How to Collect Patient Payments Faster in Your Dental Office

And, you know, we're seeing too in dentistry, Craig, I don't know if you're seeing this in all the, you know, dentists that you're working with, you know, dentists are starting to get a little fed up with insurance companies.

You might have noticed that a little bit.

And we are seeing, I mean, I think the ADA statistics are that one out of three or one out of four dentists, we call it changing their relationship with insurance, and some of them are going to fee for service, and the ones that go to fee for service are- tend to be happier.

And those doctors that are going out of dealing with insurance plans are now gonna be dealing with more patient payments, right? So for a fee for service practice, 100% of the payments are going to be there.

That's kind of important that we understand how that works.

Now, you've been in the industry.

What changes have you seen in patient payments and how they've been managed over the years?

Yeah, a couple things, and I'll just kinda give 30 seconds of context, and this is not entirely dissimilar in other industries as well.

If you think about seven, eight years ago, we had this explosion of these point software solutions that were really great fundamentally at doing one thing and one thing very well, and those were great when you had, like, two or three of them across an entire business operation.

But everybody woke up a couple years ago and realized, "I have 20 of these things." It's kinda messy, right? So this consolidation really is the key trend, and again, this is sorta how we think about the world, but this is writ large in many different spaces.

And so that's number one trend is the desire to reduce that vendor count for those specific disciplines or buckets of operation in the business.

Second thing I would throw out there as a, as an obvious trend, you kinda touched on it here.

There's just more of a patient out-of-pocket portion for any number of reasons.

That could be a whole nother podcast if we wanted to.

So practices need more solutions than ever to create, present, and collect because there's more of a need to create, present, and collect from patients.

So those two issues have compounded into something pretty significant and serious for problem perspective.

Each solution, as you know, is another system to govern, to train, to pay for, to optimize, to work into your SOPs and workflows, and any time something changes into that, the whole system has to change around it.

And of course, there's all kinds of things around security and compliance that goes along with software today in an ever-increasing, let's just call it compliance aware environment.

Yeah, the bad guys are getting smarter and smarter, and the more we try and fight with them, this is something I always talk to people about as far... and I'll tell you, doctors, please listen to this, and I've said it before.

If you think that your IT guy is your cybersecurity consultant, please think again 'cause they're not, for the most part.

But so, Craig, let's dig into a little bit of what are some of the different programs that dentists are getting or have in their practices that cost them more money, and what do they do? What are some of the things...

I know some doctors have in-office membership plans, and I know we'll talk about credit card processing, but talk about some of the different things that you're seeing.

I mean, I'm, I'm sure you've gone into offices and you're seeing doctors paying for three, four, five different programs that some of them are just not necessary.

So talk about what doctors are paying for that they really don't need.

I'll come at it slightly differently, but I'll certainly get to the, the gist of what you're-