I recently had a call with one of our dental teams.They have been struggling with getting financial arrangements for patients that slipped through the cracks.These patients did not have financial arrangements set up before treatment was rendered, and they were pretty frustrated.

I know there’s a lot of offices out there that have this as an issue that are looking for ways to solve it. So let’s dive into it.

Scenario

Patients have had treatment, and they still have a balance and they don’t have any written financial arrangement. We have sent multiple statements and no response. So what do we do?

Solution

Here’s a few things we came up with today to start clearing up some of those balances.

1. Print out your Aging Report and put them in largest to smallest balances. Ideally, you should start with the accounts that are over 90 days past due.
2. The best way to have these discussions is face to face. Review your schedule and see if any of these patients have upcoming appointments in the next 30 days. These could be patients that either don’t come or cancel their appointment because they have an outstanding balance. Get in touch with them to make sure they are coming in. However, getting a hold of people today is hard. They don’t answer their phones, and some never even listen to their voicemails anymore. But we highly recommend that you get these appointments confirmed, so that we can have a face to face discussion.
3. If you call and leave a message, use verbiage like, “Hi Judy, this is Dee Dee with Dr. Smith’s office. Dr. Smith asked me to call you today and wanted to ask you a question.  Please call me by the end of the day. I will be in the office until 5:00pm today and back tomorrow morning at 8:00am.”

• When the patient calls back, respond with something like, “Mrs. Jones, Dr. Smith was reviewing your chart today and wanted us to find out how everything was feeling after your last appointment.” If you can be more specific about what treatment we did for them that’s even better!
• Here’s the trick part - responding to the patient.
• If they are having issues, let’s get them in the office ASAP to get them taken care of. Then when they are in the office, we can set up a financial arrangement face to face.

1. If everything is great, then you can mention that they have a balance. “Mrs Jones, I’m showing here that you have balance on your account. Were you aware of this? Let’s see what we can do to help you get this cleared up.” This is the time to offer ways to help them get this balance paid with whatever payment options you can offer. 
2. Many offices have a way to do online payments and we can send them a text after we have made a verbal agreement on what will work for them. This way, patients can pay it directly from their phones.
3. The best way to make Financial Agreements is face to face. We use the @DentalIntelligence Morning Huddle feature daily to check for anyone with outstanding balances. This is a way to prepare for our patients coming in today and tomorrow and being ready to set up an arrangement face to face.

Having an Account Aging Report that seems out of control can easily be handled with these steps. We recommend each person working on this project to have a goal of contacting 3-5 patients per day and start with the largest balances first. 

This is one of our specialities, so if you find that your dental office is still having an issue with this process, let’s chat!