Flex’s Jon Podolsky joins Dr. Mark Costas to discuss Open Dental workflows, automation, payments, insurance verification, treatment planning, and growth.
Dental practices do not necessarily need another practice management system. Often, they need to remove the manual work happening around the one they already use.
That was one of the central themes when Jon Podolsky, Director of Sales at Flex Dental Solutions, joined Dr. Mark Costas on the Dentalpreneur Podcast to talk about how dental technology has evolved, where front-office teams still lose time, and how a deeper Open Dental integration can help practices simplify everyday workflows.
Jon brings an unusual perspective to the conversation. Before joining Flex, he spent roughly 14 years working in dental practices, including a lot of time as an office manager. He remembers the transition from paper charts and manually processed X-rays to digital forms, automated communication, and today’s increasingly connected practice technology.
And that experience shapes a simple question:
How much of the work surrounding Open Dental should your team still be doing manually?
Listen to the Full Dentalpreneur Podcast Episode
Open Dental gives practices a strong foundation, but the day-to-day patient journey extends far beyond the patient record.
Teams still have to:
Historically, many practices solved those needs one at a time with separate software tools.
During the podcast, Dr. Costas described the familiar problem of practices getting “$299 to death” by individual plug-ins for forms, scheduling, communication, treatment planning, and other functions. Jon explained that Flex takes a different approach by connecting those workflows around Open Dental in one platform.
That distinction matters.
Adding technology does not automatically remove work. If your team has to jump between systems, re-enter information, or manually keep everything synchronized, the technology stack itself can become another workflow problem.
Open Dental is the foundation. Flex helps automate the workflows around it.
Instead of trying to integrate broadly with every dental practice management system, Flex has focused specifically on Open Dental.
Jon explained that this focus allows Flex to build a deeper integration rather than spreading development across multiple practice management systems. He also discussed Flex’s strategic partnership with Open Dental and how that focus allows the platform to continue expanding what it can automate within Open Dental workflows.
That means practices do not have to replace the system they already know.
They can make more of the workflows around it automatic.
As Jon put it from his own experience as an office manager, tools like Flex would have reduced manual payment entry, manual information entry, and the amount of treatment-plan work that depended on individual team members.
Treatment planning is one of the clearest examples of where technology can support, rather than replace, the human conversation.
Jon and Dr. Costas discussed a familiar problem: traditional treatment plans often become a printed list of procedure codes, insurance estimates, and costs.
The patient’s eyes go straight to the number at the bottom.
Everything else fades into the wallpaper.
With Flex Treatment Planning, the treatment plan still begins in Open Dental. From there, practices can present the information through Flex, simplify the view, organize treatment, include patient-specific images or X-rays, add notes, and show payment options.
The goal is not to turn dental teams into salespeople.
It is to make the treatment easier for patients to understand.
That can mean showing:
Patients can also receive the treatment plan digitally by text or email.
Better case acceptance often starts with better understanding.
Insurance verification may be one of the least glamorous workflows in dentistry.
It may also be one of the biggest time thieves.
Dr. Costas described the familiar reality of front-office staff answering phones, checking patients in and out, helping with treatment plans, and then somehow finding time to wait on hold with insurance carriers.
Jon explained that insurance verification varies significantly between platforms. FlexVerification can access insurer portals where available, rather than relying exclusively on basic clearinghouse eligibility data, helping practices retrieve more detailed information.
Flex can also automate verification ahead of scheduled appointments or run an on-demand verification for same-day or walk-in patients.
Most importantly for Open Dental teams, verified insurance information can be used to update the insurance table inside Open Dental, reducing the manual entry of benefit information.
That changes the question from:
“How quickly can someone verify this patient?”
to:
“Why is someone still doing all of this by hand?”
Payments are another place where disconnected systems can create unnecessary administrative work.
In the podcast, Jon walks through a FlexPayments workflow that can begin immediately after a patient accepts a treatment plan.
Practices can collect a deposit, full payment, or an existing balance. Mobile terminals can allow the payment to happen with the patient instead of requiring another trip to the front desk.
Once a FlexPayments transaction is completed, the payment can post back into Open Dental, and Flex can help with payment allocation as well.
Jon and Dr. Costas also discuss two newer FlexPayments capabilities:
Buy Now, Pay Later gives eligible patients financing options so they can break treatment costs into payments while the practice receives payment according to the financing arrangement.
Surcharging, where permitted, gives practices a way to offset eligible credit card processing costs instead of automatically absorbing those costs themselves.
These features support a bigger idea we talk about often at Flex:
Diagnosed treatment is not revenue until the patient can move forward and the practice gets paid.
Yes.
Software can have an impressive feature list and still fail if nobody in the practice knows how to use it.
Flex customers receive one-on-one onboarding and training, including sessions where the team can work through Flex alongside its actual Open Dental environment. Training does not simply stop after implementation. The Flex team schedules follow-up conversations and provides a library of educational and training resources.
For practices considering new technology, that raises an important evaluation question:
Do not just ask what the software can do. Ask how your team will actually learn to use it.
A dental practice does not necessarily need more technology.
It needs fewer workflow gaps.
The patient journey might look something like:
Schedule → Confirm → Complete Forms → Verify Insurance → Receive Care → Review Treatment → Pay → Return
Every handoff is an opportunity for progress.
It is also an opportunity for something to get lost.
Flex was originally created around forms and patient communication and has expanded into a broader platform that includes online scheduling, treatment planning, insurance verification, analytics, and payments.
That evolution reflects a bigger change in dental technology:
The goal is no longer to digitize individual tasks. The goal is to connect the workflow.
If your practice runs on Open Dental and you are wondering where automation could save your team time, the full podcast episode is worth a listen.
See What Flex Can Do for Open Dental →
Flex Dental Solutions is patient communication and payment processing software built specifically for Open Dental practices. Flex supports workflows including patient communication, forms, online scheduling, treatment planning, payments, insurance verification, and analytics.
No. Flex works with Open Dental rather than replacing it. Open Dental remains the practice management foundation while Flex helps automate and connect additional patient-facing and administrative workflows.
Flex can support workflows including appointment communication, digital forms, online scheduling, treatment planning, insurance verification, payment collection, and practice reporting.
FlexVerification can retrieve insurance information automatically or on demand and can update benefit information inside Open Dental, reducing manual insurance data entry.
FlexPayments helps practices accept patient payments and can automatically post and allocate eligible transactions back into Open Dental, reducing manual payment entry and reconciliation work.