When Kelly Thome joined North Carolina Pediatric Dentistry at the end of 2023, she had a successful career in healthcare finance, and a solid background in accounting. What didn’t she have? Any direct experience with dental management. And while many of the principles were the same, the learning curve was steep.  

“The first thing I had to do was to re-orient myself with all the dental-specific metrics that MSOs don’t track. I didn’t know what hygiene reappointment was. …Learned pretty quickly that it’s a number I should know,” she joked.  

As if finding her footing in a new space wasn’t challenging enough, NCPD was facing another hurdle, albeit a good one — rapid growth. The kind that can easily outrun the infrastructure holding the organization in place.  

“I’ll use Dr. Thome’s own analogy; the locations were multiplying like gremlins. Overnight, before you knew it, we had 16 of them.”

Sixteen locations, sixteen sets of numbers, and no easy way to compare them. All on top of a new industry. There was nothing to do but dive in.  

Find the problem

One thing was obvious at the very outset. “We had a significant amount sitting over 90 days in AR. We’d done all the work already, but the money wasn’t in the bank yet.”

So her first step was to take the problem to the teams, and frame it in a way that actually mattered to them, personally.  

“I told them, look, you want raises, you want health insurance, you want all these things — help me figure out how to get this money in the bank so I can get you what you want.”

The answer she got back is something every DSO finance pro will recognize. The RCM team said it was the offices. The offices said it was the RCM team.

“Truth is, it was a little of both. It takes both sides to streamline that process.”

But taking meaningful action instead of taking a shot in the dark would require seeing all 16 offices at once, and that was the one thing NCPD couldn’t do. They had a platform that pulled numbers out of Open Dental, but the reports were clunky to build and the output was hard to trust.  

“Once a team stops trusting a system, they stop using it, and that’s exactly what happened,” she told us. Office managers had quietly gone back to pulling their own numbers by hand. That meant Kelly had sixteen versions of the truth, and no standardized methodology. So she went looking for a system that could give her one, and she found it in a new Senior Director of Operations.  

“She had used Dental Intelligence at a previous group, and on a leadership call, she put her own credibility on the table. She said, ‘Kelly, if you agree to Dental Intel, I’ll find the money in savings somewhere else. I’ve used it, and I believe it’ll generate way more than it costs to bring it in.’”

One demo later, “I was immediately, like, I gotta have this,” she told us.  

Roll it out the right way

And so NCPD went blazing off with Dental Intelligence, all 16 offices at once.  

…It didn’t take. Until it did.

“Each office had its own set of challenges, so I went back to the DI implementation team and said, hey, I need to slow this down. Let’s focus on getting a couple of offices actually running the way the products designed to be used, then fold in the rest.”

So they did. The DI team extended training and worked office by office where the friction was the worst, and once NCPD mastered one piece of the platform, DI pointed them to the next.  

“They’d say, we noticed your numbers on this metric could use some work, let’s focus there. It became a gradual thing, and we just got entrenched in it.”  

Diagnose one office at a time

Sherrills Ford Pediatric Dentistry might be the best example of growth in all of NCPD’s portfolio. They built it from the ground up, so there was no acquisition or PMS conversion clouding the “before DI” numbers. It’s also the group’s specialty office, home to the higher-end sedation cases, and those claims carry more touchpoints.  

In 2024, Sherrills Ford was holding $114.5k in AR against $350.2k in quarterly production. Roughly a third of everything it produced was sitting in AR, earning nothing.  

Once digging in with DI, Kelly found several problems stacked on each other. Everything from credentialing gaps to payer-side missteps was brought to light, and soon, patient balances had consistent oversight, and invoicing got standardized instead of simply being done whenever somebody got around to it. The result?

After Kelly implemented DI, by 2026 that AR was down to $35.5k. She’d reduced AR by 78% in the office that had the most complicated claims in the entire group.  

Spread the changes across all 16 practices

“The changes each office needed might have been different, but the conversations all started the same.”

And the start of every conversation was DI. “It got me the reports in a clean, succinct way, so I could sit down with an office manager and say, hey, why is 40% of your AR over 90 days? Now that we’re both looking at the same trend, and we both agree it’s not a good one, we can get on with figuring out what’s behind it.”  

The results followed quickly. Average AR days across dentistry is about 45 days. NCPD’s AR days was double that when Kelly started, and now they sit around just 18 days. Across the group, collections run over 98% against target, and hygiene reappointment, the metric Kelly had never heard of on day one, holds around 94%.  

Balances that used to walk out the door now get collected, either at the appointment or with automated text-to-pay. The days of chasing money are over. The AR fire is out, so Kelly's looking ahead, to case acceptance, patient retention, and the after-hours and missed calls DI's newest tools are built to catch.  

"That's what interests me most right now,” she told us. “Anything we can capture. We're always looking to bring in more patients." (And we were thrilled to tell her about AI Receptionist being out now.)  

Growth like the kind Kelly and team achieved can never be truly frictionless, and she won’t pretend otherwise.

"No implementation this size goes without challenges. We hit bumps, plenty of them. But every item I brought to the DI team, the responsiveness was admirable. When we ran into something, the team rallied around it and got it fixed."

Sixteen locations are now manageable from one clear picture. Ninety+ AR days are down to 18. And the NCPD team now collects 98% of every dollar they produce. They’re the heroes of the story, and Dental Intelligence will continue to be there to point them in the right direction.