Neat, concise, clear information about how patients can pay for dental treatment in your office is extremely important in a well-run, modern practice.
Simply giving a patient an itemized, detailed printout from your dental software confuses the patient and generates questions. It also dramatically decreases your case acceptance.
After a thorough clinical examination, the doctor needs to clearly explain the problems, treatment alternatives, and risks with the patient. Using “visual aids” such as panoramic digital x-rays and (especially) digital clinical photographs are extremely helpful in clarifying the treatment needs. It is the role of the doctor, during the case presentation, to establish in the patient’s mind both the need for the treatment and the desire to have the treatment done. This needs to be done before the Payment Options are presented.
The second part of the treatment presentation is an explanation of how the patient can comfortably pay for the treatment in your office ie, your payment options. This is usually best handled by a staff person rather than the doctor. Ideally, we think it should be handled by the person who was in the operatory when the doctor presented the treatment … most often the chairside. This avoids the dreaded “hand-off” to a front desk person with whom the patient has not really bonded. Hand-offs also seem very commonly to induce “patient amnesia” when they forget the need for the treatment just presented by the doctor! An extended review of the treatment plan should not be done by the person presenting the payment options – just a clear explanation of how the patient can comfortably afford the treatment. Any staff person, with a little practice, should be able to quickly learn the verbal skills necessary.
Below are two choices of payment options:
The first, in the video, is information about the software we had written specifically for this purpose. The software does not require either MS Word or MS Excel – it is entirely stand-alone and you can run it on as many computers as you wish. Admittedly, the video is somewhat of an “infomercial” for the software but it also discusses our general philosophy regarding presenting payment options to patients. In a nutshell, “Always give people choices; all of them yours!” See the description below on How to Order Payment Options.
The second set of choices are our early versions (free!) of the payment options but they do require MS Word and MS Excel. You can download and modify any of the templates shown below to use depending on your specific needs. It is often advantageous to use several different options in different situations and with different patients. For example, you may wish to extend in-house interest-free payments for a patient considering orthodontics but only offer a more restrictive set of options for a patient who needs treatment involving only one or two appointments – especially if you have concerns about the patient’s creditworthiness.
PLEASE NOTE: The Payment Options presented here are “compound documents” that use both MS Word and MS Excel. Both these programs (any version) need to be installed on the computer from which the Payment Options are prepared. Microsoft Office Home & Student 2010 (not the newest version) is available online for about $100. This has both Word and Excel.
Here is the infomercial about our Payment Options and also our philosophy of presenting any payment options to patients:
How to order Payment Options:
Payment Options 10 is part of our Consulting Membership Only ($99 per month; cancel anytime) This also includes our automatically updated syllabus on using Open Dental and our Report Manager suite of custom reports. You can sign up online by clicking this link. When you sign up, we will send you instructions on how we will install this on as many of your Open Dental workstations as you wish.
Here are the free downloadable and modifiable templates you can use:
5% of pt portion and care credit
Our Current Invisalign Payment Options
Do you need help making Payment Options “work” in your practice?
That’s one of the many things we do!
209-603-9944
