One of the most frustrating obstacles a dental office can face is collecting overdue patient payments. Most patients know very little about the dental plan they have with their employer. Most dental patients, will hand over the information to a front desk clerk and just hope that everything is covered. Fortunately, this “hope and pray” method usually works for most. This is to the benefit of both the dentist's office and the patient.
However, what happens when the costs exceed the amount covered in your dental insurance plan? The plan may not cover all expenses and the patient may be required to pay the remaining balance. Sometimes this can come as a surprise and the patient may not be ready to pay at the time. Continue reading more information about this article.
Faced with a situation as common as the above, dental offices run the risk of losing a patient forever. Some patients will value paying next month's rent over the potential damage an unpaid dental bill can do to their credit score. In other situations, patients feel a sincere obligation to pay the bill, but find themselves in such a financial situation that they cannot pay the full amount upfront.
If the dental office is unable to work out a payment plan, the balance will fall behind and, in many cases, will never be recovered. This hurts everyone involved because it increases the cost of doing business for the dental office, which in turn forces them to raise the prices of other paying patients to try to cover some of the loss. Fortunately, the dental office has options to try to get payment from the overdue patient.
The first recommendation is to contact the patient by phone or send a delinquency notice to the patient's residents. If after a few weeks you have not been able to contact the patient, it may mean that the patient has moved or is avoiding collection attempts for various reasons.
This is the situation where it makes the most sense to hire an experienced debt collection agency to try and secure payment of the overdue bill. Hiring collection agencies have several rewarding benefits. The collection agency will have resources like skip tracing tools to locate the patient that they will use to get alternate phone numbers.
After contacting the patient, the collection agency can ensure payment quickly and professionally by treating the patient with respect to ensure that the relationship between the patient and the dental office is not damaged, this is very important.
No one wants to deal with overdue bills, especially an office worker who will later have to see a patient face-to-face in the dental office. This makes encounters very uncomfortable for both parties, and you don't want to humiliate your patients. Hiring a third-party collection agency will help avoid this problem, increase employee morale, and most importantly, help improve the bottom line of the practice.
