Thursday, July 25, 2013
In the past I have written: “As much as I love high tech I reluctantly admit that the same systems that make sharing information quick and easy also make it quick and easy for people to steal from us.”
However if you continue with that thought we also should be able to use the power of digital information to quickly and easily track and detect dental fraud. A new Product called Practice Safeguard does just that.
Most dentists are aware of the fact that we are frequently targets of embezzlement. There are many reasons for this. Our profession demands that we be focused on the patient not on the books. Our accounting systems are simple and easy to defraud. We do not like the mundane tasks of account review so we tend to put it off or not do it at all. And finally dentists are caring, trusting people working with a small family-like staff.
We are forced by the nature of our business to put a great deal of trust in selected team members and are shocked to the core when they betray us. And they do betray us.
According to a 2012 survey from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the median loss of health care professionals who were victims of fraud was $200,000. Additionally, a survey of 1,100 dentists conducted by the creators of Practice Safeguard found 52 percent of respondents indicated they were or didn't know if they were victims of fraud, and 46 percent said their practice is never evaluated for fraud or embezzlement.
There are many business advisors, accountants and dental fraud detection specialists who advise dentists on ways to prevent or at least detect fraud. We are advised to monitor the audit trail, reconcile adjustments every day, review the daily deposit and compare it to the cash and checks on hand. All of these are good practices but they are also tedious time consuming and tend to be ignored. After all, Mary at the front desk has been with me for years and I can trust her completely.
Practice Safeguard is an eService that monitors more than twenty key factors every hour looking for extreme and unusual transactions in your practice data.
An eService works by gathering the digital data you already have stored in your system as a byproduct of doing business and then uses that data to provide a service. An obvious eService example is appointment reminders. Your computer knows the patient’s name, it knows the patient’s cell number and it knows when the patient is scheduled for an appointment. The eService simply puts these items together by sending a text message to the patient the day before their appointment. And it does this with no additional data entry, no dialing of phones or typing of messages. It does it automatically with the data on hand.
To use Practice Safeguard, the dentist does not need to enter any data, run reports or monitor findings. The system does it for you automatically. The findings are constantly updated on a practice dashboard, and an alert is sent whenever an extreme issue is detected.
For example if Practice Safeguard detects that entries are being made after hours in the middle of the night, an immediate alert is sent to the dentist’s cell phone and email.
In addition to afterhours activity the system examines collection ratios, zero charges, adjustments and the deposit summary looking for anomalies. But that is not all. The experienced fraud investigators who helped develop the product have included many confidential items they know from experience indicate possible fraud but aren’t obvious to the people committing fraud or to the casual observer.
Early adopters and beta testers have often been shocked at what the system discovers. One office signed up just as a favor just to test the system and found $45,000 in loses in six months.
At this time Practice Safeguard is designed to work exclusively with Dentrix G5 and only looks at the receivable side of the practice. It will not detect bogus payments going out of the office. However, there are plans to add a payables side before the end of the year and to rapidly expand its functionality to other practice management systems.
Practice Safeguard was developed by Dr. Don Lewis, an oral surgeon, and David Sems, a CPA specializing in fraud investigations, along with a team of forensic accountants, fraud investigators and attorneys.
Digital technology can offer thieves new ways to steal from us but it also offers new and better ways for us to catch them. The future is coming and it will be amazing!