A lot of people make the assumption that running a dental practice is a piece of cake. Run your dental practice marketing, wait for patients, and repeat until success. Unfortunately, life is rarely so simple. There are plenty of moving parts that are involved in the success of a dental practice, and it’s going to take more than a good dental practice marketing strategy.
There are certain admin factors that need to be considered, such as collections. While it would be great for you to provide free dental health services to everybody, this won’t be good for your practice. Find out the best way to improve collections for your dental practice here.
Incentivize upfront payments
One simple way that you can help improve collections for your dental practice is by incentivizing upfront payments. You want patients to pay for their treatments upfront, as this is the best course of action for your dental practice. To help boost this, you should be incentivizing upfront payments.
For example, you can offer a small discount for treatments that have been paid upfront before the patient leaves your office. You can even offer a combination of services at a discount, as long as they paid upfront. There are plenty of ways to incentivize upfront payments.
Set up a financial policy
Sometimes you have to put your foot down for the benefit of your dental practice. You should make sure that you have a financial policy for your dental practice so that patients will be aware of what is expected of them, schedule-wise, when it comes to making payments for their treatment.
Offer electronic billing
If you only accept cash or cheque, you will find that there is a lot of potential for human error, which can affect how your dental practice receives payments from patients. Because of this, more dental practices are now offering electronic billing, which means they can accept payments through electronic channels, like using a credit card.
The reason why this is beneficial for both the practice and the patient is that it makes it easy for both parties to process and verify the payments. You can even implement an in-house system that allows patients to see how much they owe your practice and allow them to pay it online. This saves the hassle and waiting period that is usually associated with other forms of payments, like waiting for a cheque to clear or a bank deposit to go through.