From strategic advice to a working product: how we built the dental invoice checker

Strategic advice is only worth something once it leads to something that truly exists. Good product strategy consulting proves its value the moment it produces a real product, and the path from strategic advice to product is exactly what this piece is about. The dental invoice checker we developed for tandarts.nl is a great example: what began as an open strategic question became a working tool that lets patients check, in a few steps, whether their invoice is correct. In this article, we take you behind the scenes, from the first question to the choices around scope, technology, privacy and collaboration.

This is the story behind the case study of notacheckers.nl for tandarts.nl. There you read the result; here you read how we got there.

What did tandarts.nl ask for?

tandarts.nl didn’t come to us with a ready-made brief for a tool. The question was broader and more strategic: where do the opportunities lie, which need in the market is big enough to build on, and what does a product look like that genuinely answers it?

So our role began with the thinking, not the building. We did the market research, sharpened the problem and developed the concept. One idea emerged from that process as the clear winner: a consumer tool that lets anyone have their own dental invoice checked.

How do you turn a gut feeling into a sharp problem?

“People want to know whether their invoice is correct” is a feeling, not a product. The craft is in the focus. A dental invoice in the Netherlands consists of technical treatment codes with matching tariffs, tied to the NZA tariffs and to rules about which codes may and may not be combined. For the average patient, that’s a black box.

That gave us a clear, well-defined problem to solve: make that black box transparent. Not with legal jargon, but with an answer a patient understands in a few seconds on their phone. That problem definition became the compass for every later choice.

Why did we choose a pragmatic MVP?

The temptation in projects like this is to want to build everything at once. We deliberately chose the opposite: a pragmatic MVP that can go live quickly. The reason is strategic. By launching fast you generate volume, you validate whether the rules engine holds up in practice, and you collect data that makes the product better afterward.

That equally meant deciding what was left out. A fully dynamic website, advanced B2B features and extensive integrations we deliberately pushed to later phases. Scope discipline isn’t a limitation, it’s what makes a project feasible and fast. We built exactly enough to test the core hypothesis: can we reliably read and check an invoice?

What technical challenges were involved?

The biggest complexity didn’t lie in one spectacular feature, but in the chain that runs from a photo of an invoice to an understandable answer. Every link had to be right:

• Reading (OCR): a patient uploads or photographs their invoice. The tool has to reliably extract the treatment codes, descriptions, quantities, amounts and the total from it, across widely varying layouts and photo qualities.
• A human correction step: OCR is never a hundred percent. That’s why the user gets the extracted data in an editable view, so a misread field doesn’t undermine the outcome.
• Rules engine: this is the heart. The extracted codes are validated against the NZA tariffs, tariff amounts are checked against the maximum per code, and code combinations are tested against what may and may not go together. Every deviation is translated into a concrete difference in euros.
• An understandable result: all that complexity has to end in one clear answer. Is your invoice correct, or does it look like you overpaid, and by how much?

Around that came the conversion logic of a freemium model, a payment integration and an automatically generated PDF report. None of these is rocket science on its own, but together they form a system that has to work seamlessly on a phone, on a mobile network, within a few seconds.

How did we keep privacy intact from day one?

A tool that processes medical invoices can’t treat privacy as an afterthought. We made it a design choice. Original invoices are not kept: after processing, the source files disappear. What remains are the extracted lines and derived insights, linked to an anonymized identifier, never to a traceable person.

The patient’s identity is also never shared with a practice. Data that flows back to the platform is anonymized and aggregated. And a watertight data processing agreement and clear privacy terms were preconditions for going live at all, not something to arrange after the fact.

Why is the collaboration between strategy and development so decisive?

This is where the core lies for us. A sharp strategy that stumbles on the technology delivers nothing. A brilliant technical build without a strategic foundation, just as little. You make the difference by getting those two to fit tightly together.

The strategy, the concept, the NZA knowledge and the project management came from Customer Impact. The technical realization was in the hands of Sam from Samtech, our regular development partner. Because we sat at the same table from the start, the original problem definition stayed intact in every technical decision. No translation losses between “what we wanted” and “what got built”.

That’s exactly how we approach other projects too. If you want to have a website or platform built that stands on a strategic foundation, it begins in exactly the same place: with the problem, not the technology.

What did it deliver?

An open strategic question became a live tool that solves a concrete problem and gives patients a grip on their dental care invoice for the first time. But the real lesson is in the approach. Strategy only becomes valuable when it reaches the market, and that only works when research, concept and development form one coherent whole.

Do you have an idea you want to take from strategy to a working product, with someone who safeguards both the thinking and the execution? Schedule your free intake.