Spotlight: Petar Tofovic @ Dentite
A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Petar Tofovic, co-founder and CEO of Dentite.
What does Dentite do?
Dentite helps patients and providers across ancillary healthcare, like dentistry, vision, and pharmacy, access their medical reimbursements that payer and medical billing complexity keeps out of reach.
For dentistry, it means allowing patients to use their medical insurance when they go to the dentist, and for dentists, it means allowing them to accept and bill medical insurance for the procedures and treatments they provide.
How did you end up working in health tech?
I never set out to work in health tech. As a healthcare provider, I spent years manually helping patients access their medical benefits because no tool existed to do it. The process was tedious and time-consuming, pulling me and my team away from what mattered most, which has always been caring for patients. As someone who's always been an early adopter of technology, I found it especially frustrating, and I knew there had to be a better way. That's how Dentite was born, out of a real need I experienced firsthand in my own practice.
How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?
My job as a CEO is to help providers get paid for care they’re already delivering, patients get care they’re paying for and are entitled to, and, in the long term, to lower payer costs by incentivizing early diagnosis and treatment.
What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?
I think RCM is going to look a lot more like financial services than like a back-office function. Right now, claims get treated as manual paperwork moving around: created, submitted, followed up, updated, resubmitted, appealed, etc. We see claims from the payments point of view: they are IOUs or money owed, with unclear odds of getting paid and even less clear odds of the timeframe before an answer is known.
RCM solutions that win will be able to tell a provider, before the patient is even in the office, what they'll get paid and when, the way your card gets approved in a second at checkout. Billing stops being a guessing game and starts working like a payment network.
Dentite is working on solving this for all ancillary healthcare verticals, e.g., dentistry, vision, chiropractors, etc. For dentists doing medical billing, the guessing game is the worst. What’s more, 95% of them have been convinced that it’s impossible. So the shift is overdue.