Collections

One of the more unpleasant assignments in any practice is dental debt collection. At a time when dentists and their teams are trying so hard to acquire patients and build strong, long-term relationships with them, it can be disheartening when those patients fail to pay on time for the professional services they’ve received. Your production total may be up, but if you don’t collect, you’ve wasted your time and effort.

It costs quite a bit to keep a dental office running, and those operating expenses come out of practice revenues before you see any income. It’s impossible to avoid this “cost of doing business,” but you can and should exercise tight control over this overhead.

Dental insurance has become commonplace in most practices today. Dentists who formerly debated whether they should accept insurance now focus on which plans to accept and how to achieve sufficient revenues in spite of low (and decreasing) reimbursements from insurance companies.

Out-of-pocket costs for dental care are rising for patients, thanks to fewer adults having dental insurance and more insurance companies reducing coverage. Where does that leave patients? Usually turning down treatment, especially larger cases, because they simply can’t afford it. Or if they do accept treatment, some have difficulty paying for it, resulting in a collection issue for the practice. To increase case acceptance while reducing overdue collections, Levin Group recommends to its consulting clients that they offer the following four dental payment options to patients:

Your practice management software can probably generate a huge number of financial performance metrics. If you try to keep track of too few or too many of them—or the wrong ones—they won’t help you manage your practice successfully. With experience, you’ll learn which are most helpful for you, but until then you should monitor what I call Key Production Indicators, or dental KPIs.