for them? And then help them plot out how do they make it happen?

It’s scary. It’s a very big step. But I have successfully helped practices transition. One of them was right during COVID, and they dropped Delta, and their profitability in 2020 was through the roof because they took the leap. They were very methodical about it, and they have reaped the rewards ever since.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly. So, Kelly, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your expertise in preparing teams for success during this shift away from insurance dependence.

Callie Ward: Thank you. I appreciate it. And I absolutely love helping people feel great. At the end of the day, that means that we’re profitable, our team is happy, we’re excited to go to work the next day. That is the dash. Like— we are born, and we die. What are we doing with our dash in the middle? Every day counts. And I want to help you make your day count.

Lester De Alwis: Exactly, exactly. Great episode. So, key takeaway—reducing insurance dependence isn’t just a business decision, it’s a team journey. When communication is clear, training is strong, and the team feels supported, then the transition becomes smoother, and the practice becomes stronger.

So, as always, this podcast is about taking action. If you are looking to understand your online visibility, schedule a complimentary marketing strategy meeting with Ekwa Marketing at lessinsurancedependence.com/marketing-strategy-meeting.

And if you’re looking for mentorship, book a complimentary coaching strategy meeting with Gary Takacs at thrivingdentist.com/csm.

Now, all these sessions mentioned in this episode— they’re all designed to help you build a thriving independent practice. More importantly, they’re all complimentary. So take your chance now.

And again, Callie, thank you again for being part of today’s conversation, and thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Until next time, keep moving towards a thriving independent practice.