Dental Embezzlement News
Issue #19 -- January 2014
Did you miss a previous newsletter?  We archive them here.
 
IN THIS  NEWSLETTER
We Love to Talk!
Here are some of the places you can hear us speak in the next few months:
Feb 28 Dr. Gerald Johnson study club, West Chester OH
Mar 27 Thomas P Hinman Dental Meeting, Atlanta GA
Apr 3-5 Western Regional Dental Convention, Phoenix AZ
Apr 25 Star of the North Meeting, St. Paul MN
May 8 Denver Profitable Dentists Study Club
Oct 5 Pacific Coast Society of Orthodontists, Anaheim CA
Oct 11 Southern Association of Orthodontists, Nassau Bahamas

To book a great speaker for your meeting or study club, please send an email here  or call us at 888-398-2327.
Prosperident's Mission
 
 “We eliminate uncertainty for dentists with embezzlement concerns and maximize financial and emotional recovery for victims.”
 

Read our stuff
 
 
 
 
Listen to Gary Takacs' great interview with David Harris for his "Thriving Dentist" show here (stay tuned next month for a guest column right here from Gary)
The newest member of our team
 
We'd like to introduce our newest team member, Wendy Chediac, who started in her role as Manager, Customer Service in January 2014.  Wendy oversees the gathering of information for our investigations and works with investigators to ensure that investigations are completed in a timely manner. 
 
Before joining Prosperident, Wendy was the office manager of several large dental offices.
 
Wendy can be reached at wendy.c@dentalembezzlement.com
 
How to get your own Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire
 
Our most powerful (and most requested) embezzlement detection tool is our free Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire. You can request your own copy here.
 
 
Learn more about Practice SafeGuard at 
www.practicesafeguard.com or call 800.771.0632 
 
 
 
Guest Column -- Dr. Don Lewis
Don Lewis is an interesting guy.  He is a practicing oral surgeon.  Some years ago, he was an embezzlement victim and, after earning his Certified Fraud Examiner designation, Don has spent considerable time on the lecture circuit educating dentists about the dangers of employee theft.
 
Don has now progressed from talking to dentists about embezzlement to helping them combat it.  He is the CEO of a company that has developed Practice SafeGuard, which is a monitoring product that works in conjunction with Dentrix practice management software. 
 
Prosperident supports the use of software-based monitoring.  Let's let Dr. Lewis tell you more about it.
Practice SafeGuard: Financial Security As It Should Be
 
Have you ever wondered what mistakes cost your practice revenue over time? Whether you deal with costly mistakes or fraudulent activity, income loss is usually preventable with early detection.
 
Practice SafeGuard is a new web service for Dentrix G5 that provides transaction monitoring and trended business metrics. It works by flagging transactions that violate best-practice financial rules or that could indicate loss. It also aggregates financial data into performance trends you can use to make better decisions. Users receive private alerts and automatically monitor income without spending hours auditing reports.
 
Whether an entry is a simple mistake or something more serious, early detection is key to loss prevention. Practice SafeGuard pushes information to you so you know, quickly.
 
We didn’t overcomplicate it: As a doctor, the last thing I want to do is pore over reports after a long patient day. With Practice SafeGuard monitoring your ledger, it’s like having a fraud investigator and a financial analyst in your inbox. You get:
1.      Alerts: Real-time alerts to unusual entries via email. It’s web-based, so you can log in from any browser to research and resolve.
2.      Analysis: Practice SafeGuard explains transaction types and potential problems, and recommends research steps if an entry needs more attention.
3.      Answers: We aggregate all your transaction data into trends like collections ratio, production over time, reimbursements by procedure, entries by Dentrix user, and much more.
 
Practice SafeGuard was born from the conviction that doctors should be able to protect their businesses from theft and negligence. Now, in just minutes a week, you can monitor your income and use professional reports to measure financial performance. This is financial security as it should be.
 
Practice SafeGuard is $199 to install and $99/month.
A Note From Our CEO:
 
 
Travel Fatigue!
 
I'll confess that I'm feeling a bit travel-weary today.   I had the privilege of speaking with a great group of orthodontists in Tucson on the weekend.  Unfortunately, my return trip wasn't nearly as smooth as it should be.  Weather and operational factors resulted in cancelled flights and long delays.  I still have the ELEVEN boarding passes from the flights I was booked on before being re-booked onto something else in a futile effort to get home, before finally making it home at 3:00 am.  My suitcase still hasn't made it but I'm optimistic that it will arrive any day now :-).

My experience this weekend reinforces a couple of points with me.  First, running an airline is a big, complex undertaking and despite some the intricate planning and extensive computerization, it doesn't take much to thoroughly disrupt the system. 

Second, notwithstanding that winter weather occurs every single year, it always seems to come as a surprise to the airlines.

Are there parallels in a dental office?  I think that there are.  First, since I first encountered dental embezzlement in 1989, the challenges of running a dental office have increased considerably.  The insurance environment is definitely more complicated, there are heavy compliance demands from regimes like OSHA and HIPAA.  An increasingly competitive environment often requires attention be given to marketing, with a good web site and patient interaction through Facebook and Twitter now becoming de rigeur for many practices.  Computerization is intruding into more corners of most practices.  Manual appointment books and paper charts that were retained when many practices computerized have all but disappeared, and software is now taking over functions like appointment confirmation and patient sign-in for many offices.

Does this combination of complexity and automation facilitate embezzlement?  Definitely.  Both our own internal statistics, and those that we see published, suggest long-term trend both of an increasing probability of embezzlement and larger amounts being stolen.  Computerization creates a barrier between practice owners and information, and this barrier is exploitable by embezzlers.  Please don't misunderstand me; practice management software has improved dramatically over time, and its increased capabilities allow offices to accomplish more.  At the same time, they also make the job of the embezzler easier. 

And like the way that airlines seem to be surprised by winter weather, embezzlement comes as a surprise to many victims.  This is why I am glad to see products like Practice SafeGuard becoming available.  In combination with the behavioral monitoring provided by our Embezzlement Risk Assessment Questionnaire, PSG provides an effective monitoring tool for dentists.

I'm travelling to PSG's head office in Cleveland in a couple of weeks for an information-sharing visit.  That means I have to subject myself to the airlines again.  Please cross your fingers for me ...
I
Yours truly,


 
David Harris, MBA CMA CFE
Chief Executive Officer
 
 
 
 
Prosperident -- The world's largest dental investigation embezzlement firm
888-398-2327