Dentists and insurance payers have the challenge of interacting with each other frequently despite their very different styles of doing business. Insurance companies are typically large, well-oiled machines with antiquated processes and lagging technology while dentists are often small organizations with less than 10 staff members, many of whom did not attend a business school. In modern America, however, the two cannot exist without one another, as over 80% of Americans use dental insurance to cover the costs of their visits.
The Situation
Upon joining DentalXChange, I was charged with improving the efficiency of our Credentialing product. The platform is similar to TurboTax in a way in that dentists have to complete an application to an insurance payer before they can accept that insurance companies patients. Those applications can range from 20-80 pages long and because of this, there is often friction in the credentialing process. The result is long turnaround times due to the slow back-and-forth on applications which can become a real challenge for both parties.
The DentalXChange Payer and Provider Message Portal was an idea my newly formed team came up with to bridge the gap on payer and provider communication. The idea was simple: implement a Zendesk-style communication platform that was fully integrated with our platform to allow for seamless communication between parties. Over the course of 4 months, as the Product Manager, I led the product from a “cool idea” to a fully deployed feature that received praise from all sides of the business.
My Role
At the start of this initiative, my newly formed scrum team had just completed our first few epics and sprints; a new concept at this company. This framework allowed us, however, to truly build software in an agile methodology. As the Product Manager, I rallied the team around architecture decisions, database diagrams, wireframes, and business cases during the first month as the idea became a plan of action. As time in our product roadmap opened up, it was game time for development.
Wireframes of the design were built with each linked ticket describing the story functionality and acceptance criteria.
During our first few sprints, we ran into some challenges with use case implementation but given our agile nature, were able to quickly adjust course and update our wireframes. I broke the feature into two main epics: the MVP and the improvements.
The Outcome
In January 2023, we launched the MVP to our customers alongside documentation indicating why we built this, how they can use it, and what was coming next. Insurance payers are very slow to adjust their processes but eventually came to value the ability to asynchronously communicate with dentists.
The new Message Portal launched in January 2023 and became a daily used feature for users.
The platform works very similar to an email conversation but as the platform was built around our product, each message has a focus which is the dentist. You can add or remove participants similar to the To or CC lines in an email.
Messages are also sent to a users email inbox and they can reply directly to the email with that reply being imported right into the Message Portal thanks to SendGrids email parse API.
Overall, the feature launch was a big success and led to increased confidence in the companies commitment to it’s innovation.
