Dues payable for services rendered to a patient are not an ideal scenario for a dental practice. Payments from patients too must come on time to keep the cash flows going. For a dental practice, dental patient statement services outsourced to a professional agency or managed in-house are vital for cash flows. A dental practice expects a patient to pay the expected amount in full on the day of the appointment or before.
However, that rarely happens as the practice needs to send claims to the insurance companies to pay their portions of the treatment offered to patients while the patient also waits to receive treatment and then pays when the job is done.
In many cases, there is a bit of inertia among patients to make payments and a consistent approach is needed to receive dues owed to the practice. Once a practice has sent the initial two or three invoices and no response has been received, the dental team needs to follow up and carefully increase the frequency of reminders.
At times, it can be a delicate situation as the practice cannot be very demanding and confront the patient on payable dues as it can turn the patient relationship sour. However, it is possible that once the dues are built, they might not visit the practice again. A few challenges that need to be encountered are as below:
Billing statements take a long time to prepare and the team needs to print and ship these statements to the correct address of the patient. There can be manual tasks involved from packing bills into envelopes and then depending on a courier or the post office for final shipment to the patient.
Alternatively, a practice can depend on automated solutions to generate patient statements that are precise and yet affordable. One can use third-party print and mail services to streamline all patient statement shipping activities from the beginning to the end.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) regulates the collection of dues and third-party usage for collection and safeguards the patient against harsh or unfair collection modes. The practice needs to ensure that billing statements comply with data privacy and other mandatory guidelines.
A patient is bound to receive multiple communication statements and advertisements in the mail from credit cards, retail chains, healthcare services, and more. There must be absolute clarity when sending a dental billing statement about who is sending the statement and what action is needed.
The name and logo of the practice need to be visible on the envelope and the patient statement. This prevents the mailer from being junked by the patient. Some colorful text and graphics can attract the patient’s attention and help them see that this is from the practice and that dues need to be paid.
Paper statements have always been the go-to choice for a practice for decades. As can be witnessed in the last few years, a large volume of patients are now paying bills online and are even tracking their dues online.
Many companies too have converted bills into a paperless format and a practice can explore the usage of both, paper and digital. In addition to receiving the paper statement in the mail, the patient can also be given access to statements via the patient portal. A practice can make patient statements available online while securely backing them up with paper statements.
A large volume of everyday billing is getting paid online with debit or credit cards. Practices can offer patients a debit or credit card option to pay bills as it is quick and convenient. The team can integrate the payment via your patient portal. All card payments can be made secure by using the right technology and software. This will help to boost the quantum of online and on-time payments that a practice receives. The billing statement can outline all the possible payment options available to the patient.
When a practice sends a statement to the patient, there can still be a misunderstanding in the patient's mind. Dental bills can be unfamiliar to some patients who are not familiar with them. The way ahead is to highlight the area and amount payable by the patient a little differently. This will make the amount the patient is liable to pay clear. The area of the bill that provides details about what the insurance company will cover can be made a little less prominent.
Difficult patient collections will decrease by eliminating any confusion around their responsibility toward the bill. This is a way to lower difficult patient collections by highlighting and educating patients about pending dues. One also needs to make the patient aware of any payment plans that can be availed, resources available to make payments, and the consequences of not making timely payments.
When generating a patent statement, the dental team needs to make sure that all details about the patient’s insurance plan and coverage details are highlighted.
For patients who avail of dual coverage, details of the primary and secondary insurance plans need to be included. Any pending amount awaited by the practice from the insurance company needs to be added as this enables the patient to stay updated about bills and payments and reduces any possible doubt.
These details need to be highlighted at the top of the statement so that it is easily visible to the patient. The dental team should avoid the use of any unnecessary and add only pertinent details regarding dues receivables.
In case a practice sends patient statements on any fixed day of the month, then all patients would receive their statements at approximately the same time. Patients willing to make payments will pay immediately and there will be a spurt of payments in a particular week. It is advisable to stagger the delivery of statements so that payments can be distributed across the month.
Moreover, there could be many patients who receive statements and might not recollect the amounts related to their EOB. They will call the practice for clarifications or objections. When all statements are sent on a fixed day, this could result in an increased number of calls to discuss dues for a few days. Hence it is advisable to send patient statements across the month.
On completion of a procedure, the dental team needs to submit the claim to the insurance company at the earliest. When the claim gets approved, Once the insurance company processes the claim, the EOB is sent to the practice and the patient. The patient may review the EOB and might not pay much consideration.
This could be explained as follows. The practice sends a patient statement on the fifteenth of the month while the EOB reaches the patient on the twentieth of the previous month. Since a good amount of time has lapsed between the EOB and the patient statement, a patient is not likely to remember the EOB.
A practice can enhance the possibility of patients paying bills preferably immediately after the procedure is complete and the EOB has been received.
The practice can make use of dental patient statements as a tool to inform patients about dues and follow it up with a message or a phone reminder. With billing statements, there are challenges and the practice must navigate all of them successfully and make them work in its favor.