Having your front desk staff member spend time on collections efforts costs your practice time, energy, and money. While some collections efforts are unavoidable, it’s much better for your accounts receivable to get paid on time. Here are the top five ways Denticon Practice Management Solution helps ensure that your practice gets paid on time consistently.
Collecting Payments on Time
For all practices, ensuring accurate billing, offering transparent pricing at the time of appointment, and offering multiple payment options (i.e., membership plans, payment plans, CareCredit, etc.) helps make the payment process as smooth as possible. With fewer hurdles and no unexpected surprises, patients are less likely to find reason to delay payment.
So, what are some of the top reasons why a payment might not be collected on time?
- There was lack of transparency and the patient didn’t fully understand their bill
- The patient forgot to make payment
- There was no convenient way to make payment
- The patient couldn’t afford to make the payment
- The office didn’t collect payment at the time of the appointment
How Denticon Addresses Each Obstacle
1. Billing Transparency
Patients want transparency to understand what they’re paying for. Proving a clear picture of the total cost a patient owes and keeping them apprised of their co-pays, frequencies, and maximums goes a long way in helping patients stay current on their bills. Patients who aren’t surprised with bills that significantly deviate from initial estimates and understand what went into calculating each bill are more likely to make payments quickly.
Here, Denticon can help you share real-time numbers with your patients by using the advanced fee schedule and insurance module, so your estimated numbers are very accurate. Building trust through transparency about what the patient is responsible for, as well as the entire cost, encourages timely payments and return visits.
2. Timely reminders
Patients are busy. The vast majority have every intention of making payments on time. But with busy schedules, patients can sometimes forget that they owe a payment. This is where a timely reminder from your office can help patients check this task off their to-do list.
With Denticon’s patient communication tools, your practice can periodically send automated payment reminders to patients with outstanding bills. With automated communications and segmented lists, your practice can continually send reminders to help patients stay on top of their bills without creating any additional work for your staff.
Since reminder messages include a convenient link that patients can click to make payments, it’s not only easy for your team to send reminders, it’s easier for your patients to make payments, too.
3. Convenient Online Payments
Following the above reminder, patients also need a quick and convenient way to pay their bills before they forget. The easier it is, the more likely that it will get done. Patients these days want the convenience of paying their bill on their phone while they’re going about their day. Paper statements are becoming less and less favored by patients, particularly younger ones. Sending a mobile payment link along with your reminder makes it so much easier for patients to make payments right then and there.
Help patients make quick and easy payments using Denticon’s patient portal. With Denticon’s patient portal, patients can make payments on their own time, from the convenience of their home or via their phone while they’re on the go. And with since payments automatically post to your ledger within Denticon, there’s no manual entry required.
4. Affordable Payment Options
A major patient concern that can cause missed or delayed payments is the inability (whether real or perceived) to pay the bill. Sometimes, patients might not be aware that they have alternate payment options available to them. Helping them make flexible and affordable payments over time can help ease the financial burden so that patients can stay on top of their bills. Or, your patient might want to opt to finance the cost through a credit card like CareCredit.
And with the CareCredit integration in Denticon, you can quickly look up which patients already have a CareCredit account and which patients are preapproved. If they’d like, applying for CareCredit takes just a few moments. With this information at your fingertips, you can easily present options to your patients, so they are empowered to choose the option that works best for them.
5. Consistent Payment Collection with SmartAssist
Perhaps the easiest way to ensure that your practice can get paid on time is to make sure that every patient makes payment before they leave your office. It helps to standardize patient check in and check out to ensure each patient that leaves your office has completed making any outstanding payments. The more consistently your office can stick to this best practice, the fewer collection efforts will need to be spent afterward.
To help ensure that nothing slips through the cracks on even the busiest of days, Denticon’s SmartAssist feature provides a real-time checklist that includes a customizable list of everything that should be completed for every appointment, including collecting payments.
With SmartAssist, your staff can quickly visualize which patients still need to make payments and which ones have already paid. It’s a more efficient way to collect payments consistently, and it saves your patient time, too.
Save Staff Time and Get Paid with Denticon
With a little help from Denticon, you can help reduce the need for collections with accurate billing, increased transparency for patients, tools to assist staff in collecting payment, as well as offering payment options. Contact us for a free demo to learn more.