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Corporate Profile: Lighthouse PMG Benjamin Lund, Editor, Dentaltown Magazine

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by Benjamin Lund, Editor, Dentaltown Magazine

Lighthouse PMG co-founders Brian Smith, Joel Kozikowski and Allen Jorgensen.

You love sending your patients appointment reminders – as long as you don't have to think about them, or remind someone in your practice to take care of them. "If only there was an automatic system that could do it for me," you say. Enter Lighthouse 360, a comprehensive patient communications system that integrates with your practice management software (PMS) and takes automation to a new level. Via this software, practices don't even need to think about sending out appointment reminders or birthday wishes. Lighthouse Practice Management Group (PMG) is dedicated to a single philosophy: the only real way to ensure the business side of dentistry is run at maximum efficiency and profitability is to install processes that are truly automated. To learn more, Dentaltown Magazine spoke with Lighthouse PMG cofounders Allen Jorgensen, Joel Kozikowski and Brian Smith.

Please explain the history of Lighthouse. How did it start?
Brian Smith: Joel and I started PracticeWorks, where we worked for nearly a decade. We developed some pretty cool concepts in automation and customization. While those features made it into the product, we struggled to get the rest of the organization to understand our vision, especially after a major ownership change in 2000. In 2002, I left PracticeWorks and decided to do consulting for PracticeWorks users. I asked Joel and Allen – who was probably the best PracticeWorks user on the planet – to help me put on a seminar. Joel knew the technical details of the software, and Allen was one of the few users who really understood the automation concept. The seminar was such a success that we decided to build a business around it.

Between the three of us, we have a long history in practice management software development and a shared passion for automation, so we created Lighthouse 360 as our platform for delivering automation to dentistry, regardless of the PMS an office uses.

Allen Jorgensen: The problem with in-office consulting is you can only help one office at a time. We wanted something that would scale better, so we created an online forum called "Club Lighthouse" that we used to reach many more practices at a much lower cost than we could doing on-site visits.

Joel Kozikowski: The problem with that business was it was limited to PracticeWorks users. We wanted to deliver our automation ideas to the entire dental profession. We were going to write an entirely new PMS with all the new Internet technologies built in, but decided not to, because it's such a huge disruption for an office to switch to a new PMS. We figured out how to deliver our automation ideas by simply "piggybacking" on all of the existing ones. That made it easier to write, and made it far easier for our customers to adopt.

Can you explain what Lighthouse does?
Allen: We provide the office with an "artificial intelligence" worker that's programmed to do the critical tasks needed by every office. We completely automate the most important communications with patients that take place when patients are not in the office: appointment reminders/confirmation, recall, reactivation, post-visit feedback and "loyalty programs" (birthday greetings and e-newsletters). Every single message we send is 100 percent automated. For example, when it's time for a human to call a patient to schedule a hygiene visit, the staff is alerted – automatically. We do it by extracting data from the existing practice management system, so the office simply keeps doing what it has always done, and we build on that.

What is your current business philosophy?
Allen: If you're being honest, you know that people are unreliable. The only way to ensure that a business process is done consistently is to take the human element out of it and to completely automate it. We take these processes that are important for a dental office to do, and we do them 100 percent automatically. The humans get involved only when the computer detects something it can't deal with directly.

Brian: That is certainly our product philosophy. If you want to know our business philosophy, I would say we make the best product we know how to make, sell it for a fair price, treat customers the way they want to be treated and hire awesome people who understand how important all of that is. That might sound cliché, but how else would you run a business?


Training and support staff in our Sugar Hill, Georgia office: from left, standing, Brian Allen; kneeling, Ron Walton; Kurt Lee, Lighthouse co-founder Allen Jorgensen; Ann Lewis; kneeling, Jeff Gzyl and standing, Kevin Lewis.

Good point. So, how does Lighthouse stand out from the competition?
Joel: I think it's a combination of our knowledge of what dental practices need, and our "automation" philosophy. In our seminars, we talked about "automation" vs. "computerization." Take the recall system for example. Every PMS can print reports and postcards for people who are due or past due for recall. But the PMS won't do those things unless a human knows they need to be done, and knows how to tell the computer to do it. If you want to execute a comprehensive recall system, contacting patients multiple times, at strategically timed intervals, using all appropriate message types, you have to design your strategy, then someone in the practice needs to know what to do, how to do it and when to do it. That's "computerization." When we were consulting, we developed a comprehensive recall system, but it still required humans to execute it – and it didn't get done. With Lighthouse 360 we have automated that entire recall system, to the point that our clients don't ever need to run a recall report in their PMS. Our competitors send e-mails and texts, but there is still a significant percentage of patients who don't have e-mail, don't want to get texts or don't read e-mail very often. How do you reach them? If you still have to manually print and mail even a small number of postcards every month, that's not automating the entire process.

What is the one thing at Lighthouse you're most proud of?
Brian: The feedback we get when a client switches to Lighthouse 360 from a competitor, letting us know how much better it's working than their previous system. Just last week, a new client told me his practice is getting appointment requests from our recall system every day, but it almost never happened with the system he had been using. That's when we know that all of our hard work and experience are paying off.

You have a very robust system… Do you ever worry that it's too much for a practice to handle?
Allen: Not at all. Remember, the core strategy is for the system to handle it all with no human interaction. It's true that we've built a lot of flexibility into the system, and with flexibility comes complexity, but we hide all of that complexity from our clients. They want a particular result, and we deliver that. How we do it is not their concern. It's like most patients – they want a nice smile and painless dentistry – they don't care if the dentist uses a pneumatic or electric handpiece, or what size the burs are, or what they're made of.

How do you help practices find new patients?
Brian: We automate the process of asking patients to post reviews online (to Google, Yahoo and any other review site a client wants), and we have simple mechanisms for sharing great reviews on the practice's Web site, and through Facebook and Twitter. It's always up to the client to deliver the kind of patient experience that results in positive reviews, but if they do that, Lighthouse 360 will help get those reviews in front of prospective new patients.

We also make it very easy for an office to add some nice functionality on their Facebook page. Visitors can see great reviews, request an appointment, see office hours and even read a short bio about the doctor and team members – all with Facebook apps we've written, that install in minutes.



How does your system address patients who don't use e-mail or cell phones?
Joel: Even though our system is very "high tech," we know that "low tech" communications (postcards, letters, phone calls) are still required to reach 100 percent of patients. More than 80 percent of Lighthouse 360 clients have us print and mail postcards for them for one or more purposes. These patients are not ignored by the system.

Hypothetical situation: Mom and her kids all have their hygiene appointments at about the same time. Does she get one reminder, or several?
Allen: Nothing hypothetical about that question! I sat "front desk" in my wife's practice for years, and still do on occasion, so I've heard every complaint patients ever had, about everything. When we first released Lighthouse 360, we didn't have a way to combine family members' appointments – and I heard about it! The more kids mom was bringing in, the more she didn't want to get separate messages. So now, we do "family clustering" of messages for every one of our message types – e-mail, text, automated phone calls, postcards and letters. Mom gets one message, makes one response, and all the appointments are automatically confirmed in the appointment book. Everyone's happy.

What can a practice expect when it signs on with Lighthouse?
Allen: We typically install the system within two to three business days of the sign-up, and the initial training occurs within a week after that. Then we do all the customization of the messages in another few days, and we're ready to "go live." Offices are typically live within two weeks after signing up. Our training and support team is amazing – they routinely go above and beyond to meet the specific needs of our clients. In addition to the initial training session, there is a training about a month later. The system is so automated, there isn't much to be trained on. And since we do all of the customization and configuration, clients don't even have to learn how to do that – like everything else, it "just happens."

What does your system cost? And is there a contract?
Brian: The monthly fee is $269, which includes unlimited e-mails and text messages, the automated reporting we do each day and access to the practice's data through our portal system (some call it a "dashboard"). It also includes our mobile app for smartphones, which makes it super easy to do patient follow-up calls and confirmation calls when not in the office. The optional message types (postcards, automated phone calls and letters) are charged "per message." All pricing information is on our Web site, on the "pricing" page. No secrets. We've got nothing to hide.

And regarding contacts, we think it's ridiculous to have a contract for a service like this. Dentists have to earn patients' loyalty at every single encounter, and we feel the same way about our business. In fact, we hate contracts so much that if someone is in a contract with one of our competitors, we'll waive our monthly fee for the last three months of that contract, and reduce it for all the other months, to make it easier for someone to switch to Lighthouse 360.

If a practice is having a problem with your system, what do they do?
Allen: Call or e-mail our awesome support team. While we think our product is pretty amazing, we know that we're always going to be judged on the quality of our customer service, so that's where all of our staffing growth is happening. Our goal is to take as many live calls as possible, and to reply to all others within one business day.



What can current Lighthouse users expect in the next few years?
Joel: Earlier, I mentioned that Lighthouse 360 started out as the platform for our next generation practice management system. It was never designed to be just a patient messaging system. We actually are watching a tremendous amount of valuable information flowing through the practice. We've started to work on a way to present that information to our clients in ways that will help them manage their practices better.

Allen: Lighthouse 360 is like an evolving "life form." Every new client benefits from all that we've learned from past clients, and also helps us get better by communicating their unique needs to us. When we make an enhancement to handle those needs, the system just gets better, for that client, but also for all current and future clients.

To learn more about Lighthouse PMG, visit www.LPMG360.com or call 888-207-9385.
Dentaltown Magazine
April 2024
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