Confusing dental bills and collection processes derails the experience of patients coming to your practice. To prevent the billing and collection process from hurting patient experience, dental practices should focus on managing patient’s expectations and encourage them to be accountable for paying their bills on time.
One of the crucial aspects that determine the success or failure of your dental practice is COLLECTIONS. With the increasing rise in high-deductible plans, patients are coming across huge dental bills that they are not even prepared to pay. This ultimately affects your practice.
Once you are done with the treatment part, the next step would be the collection of balance in your accounts receivable. You cannot afford to lose patients or profits by not collecting balances. Right? Collecting payments becomes a piece of cake if you have expert assistance backing up.
At Capline, we can help you collect your money so that you can focus on strengthening relationship with your patients.
How to Increase Collections?
To keep your practice running through, you need a plan of action that can help you improve patient collections. Given below are a few suggested by our experts:
Be As Upfront and Transparent As Possible
Dental treatment bills can be hard to budget for. There are times when patients expect to get treatment free of charge and sometimes they fail to realize whether the insurance has covered the entire procedure or not. In that case, you need to be transparent with patients about the treatment costs. Patients who are on high-deductible plan must be clearly reminded that they will likely be paying out-of-pocket.
Open Communication
As discussed above, it is very important to advise patients about payment policies. This not only creates a streamlined partnership between patient and provider but also keep things smooth. Patients are generally confused about what they are being billed. This is one of the key reasons they disagree to pay. They simply ignore the bills that they don’t understand. Being able to consistently communicate with the patients about their bills reduces the chances of denials in billing and maintains cash flow.
Send EOB’s
EOB or Explanation of Benefits is a direct window to your billing history. The EOB gives a clear picture indicating which benefit(s)/charge(s) are covered or not covered by the dental benefits plan. It is recommended to send clear and easy to understand EOB statements to eliminate any kind of confusion in billing. It should delineate the benefits and limitations of plan along with any balance due by the patient.
Dealing With Conflicts
When there are loopholes in the way things work, there are increased chances of error. Sometimes a bill may be sent out to a patient who has already paid the bill. The reasons for the same could be a miscommunication with insurance. To keep things organized, you should simply send out the statements to address the problem effectively.
Keep Your Patients Informed About the Policies
It is important to give patients a clear understanding of the policies related to your practice. Before the treatment starts, a financial agreement must be signed that states the responsibilities of patients and when the payment is expected. Any kind of changes made in the policy should further be communicated with the patients.
So, let’s start working on these tips and see how you can expand your practice’s bottom line.
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