BOCA DIRECT · INITIAL COMMERCIAL PRODUCT
BOCA Direct
Membership-Management Software for Independent Dental Practices
Dental membership programs have become an established way for many independent dental practices to serve uninsured and fee-for-service patients while creating recurring revenue outside the traditional insurance system.
Creating the program is only the beginning.
Once patients enroll, the membership program becomes an ongoing business operation within the practice. Payments have to be collected, benefits tracked, renewals managed, communications sent, questions answered, exceptions handled, and records kept straight over months and years.
BOCA Direct is a membership-management platform being developed to bring that work into one coordinated system.
The goal is to help practices build and operate a membership business capable of growing recurring revenue without creating an equally large administrative burden.
THE OPERATING PROBLEM
Creating a Membership Plan Is Easy. Operating One Well Is Not.
A practice can create a membership program with a plan, a price, and a way to collect payment.
Then real life begins.
A member’s credit card expires. Someone misses a cleaning included in the plan. A patient reschedules across a renewal date. A payment fails. A benefit is used but not recorded correctly. Someone wants to cancel. Someone else believes a service should still be available. The employee who normally manages the program is out—or leaves the practice entirely.
None of these situations is extraordinary. They are the ordinary work of operating a membership program.
CREATING THE PLAN
Define the Plan → Set Pricing & Benefits → Enroll Members
OPERATING THE PLAN
Enrollment → Billing → Renewals → Benefit Administration → Communication → Reporting → Exceptions & Member Support
At a small scale, practices can often keep that work organized through some combination of their practice-management software, payment processors, spreadsheets, calendars, notes, and staff memory.
Those tools perform important jobs, but the membership program creates a recurring operational cycle of its own. As membership grows, the number of payments, renewals, benefits, communications, dates, exceptions, and follow-ups grows with it—and the information needed to manage them can become spread across different systems and people.
What began as a relatively simple membership offering can become another business operation the practice has to manage.
A membership program needs more than a spreadsheet. It needs a system.
THE PRODUCT
One System for the Membership Lifecycle
BOCA Direct is being developed to organize the recurring work of a membership program in one place—from the moment a patient enrolls through billing, benefit use, communication, renewal, and continued membership.
Enrollment → Active Membership → Billing → Benefit Use → Communication → Renewal → Continued Membership
The practice defines the program. BOCA Direct provides the system for operating it.
01 · Enrollment & Membership Administration
Every membership begins with enrollment, but the information created at enrollment needs to remain useful throughout the life of the membership.
Direct is being designed to help practices present their plans, enroll new members, establish membership terms and status, track included benefits and relevant dates, and maintain the information associated with each membership as things change over time.
When a question arises, the practice should be able to see what the member has, what has happened, and what comes next.
02 · Billing, Renewals & Payment Continuity
Recurring revenue depends on payments and memberships remaining current over time.
Payment methods expire. Payments fail. Annual memberships come up for renewal. Patients change cards, cancel, or decide not to renew. Staff need to know which memberships are current and which require attention.
Practices may also want flexibility in how patients pay for membership. One practice may require payment in full. Another may offer recurring payments. A practice could offer an initial payment followed by installments, or make different payment arrangements available where appropriate.
BOCA Direct is being designed to give practices that flexibility while managing and tracking the work behind it—recurring billing, payment status, retries, payment-method updates, renewals, cancellations, and the membership changes that follow.
The practice defines the payment options it offers. Direct helps administer them and gives the team a clear view of which memberships are current and which require attention.
03 · Member Communication & Participation
A membership program creates expectations on both sides of the patient relationship.
Patients need to understand what their membership includes, when it renews, what has already been used, what remains available, and what they need to do to receive the benefits their plan provides. Practices need a consistent way to communicate those expectations and document what happens when circumstances change.
Direct is being designed to help with more than routine reminders and payment notices. When an event could affect a member’s benefits or membership, the system can help explain what happened, what options remain available, and what happens next.
For example, if a member misses or cancels an included preventive visit, the practice may allow that visit to be rescheduled within a defined period. Direct could communicate that opportunity, remind the member as the deadline approaches, and make clear when the available window is about to close. If the benefit ultimately expires, both the practice and patient have a clearer history of what occurred and what was communicated along the way.
The same principle can apply to renewals, failed payments, unused benefits, plan changes, exceptions, and other situations where unclear expectations can become frustration.
Direct is being developed to make those interactions clearer and more consistent—giving patients a reasonable opportunity to act while helping practices apply and communicate the terms of their programs more reliably.
The goal is to resolve routine membership problems before they become patient-relationship problems.
04 · Reporting & Operational Intelligence
A membership program becomes easier to manage when the practice can clearly see what is happening.
How many members are active? How is enrollment changing? What recurring revenue is the program generating? How are different plans performing? How many memberships are renewing or cancelling? Where are payments failing? How are included benefits being used? Where is follow-up needed?
Direct is being designed to bring that information together so the practice can understand the membership program as a business—not simply as a collection of individual patients and payments.
THE BUSINESS VALUE
Membership Revenue Only Matters if the Program Is Worth Operating.
Membership programs can create recurring revenue for a dental practice while giving patients access to included services and reduced fees for additional care.
But every new membership also adds payments, renewals, benefits, dates, communications, and follow-up that have to remain organized over time.
As membership grows, the value of the program can grow with it. But if the work required to operate the program grows at the same pace, more of that value is consumed by the administration required to support it.
BOCA Direct is being developed to change that relationship.
By coordinating recurring work, automating appropriate tasks, keeping membership information organized, and making problems easier to identify, Direct is intended to help practices support more members without requiring administrative effort to grow at the same rate.
Better organization can also help practices identify opportunities that might otherwise be missed. If a member still has an included preventive visit available, Direct can help identify that patient and support timely outreach before the benefit period ends. That gives the patient another opportunity to receive the care included in the membership while helping the practice keep patients engaged in ongoing preventive care and make better use of available hygiene time.
Those visits can have value beyond the included service itself. Regular preventive care keeps patients connected to the practice and creates opportunities to identify additional treatment needs when they arise.
Taken together, Direct is intended to help practices reduce repetitive work, maintain more consistent billing and renewals, prevent avoidable membership interruptions, improve visibility into program performance, support continued patient participation, and preserve more of the economic value their membership programs can create.
That is the commercial proposition behind BOCA Direct. If the software makes a membership program easier to operate and more capable of growing without a proportional increase in administrative work, the value it helps preserve can justify what the practice pays to use it.
A membership program should create recurring value—not recurring administrative burden.
There is also another reason some practices may choose BOCA Direct.
Cadmus is openly developing Direct as the first business within the larger BOCA project. Practices do not need to participate in BOCA Prime or commit to Cadmus’s longer-term plans to benefit from the software. But dentists who share Cadmus’s interest in improving how dental benefits work can use a practical product their practice needs today while also having an opportunity to contribute their experience and perspective to what Cadmus is working toward.
Practices should not have to wait for the future of dental benefits to receive value today.
THE STRATEGIC ROLE
Useful Today. A Foundation for What Comes Next.
BOCA Direct is being developed to earn adoption by solving problems dental practices already have. If it does that job well, its value to Cadmus extends beyond the software business itself.
Direct gives Cadmus a practical way to begin building relationships with independent dental practices by first providing something useful. Especially in its early stages, Cadmus intends to grow Direct through a grassroots effort among practices that understand the larger goal: developing BOCA Prime, a new model of dental coverage intended to work better for patients and dental practices.
Dentists who share that goal can contribute their experience and perspective as Prime develops—and potentially become part of the group of early practices willing to help test and participate in the model as it advances.
That matters because Prime ultimately depends on more than patients wanting a different form of coverage. Dental practices have to be willing to work with it. Direct gives Cadmus an opportunity to earn those relationships over time through useful software, real support, and firsthand experience working together rather than approaching practices for the first time only after a new coverage model has been designed.
Those relationships can also teach Cadmus things that are difficult to learn from research and modeling alone.
A membership program operating inside a real dental practice produces a history. Patients enroll, use benefits, renew or leave. Payments succeed or fail. Practices establish prices and discounts. Treatment is provided at different fees in different markets. Programs develop different patterns of participation, utilization, retention, and performance.
With appropriate permissions and safeguards for sensitive practice information, Direct could allow Cadmus to learn from that activity across many participating practices.
Some of that information could be particularly important to Prime. Practice-established fee schedules, membership pricing and discounts, utilization patterns, geographic differences, payment continuity, and program performance could help Cadmus develop a better picture of what dental care actually costs across different markets and how patients use financial benefits when they are available.
That evidence could help inform questions Prime will eventually have to answer: How much financial support can a given contribution level sustainably provide? How should regional differences in the cost of care be reflected? Where should benefit limits or pricing parameters be set? How do utilization and participation affect the economics over time? And how can those assumptions be tested against what actually happens in dental practices rather than relying only on national averages or theoretical models?
Direct cannot answer every question Prime must resolve. Legal and actuarial work, economic modeling, technology, privacy, security, and other forms of validation still have their own jobs to do. But those efforts can be better informed when they are able to draw from what Cadmus has learned alongside real dental practices and patients.
- Build useful software
- Earn practice participation
- Learn from real operations
- Develop better evidence and better questions
- Use what is learned to inform what comes next
- Build useful software
- Earn practice participation
- Learn from real operations
- Develop better evidence and better questions
- Use what is learned to inform what comes next
Evidence precedes expansion.
Direct begins with useful software for independent dental practices. If it earns adoption by doing that job well, it can give the larger BOCA project something theory alone cannot provide: relationships, experience, and evidence grounded in how membership programs and dental practices actually work.
Explore the BOCA Overview → Explore BOCA Prime →
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For Dental Practices
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Investors
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