Sterling Practice Management - Glendale, CA: If you are working hard providing high-quality dental care to a lot of people, yet find yourself with very little money to show for it, you probably fell into the following trap. Somewhere along the line you didn’t have many patients, or you felt that your patient numbers were dwindling. So, you agreed to see patients from very low paying HMO and PPO plans as well as welfare patients.
Next thing you know, you find yourself slaving away and actually making only 50 cents on the dollar, if that. Non-paying customers are rarely the best customers. They tend to frequently miss appointments, complain more and often fail to get better. There are reasons for this which we won’t get into here. Suffice it to say that life can become very aggravating with no-shows, cancellations, too much stress and difficulty paying the bills.
There are gradient solutions to handling these problems.
Categorizing Your Patients
Make a list of all your low-paying plans. Categorize them from worst to best in descending order, in terms of percentage of your fees you receive. Include on the list all plans that pay less than 80%.
If your schedule is already quite full, start eliminating them one by one from the top down.
Our clients find that as soon as they make room for patients by ridding themselves of the worst plans, cash patients or patients with good insurance materialize out of thin air. But if you are apprehensive about it, do it step by step, one at a time.
If Your Schedule is Full of Low-Paying Patients
If you fill your schedule with low-paying patients, you are then left with little or no time to see the higher-paying patients. There is nothing worse than having a new patient wait two, three or more weeks to be seen. And while most dentists will somehow fit emergencies into the schedule, who wants to work through lunch and dinner while making all the other patients wait for hours?
But there is something you can do until your schedule frees up enough for you to be able to fit in new patients, emergencies, and large procedures within a day or two. Each day, set aside an hour or so for them. This would be a different time of day each day to accommodate different schedules. You don’t want to lose a three-unit bridge because the patient didn’t want to wait two weeks, do you?
What if Your Schedule isn't Too Full?
If your schedule isn’t that full or you are too concerned about your ability to replace the low-paying patients or patients on welfare, here’s another solution. Start cluster booking them into the less popular times of day when you normally have no or less patients.
In the case of welfare patients and any other group known for cancellations and no-shows, you might also want to start double booking. It’s a bit nerve wracking if they all happen to show up, but it’s less of a hardship than having no patients in a schedule which that morning was so booked you had to turn away a patient.
As a side note: If you often find you suddenly have time slots in your schedule with no patients, you might also want to keep a list of people who are willing and able to come in at very short notice. Whenever you book someone more than a week ahead, ask them if they’d like to be called if an earlier appointment opens up. If so, add them to the list.
The very least you can do, to start with, is stop accepting additional patients from those particular plans.
Promote to the Patients You want
It goes without saying that in the meantime, you would want to promote as much as possible to the type of patients you’d like to attract to your practice. The more you do this and the more successful your promotions, the easier it will be. But even if you don’t know how to market yourself, your practice and its services, the mere fact that there is now some room on your schedule for other types of patients tends to “miraculously” draw them in.
Sterling Practice Management can help you to attract the type of patients you want. We have been doing exactly that for over 36 years—helping dental practices to increase the flow of new patients into their office. We can do the same for you. Find out what we have to offer by getting our free practice solutions DVD or by attending our next workshop.
Senior Consultant, Sterling Practice Management