When Outsourcing Actually Works: How Sweet Truth Dental Found the Right Billing Partner

When Lyndsey Magnino stepped into the Director of Operations role at Sweet Truth Dental, she brought nearly 20 years of dental experience with her, but most of it had been spent on the clinical side.

After 16 years as a hygienist, she was suddenly learning an entirely different side of running a dental practice.

“I had my work cut out for me. I had a lot to learn and I had to learn quickly,” Lyndsey says.

And among the challenges waiting for her was a significant one: billing.

Sweet Truth had inherited aging accounts receivable and billing cleanup that needed attention. Lyndsey was still getting comfortable in her new role, her team was relatively young, and keeping up with billing was consuming time and mental energy that could have been spent elsewhere.

So Lyndsey had to make a decision: 

“We could either try to become the billing experts ourselves, or we could partner with people who already were,” Lyndsey explains. “For me, the most important thing is that my team gets to be really patient centered.”

For Sweet Truth distributing the work effectively meant putting the right work in the hands of the right people. 

“My team is here to help the patients, to make them feel comfortable, to help grow the practice, not spending hours chasing insurance companies,” she says. “It wasn't really about replacing anybody or bringing somebody new in. It was about finding somebody who could be the best at this billing for us.”

Why Wisdom worked when others fell short

Sweet Truth explored outsourcing prior to working with Wisdom, however, they found that their previous partner didn’t alleviate enough of the billing burden from her team.

The company would send weekly task lists, but instructions could be unclear or incomplete. When the team had questions, getting an answer could take days. And although there had been an expectation that the partnership would help the team learn, Lyndsey didn’t feel that support materialized.

“I just felt like I never knew where things were at in process,” she says. “It just felt like everything was always delayed.”

That partnership unveiled the importance of choosing the right partner because simply outsourcing won’t automatically solve a practice’s billing problems. 

Billing is directly connected to the financial health of a practice, and Lyndsey knew that handing it over required trust. From her first conversation with Wisdom, she noticed a difference.

“Wisdom really demonstrated that they understood dentistry, that they communicated really well, and that everything had a structured process,” she shares. “That really gave me the confidence that things weren't just going to be getting done, but that they would be done very well.”

Once the partnership began, that difference carried into the day-to-day experience.

“Wisdom's just been so much easier to work with,” Lyndsey says. “Their instructions are more clear, they're more communicative. All of the girls that we work with are so easy to get a hold of, and they're so helpful, and my team just feels so much more confident having that kind of support.”

What Consistent RCM Can Change

That stronger partnership has translated into measurable results across Sweet Truth Dental’s locations:

Brentwood: 

• 30+ day insurance AR: $195,000 → $67,000 (66% reduction)
• 90+ day insurance AR: $140,000+ → $60,000 (57% reduction)
• Average collection ratio since launching with Wisdom: 113.21%

Nashville:

• 30+ day insurance AR: $40,000 → $25,000 (37.5% reduction)
• 90+ day insurance AR: $22,000 → $17,000 (23% reduction)
• Average collection ratio since launching with Wisdom: 107.15%

Across both locations, collection ratios have remained consistently above 99% as a result of consistently doing the fundamentals well: submitting clean claims, posting payments on time, steadily working aging balances, addressing roadblocks, and keeping communication moving between the Wisdom and Sweet Truth teams.

Lyndsey has noticed the financial difference, too.

“Our collections have definitely increased and they happen a lot faster,” she says. “Our owner, Dr. Poole, has let me know…that she has been really happy seeing how successful the collections have been since onboarding Wisdom.”

What better billing made possible

For Lyndsey, however, the biggest impact isn’t contained in an aging report.

Before Wisdom, billing occupied a constant place in the background of her day. She worried about where claims were, whether follow-ups were happening, what was coming through on task lists, and whether her team understood what needed to happen next.

“Before everything felt really reactive and like we were just constantly trying to catch up, answer questions, and solve problems after the fact,” she says.

Today, however, Lyndsey knows it’s all being handled well. “That allows me to shift my focus back to the operations, the leadership, the coaching, growth of the practice, improving our patient experiences,” she adds.

Every hour a team spends tracking down a claim, calling an insurance company, or figuring out what should happen next is an hour they aren’t spending on the responsibilities that require their presence inside the practice.

With dedicated billing expertise working behind the scenes, Sweet Truth’s team can keep its attention where they want it: on patients.

“It really does allow the team to be patient focused, take care of the people who are in front of them and the people who are on the phone without constantly having that running in the back of their mind that I've got to call these 10 insurance companies today and figure out what's going on with these claims.”

Outsourcing = Investing in expertise

Giving such an important part of the business to an outside partner can understandably feel uncomfortable.

But Lyndsey believes practices should reconsider what they are actually giving up when they choose not to get help.

“I think what I would say is not to look at outsourcing as giving something up, but investing in expertise,” she says. “Insurance billing is an entire specialty thing on its own.”

And there is a cost to asking an in-office team to carry that specialty themselves:

“If your front office is spending hours on insurance instead of taking care of your patients, supporting your providers and creating a great patient experience, to me, that's a really expensive trade off,” Lyndsey says.

The right partner doesn’t take control away from the practice – it provides the expertise, communication, and systems that help the practice operate with more confidence.

As Lyndsey puts it, “For us, it wasn't about outsourcing billing. It was about creating better systems, reducing stress on the team, and allowing them to focus on the work that has a bigger impact on our patients.”

Finding a partnership worth expanding

Perhaps one of the clearest indicators that Sweet Truth found the right fit is what happened next.

After seeing the progress on the billing side, the practice decided to begin working with Wisdom on insurance verification, too.

“We decided to do this from the billing side and it's been so successful that we decided that we're also now trying out the insurance verifications,” Lyndsey says. “And that's also been going really well.

“Again, it's taking away one more task that pulls the team away from taking care of the patients,” she says. “If we can have someone who's an expert at doing it, do it, then why not?”

With the right partner, outsourcing can lead to clearer processes, stronger communication, healthier AR, more consistent collections, and a team that has the bandwidth to focus on what only they can do.

For Sweet Truth, finding that partner meant turning billing from something the team constantly had to manage into something they could finally trust was being managed well.