DENTAL PROFILE
The sweet spot of data analytics By James Yau
A manufacturing engineer by training, Swee Siong Lee, CEO of Medtrik, was bitten by the “entrepreneur bug” in his early career which saw him through the dot com bubble of the early 2000’s. After developing his career in banking and finance, the bug came biting again, leading Lee to establish TrueVA Capital, a strategy advisory, training and venture building firm, in 2018. The focus of TrueVA are investments in technologies found at the intersection of finance, digital and sustainability, leveraging on Lee’s expertise with technology, product development and commercialisation gleaned throughout his career. It was in this space that Medtrik was created. “Medtrik was born from a consulting engagement with a dental client looking at a strategy revamp to pave their way forward for the next five years. They were interested in data analytics and the insights which could be harvested from it but did not know how to get started,” said Lee. Poring over 15 years’ worth of data from the client, Lee distilled these insights to advise strategic directions for the clinic. This successful engagement helped Lee realise that other dental practices could benefit from such an offering and decided to productise the service in 2021. After building and fine-tuning the capabilities of Medtrik to suit the needs of dental clinics, the practice optimisation platform was commercially launched in June 2023. “I think managing a dental business can be challenging. It is not just about perfecting your craft for the patients, as there are many operational, business, and financial challenges to deal with. I believe that with the abundant availability of data points today, when objectives are simplified into performance matrix and used properly, this data can be tapped into to provide assurance for business
distance stayed from clinic, can be inferred by cross triangulating different data points.
If a clinic owner decided to track the profitability performance of a dentist, the insights gathered can be embedded into a clinic’s daily operational processes through custom targets and forecasts. This allows owners to measure the progress of dentists and take pre-emptive actions to ensure that its targets are met. Lee believes that Medtrik’s offerings are suited for clinic chains with a focus to grow their business in a fast and sustainable manner. "Many progressive dental chains would have professional non-practitioner staff like a CFO and COO, who manage a team looking and interpreting through data. This is the sweet spot for Medtrik because when they see our product, they understand the value of data and how it can drive business decisions,” he said. In doing so, Lee believes that the platform is beneficial in helping users tackle common pain points within a clinic such as the utilisation rate of equipment and acquisition of new patients. Moreover, Lee aims to dissuade owners from relying upon their “gut feels” to tackle these problems and base decisions upon the hard data gathered. The decision to practice general dentistry or offer more specialised treatments and value-added services, and allocation of resources and opening hours can be strategically informed by poring through the data. For the second pillar of Medtrik, the platform provides diagnostic tools driven by AI- based technology to function as “digital doctor assistants”. An app developed by Medtrik allows the scanning of various dental conditions through the smartphone of a clinic’s staff, which is planned with an integration with an AI treatment planning assistant. This allows dentists to create
Swee Siong Lee, CEO of Medtrik
owners that they are on the right trajectory,” said Lee.
DIGITAL OFFICERS AND ASSISTANTS Built upon two core pillars, Medtrik’s AI- and data-assisted platform offers a variety of tools and analytics which focuses on helping the business and clinical aspects of a dental practice. Likened to a "digital CFO and COO assistant", the first pillar is designed to create personalised and actionable insights where the platform harvests data from existing clinic management systems (CMS) to derive the different levels of analysis. At the base level, the type of analysis provided is known as data visualisation where countable data, such as revenues and costs, are presented to users in intuitive and readily understood formats. At higher levels of analysis, custom algorithms, statistical methods and machine learning are applied which enables Medtrik to derive a deeper level insight, which helps drive strategic business decisions for users. For example, clinic owners can analyse its profitability is different ways for instance, in terms of per invoice issued or profitability per hour when a patient is sitting on the dental chair. Moreover, data that is not readily available and influential in profitability, such as a patient’s preference for treatment type or
30 DENTAL ASIA SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2024
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