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What credit coaching can do for your practice

Marla Merritt (DTI/Photo OrthoBanc)
Marla Merritt, USA

Marla Merritt, USA

Mon. 19 September 2011

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You’ve heard it on the news: banks just aren’t lending. In addition, more and more practices are discovering that third-party financing isn’t the best option for their patients who need high-dollar dental work. One of the main reasons for this shift is that third-party companies have started approving fewer patients due to stricter credit criteria.

This can mean that a person with good credit, who would have qualified for an interest free payment plan in the past, is no longer able to receive financing for dental work.

DentalBanc offers an alternative to third-party financing via credit checks and managed payment plans. Read below to learn about the benefits of assessing a patient’s credit risk and then contact DentalBanc to learn how Zuelke Automated Credit Coach (ZACC), used in conjunction with outsourced payment plans, can increase your case acceptance without creating extra work for your staff.

With ZACC:

  • You can identify the patients whose risk of non-payment is close to zero. This allows you to offer flexible, internal, financial arrangements, which assures measurably better case acceptance. (Even a tiny improvement to the rate of case acceptance in the average dental practice will generate thousands of dollars per year in additional net income!)
  • You can identify patients whose credit history or financial instability yields a significant risk of non-payment. With ZACC’s seven degrees of risk, you can structure your financial arrangements in a manner that will keep these risky patients from wreaking financial havoc on your practice.
  • You can significantly reduce the number of failed and/or cancelled appointments as well as have far few instances of clinical non-compliance. High credit-risk patients typically present a practice with more missed appointments and less clinical cooperation. Identifying these high credit-risk patients in advance will greatly diminish both of these issues.
  • You can prioritize patient contact. An appointment coordinator working on recall or a treatment coordinator working her pending file can prioritize calls so that “A” category patients are contacted before the “B” category patients, “B” before “C” and so on. Working the most profitable and compliant cases first just makes good business sense.
  • You can quantify the quality of your referral sources. If you pull a ZACC grade on new patients, you may discover that one marketing/advertising source is regularly sending you patients in the high-risk category while another referral source is sending you wonderful, low-risk patients. In this scenario, where should you focus your marketing dollars? Do you really want to spend marketing dollars in a manner that results in low quality, low dental IQ patients? Remember these are the patients who cannot afford your treatment plan, who only want to fix what hurts and who often disrupt the wellbeing of your practice via failed and cancelled appointments, poor clinical cooperation, delinquency, etc.
  • You can assess financial integrity. There are more families today with only one working wage earner, but that doesn’t mean you have to be strict with your financial arrangement. If ZACC indicates that a family with only one income source is still stable and paying their bills perfectly, you can confidently offer zero down payment terms or a contract length of the entire treatment time (or longer), which can positively boost case acceptance.

Note: ZACC was developed by Paul Zuelke who, after 10 years in the banking and finance industry, started his dental consulting business in 1980. In the 31+ years since, Zuelke & Associates has taught and trained well over 1,000 private dental clients the value of in-office credit granting. His clients are among the most productive and profitable within the profession, he said.

Zuelke is the author of the book, “Cash or Credit,” a guide to risk identification, credit granting and delinquency control in the dental office, a multi-year PennWell best seller. Zuelke lectures nationally and can be reached at +1 800 845 4766.

 

 

 

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