CareStack, a dental care start-up with two headquarters – one in Florida, US and a domestic headquarter at Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala – recently facilitated an exit for 12 early-stage investors.
Dental offices (individual clinics or dental health groups operating multiple clinics in different locations) have perpetually needed technology solutions to help them with end-to-end dental operations management right from appointment scheduling, clinical and patient services, insurance management, business analytics, reporting, and telephony integration. For far too long, dental offices have struggled with having to juggle between multiple, complex and fragmented solutions.
The dental healthcare and wellness space has real needs in terms of maximising insurance reimbursements and patient payments. The dental services market has always relied on multiple software solutions shoddily connected to traditional dental software. It has largely proven to be unproductive for them.
There is an urgent need for technology transformation and critical infrastructure like patient acquisition systems for dental clinics and dental groups.
Technology challenges in the Dental sector
A big pile of systems
The dental world is still dependent on the traditional client-server practice management systems. To make up for their legacy software, dental clinics have come up with a makeshift dental software of sorts. They have connected multiple different systems to the traditional software. They are all loosely integrated with each other.
There are a number of challenges that arise from using this makeshift system for everyday dental practice. It needs regular troubleshooting. Dental staff thus waste copious amounts of their practice time in troubleshooting issues. They also waste time in redundant data entry which takes away from their productivity throughout the day.
Software solutions that do not communicate
It is sad that the dental care sector has to struggle with incompetent software systems that do not communicate with each other.
Hampered dental care operations
Relying on dysfunctional technology systems hampers everyday operations in dental care offices. Some of the problems which they struggle with include:
- Delay in responses
- Missed appointment schedules
- Patient dissatisfaction
- Delayed patient fee and insurance payments
Understanding CareStack’s technology solution
CareStack offers an end-to-end modern, dental software solution which adapts to and fulfils the dental practise workflow. It’s a Dental SaaS platform which provides an intuitive user experience and is focused on one particular workflow, ‘revenue cycle management’. The workflow solutions are contactless which works well for social distancing practices at dental clinics. It’s a full-stack dental practice management software for clinical and business management.
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The dental healthcare and wellness space has real needs in terms of maximising insurance reimbursements and patient payments.
What’s in it for me?
Investment required for building dental software is significantly high. Health tech and B2B SaaS start-ups need to have significant capital at hand to venture into the dental space. However, the dental market is fragmented and has strong underlying demand drivers. The dental sector is one of the most complex sectors in healthcare. To build software workflows for such an industry, you need to get up close and personal to understand its nuances. Workflows and SOPs vary depending on the market. Dental practices vary from one market to the other.
Dental health is one of the most ignored areas in the Indian healthcare system. Indians refrain from approaching dental clinics fearing costs. There is also a shortage of dental workforce in the country. There is huge potential for dental health start-ups in India as CareStack has already demonstrated. The domestic market itself is huge since the demand is strong for dental tech among solo dental practitioners, individual clinics, as well as dental care groups.
