AADOM QUICKcast: Dollars and Sense for Your Practice and Patients

Video Description:

Review the patient’s financial landscape and barriers. An overview of the current dental payment and financial options and how they impact your practice and patients.

Course Learning Objectives:

• Learn why financing and payment options matter for your office and your patients
• Overcome barriers and find opportunities to support your patients
• Discover how to leverage your financing tools to increase case acceptance rates, assist with patient retention, attract new patients, and improve the office revenue

Sponsored by: Wellfit Technologies

Dollars and Sense for Your Practice and Patients

An overview of the current dental payment and financial options and how they impact your practice and patients.

Dental office managers confront significant challenges, including retaining patients, increasing revenue amidst reduced patient spending, and managing staff shortages and turnover.

Compounding these issues is the financial strain patients face, many of whom lack the means to proceed with recommended treatment plans.

As patients increasingly prioritize other needs over their dental care, addressing these obstacles becomes imperative to mitigate losses and ensure the success of your dental practice.

Payment and Financial Options That Impact Your Practice and Patients

Patients often forgo necessary care for several reasons, with financial concerns being the primary deterrent. Addressing this access gap to treatment is crucial.

Many patients hesitate to proceed with full treatment plans due to affordability and the need for more awareness about available financing options.

Payment options not discussed represent a missed opportunity. Many patients may be uncomfortable asking about financing, mistakenly assuming cash or personal credit card payments are their only options.

Proactively offering a financing option with every treatment plan allows patients to decline interest or ask for more information easily. Monthly payments tailored to the patient’s budget increase the likelihood of them accepting care.

Cash discounts for uninsured or underinsured patients may not effectively optimize care or promote patient retention. They prioritize immediate care and diminish the value of high-quality dental services.

Evaluate the frequency of offering cash discounts to uninsured patients. Transitioning these patients to dental discount plans retains them for at least a year.

New patient discount programs may initially attract new patients, but what measures are in place to ensure continued patronage? While these promotions are attractive to uninsured patients, presenting a dental plan recovers the expenditure attracting these new patients.

Insurance write-offs can be complex, as discussed in a recent blog post. To summarize, your office’s financial livelihood can hinge on its negotiating prowess.

Dental insurance reimbursement rates are continually declining and often lower than standard dentistry fees. Mishandling these negotiations can lead to losses in time, labor, personnel satisfaction, and revenue while also burdening patients with more out-of-pocket costs.

Exploring alternatives to traditional insurance and finding the right partner can provide a more transparent and dependable solution for patients and offices.

Insurance alternatives, such as dental plans or third-party financing, provide favorable benefits for many offices because they increase patient retention, improve care access, and provide a guaranteed fee for services.

Once a dental plan is in place, patients are more likely to have necessary work performed because they have a fixed cost they can budget around. Offices offering a Wellfit Dental Plan see enrolled patients visit three to four times annually, compared to the patients without one only visiting one to two times. When patients receive financing options that work with their budget to address the work they need, they elect care.

Staffing challenges must be considered, particularly for treatment coordinators and office managers with multiple responsibilities.

When implementing a financial program, consider its impact on staff responsibilities. Assess workflow and operational steps to facilitate a smooth patient financing process for your staff. Programs that are easy to understand, train, and integrate into daily workflows yield positive operational and financial results that are also scalable across multiple offices.

Simplified financing solutions are essential; too many options can overwhelm both staff and patients. A single, comprehensive program that accommodates various credit scores streamlines implementation and enhances patient participation.

A comprehensive review will tell a story. Evaluate your full-case conversion rates to gauge how many patients decline the recommended treatment plans. Investigate whether your office has adequate resources in place to support patients who may be hesitant due to financial constraints. Compare the number of proposed treatment plans with the number of patients moving forward.

Also, assess the percentage of patients using cash discounts and your patient turnover rates. Consider whether your existing approach generates revenue and effectively matches patients of varying FICO quality with financing partners.

Options That Enable You to Deliver Optimal Patient Care

Every patient deserves optimal dental care, and your staff deserves processes that make sense and improve their quality of life on the job. Many offices are turning to dental discount plans and third-party financing to deliver optimal patient care and improve financial positioning.

Wellfit’s streamlined partnership model offers DSOs and dental practices a wide range of financing services through a single platform that would otherwise require two or three different partners. Dental practices can improve their cash flow and reduce risky debt by providing a variety yet unified payment options.

Learn about the presenter:

Catlin Zuniga serves as the VP of Sales for Wellfit, leveraging extensive experience from her leading roles for healthcare and consumer finance institutions, including Philips Healthcare, Lending Club, and GreenSky. Over the past seven years, Catlin has dedicated her efforts to patient financing aiding dental offices to enhance their patient case presentations. Catlin has an innate business acumen and thrives on creating strong relationships with her partners, many of whom consider her to be a trusted advisor due to her depth of industry expertise.