The Top Three Payment Mistakes made by Dental Practices
Many dental practices of all sizes have failed to keep up with the shifts in payment technology. After talking to and working with 75+ practices to improve their payment experience, FeatherPay identified three common dental practice payment mistakes made today.
Given the monumental changes in payments over the last few years, from the rise of contactless payments to the proliferation of third party financing, failing to deliver a great payment experience can hurt a dental office's financial performance significantly. FeatherPay has worked with dental practices of all sizes on their patient payment payment experience. Through this process we have identified three common dental practice payment mistakes that lead to lost revenue for the practice.
Mistake 1: Failing to present all payment options clearly
Many practices offer patients a wide degree of flexibility in how they pay for their care, but this information is buried on an obscure webpage on the dental office website and never presented to the patients in a clear way. As a result, many patients don’t realize their different options -- they might as well not exist.
The Bottom Line: if patients can’t see all the options your practice enables them to pay for their care when they get their bill, some are probably walking away without realizing they have options.
Mistake 2: Making it difficult to pay
Many dental practices face technology limitations which make paying for care inconvenient. Instead of communicating with patients electronically, they send out paper bills. Instead of enabling a patient to pay by text directly, they require logging into a portal or visiting a webpage and entering information. Rather than saving a card on file or enabling contactless digital payments like ApplePay, they require a patient to fill out their information manually. Each of these steps creates leakage, where patients who are able to pay choose not to because it’s simply too inconvenient for them.
The Bottom Line: if letting your patients pay for care isn’t as easy as clicking a link on a text message or email, then your accounts receivable is probably higher than necessary due to pure inconvenience.
Mistake 3: Not letting patients use multiple payment options to complete their transaction
At FeatherPay, we’ve seen that ~10% of patients with an out-of-pocket payment larger than $1,000 opt to use multiple payment methods to pay for that care. There are several potential reasons a patient may choose to split their care -- a single payment method can provide insufficient funding for their care, they may be splitting a bill with a spouse or relative, or they may be trying to use their full HSA/FSA allowance for the year -- but enough patients split payments to make this functionality critical for any dental office.
The Bottom Line: if you don’t make it convenient for patients to use multiple payment types to complete their transaction, then you’re probably failing to maximize your case acceptance for larger treatment plans.
FeatherPay is a payment platform that accelerates revenue and lowers operational costs for healthcare companies, while delivering a great experience for patients. FeatherPay consolidates all the different ways your practice enables payments into a single experience for patients and administrators.
Companies that use FeatherPay have seen 5-20% increase in their revenues as well as improvements in operational metrics such as patient satisfaction and sales rep performance.
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