Summary
In this solo episode, Dayna discusses how accounts receivable and collections is a team sport in every dental practice. She highlights the negative impact of overdue balances and emphasizes the need to collect on the day of service. Dayna introduces a proactive approach to accounts receivable, involving the entire dental team. She suggests preparing the patient by providing treatment estimates and educating them about their out-of-pocket expenses. Dayna also emphasizes the importance of preparing the team by ensuring everyone is aware of patients who owe money. Lastly, she discusses the significance of asking for money on the day of service.
Takeaways:
- Accounts receivable is a team sport and requires a proactive approach
- Collecting on the day of service is crucial for practice profitability
- Preparing the patient by providing treatment estimates helps build relationships and improves collections
- Preparing the team and ensuring everyone knows which patients owe money is essential for successful collections.
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Transcript provided by Riverside AI so please ignore any misspelled words or grammar errors.
Dayna (00:01.654)
Hey, my friends, welcome. I am here today doing a solo episode. I know in the past couple of weeks, I’ve had several guests on my podcast, which has been amazing because I’ve had some just incredible relevant topics. So if you want to hear about maybe…
how to protect your doctor in a lawsuit. You can listen back to Dr. Mitchell Gardner a couple of weeks ago, or if you wanna hear about how to reduce cancellations and no shows with Carrie Weber, you can definitely look back in our past episodes over the past month or so, and you’ll hear from some of our guests in the past.
And so today I’m back doing a solo episode and it’s a very important topic. And it’s also a topic that kind of encompasses the next few weeks of our podcasts over the next couple of weeks. We’re going to be talking about accounts receivable, collections. And so my topic today is accounts receivable is a team sport. And
The reason I want to talk about this today is because I’m seeing a lot of accounts receivable issues in practices. I was in a practice recently and the over 90 day past due balances was over 200 percent. And so what that means is that when your accounts receivable goes, you know,
past 60 days, you’ve already lost about 30% of the value of that money. Now let’s just kind of back up a little bit and let me talk to you first about what accounts receivable is. And so accounts receivable of course is the amount of money that you have sitting on the books. It’s not yet in the bank. And so
Dayna (02:08.17)
This is money that either the insurance company or your patients have pledged to you that they’re going to pay because they’ve had services done, but it’s not yet in the bank. And so it is sitting on your accounts receivable, which means that you need to collect it. And the longer you wait to collect that money, the less value that money is to the practice. So that means that the longer you wait,
past the date of service, the loss in that money really, because the amount of time, the amount of resources, the amount of just useable like paper and phone calls and all these resources that we use to collect money, that reduces the value of our money. And so,
We really want to talk about collecting on the day of service. That is like the most important thing that you can do in your practice to help your practice, your business, be more profitable and give you the opportunity to give your team raises and help your team go on CE trips or…
You know, go to ThriveLive in May, or go to the AADOM Conference in September, or get new scrubs if your clinical team needs new scrubs. All of that comes from the profitability of the practice, and maybe you wanna start a 401K for your team members, or maybe you wanna be able to give them a gym membership as part of their benefits, you know? So…
If we want to do all of those things, if we wanna be able to offer our team members benefits and better salaries and raises, that all comes out of the profitability of the practice. And so collecting on the day of service helps our practice be more profitable. And so let’s talk about that for a second, because…
Dayna (04:22.806)
Today, what I wanna talk about is being more proactive, giving your practice a proactive approach to adopting a more team focused approach to collections. So I want you to think about being proactive and not reactive. And when I say reactive, I mean, that’s when you are…
sending a lot of billing statements and you’re having to make collection calls and you’re having to you know chase people down for money you know I’m not talking about running down the street chasing people after money but I am talking about that you are actively like doing phone calls or sending collection letters or sending billing statements that’s all being reactive and being reactive is hard it’s hard work and you know when you are chasing people for money
then you’re also putting the relationship between you and the patient at risk. And so, when patients owe you money, then that means that maybe we didn’t do a good enough job giving that patient an estimate, or maybe the insurance company denied something that we…
you know, we thought that the insurance company was going to cover, but the insurance company ended up denying it. Now the patient is, is mad because the insurance company thinks, or the patient thinks that they shouldn’t have had to have it done because their insurance company didn’t cover it. And so anytime we’re chasing patients for money, we always run the risk of it damaging our relationship with our patients. So, so we don’t want that to happen. We want to be more proactive.
when we are looking at collections, when we’re looking at accounts receivable, and it is a team sport. So I really want you to think about accounts receivable being more proactive and it becoming more of a team sport. Everyone on the team can help influence and participate in accounts receivable. So here’s what I’m talking about.
Dayna (06:46.414)
Thanks for watching!
Dayna (06:53.578)
All right, so here’s what I’m talking about. Number one, I want you to prepare the patient. So what we wanna do in our proactive approach is we want to prepare the patient better for what their out-of-pocket is going to be on the day of service. So what that means is that we have to do a little bit more work on the front end to make sure that the back end
We’re not having to do all this extra work on the back end. So a little bit more work on the front end. So what does that mean? What that means is that you are checking patient benefits, that you are at least giving the patient the best estimate that you can, so that the patient is more prepared for their out-of-pocket expense, their out-of-pocket investment.
on the day of service. So we do want to make sure that we’re giving patients a treatment estimate before we schedule the appointment. Not after we schedule the appointment, okay? Before we schedule, before they get on our appointment book, the patient needs to know what to budget for. I don’t care if it’s $25 or $2,500. We need to let the patient know what they need to budget for.
for the investment for that dental visit. It could be a $25 fluoride, or it could be a $2,500 dental implant. No matter what it is, it’s important that our patients know what their out-of-pocket investment is before they schedule that appointment. This helps them budget for the appointment. It also helps you to build that relationship with your patient because you are
Helping them understand what their dental benefits might be. It’s just helping you prepare the patient for what they need to pay for before they walk out the door. So this is a really great patient building, relationship building process. Now I realize that it might be a little bit more work. You have to check on their benefits. You might have to see if they’ve…
Dayna (09:15.518)
maximize their benefits for the year? Have they met their deductible? And so I’m not saying that you need to find out every little limitation and frequency of their dental insurance, but you do need to at least be able to give the patient an estimate for the services before they schedule. So this might be a printed estimate. You can print an estimate very easily out of your Dentrix software.
I was just in a practice and they actually print all the estimates from the clinical room and send the estimate up to the front desk so the front desk knows before the patient even walks up to the front what the treatment is that they need to have done so they can prepare that estimate before the patient walks out the door. And so that was smart, so smart. And it’s just…
they’ve just, that’s been part of their practice is the clinical team prepares the estimate. They send it, they don’t go, the clinical team doesn’t go over the money with the patient but they do treatment plan and they do send the treatment plan estimate up to the front desk printer so that the front desk can then review the cost estimate with the patient. But it’s a team sport, right? So the clinical team.
is treatment planning, sending that treatment plan estimate up to the front desk computer, printer. I thought that was brilliant. So you could create some kind of a system that way. I think all the treatment planning needs to come out of the back. And then the front desk or the financial coordinator or the treatment coordinator prepares the estimate for the patient so that when the patient is ready to schedule, that’s already been done. It’s already been talked about. The patient knows what their budget is,
what their investment is for that day. So that’s number one, preparing the patient for what their out-of-pocket expenses will be for that visit. Okay, that’s number one. Number two is we have to prepare our team. So what does that mean? Well, in the morning huddle, or maybe you have like an admin team morning huddle, but.
Dayna (11:32.754)
Everyone on the team needs to know all the patients that are coming in today and what patients owe money today. And so if you’ve been listening to me talk for a while, you probably know that I like to use the appointment note in Dentrix to put what the patient out of pocket is for today. So you can put like just, you know, PP patient portion, $200.
you know, or patient owes for fluoride today, whatever that might be. So everyone on the team knows all the patients that owe money today so that you don’t just let the patient walk out the door without making their payment for today. So that’s preparing the team. So everyone on the team can collect money, use the credit card machine, you know, everybody on the team should
know how to use the credit card machine. One thing that I love in one of the recent Dentrix updates is they put a pay button right on the appointment. So you can click right on the pay button right on the appointment if you’re using Dentrix pay and make the pay. You don’t even have to go to the ledger. You just put in the credit card or scan the credit card or whatever. Sometimes you can even have a credit card on file.
And so it’s super easy to collect money nowadays. So that’s number two is preparing your team. So everyone on the team should know what patients owe money today. And then number three is everyone on the team should know how to ask for money. Okay, so number three is asking your patients for their copay. And the way you ask for money on the day of service is
It looks like today your patient portion is $200. How would you like to take care of that today?
Dayna (13:36.158)
and then pause and let the patient either they’re going to pull out their credit card or they’re going to write you a check. You know, if they say something like, oh, well, I forgot my, my checkbook at home or I forgot my credit card at home. Great. Let me send you a link right to your phone right now so that when you get home, you can just punch in your credit card right into our, our mobile app.
our mobile payment process, and then you can make your payment as soon as you get home. So there’s always ways to collect money, but it is important that we ask the patient before they walk out the door that they owe money. So those are the three things that we talk about how you can create a more proactive team approach to your collections and your accounts receivable. So
We’re gonna go back over that. Number one is prepare the patient. Make sure that the patient understands what their investment is for on the day of service and that it is due on the day of service. Number two is prepare your team. So making those notes in the appointment note and also making sure that the copy of the treatment estimate is in the document center. So if you wanna find…
that exact copy of the treatment estimate that your patient received that should be in the document center. And then number three is asking for money on the day of service. So those three things, prepare your patient, prepare your team and ask on the day of service. Those three things, if you do those three things, your accounts receivable is gonna be golden. Your accounts receivable is gonna look better than it ever has. Because
you are being more proactive about collecting money and not reactive and not chasing down money. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. This was really fun for me. You probably could tell that I am very casual today. Baseball hat, no makeup. I actually am on vacation. I am in Cancun, Mexico. And so I thought, hey, you know what? I need to record a podcast for this week.
Dayna (15:59.638)
I’ve been a little bit behind on my podcasting, so I needed to make sure I got this done before I headed home. But I hope that you enjoyed this episode. If you did enjoy this episode and you would like to share it, please share it, rate it, review it. This is how my information, this is how all my content gets out into the world is by you.
rating it, reviewing it, sharing it with your colleagues. And I hope you have a great rest of your week. And I look forward to watching your journey of becoming a high performing dental team.
