Too Much Work and
Too Little Money Got You Down?
If you are working very hard helping a lot of people yet find yourself with very little money to show for it you probably fell into the following trap. Somewhere along the line you didn’t have that many patients, or you got worried you wouldn’t, and thus you agreed to see patients from very low paying HMO and PPO plans as well as welfare patients.
Pretty soon you find yourself slaving away and getting 50 cents on the dollar, if that. Worse, non-paying customers are rarely the best customers. They tend to miss more appointments, complain more, not get better. There are reasons for this which we won’t get into here. Suffice it to say that life can become very aggravating with no shows, cancellations, lots of stress and a hard time paying the bills.
Here are gradient solutions to getting rid of these problems and starting to enjoy dentistry and life more.
Make a list of all your low paying plans in order of the worst - in terms of percentage of your fees you receive - to the best. Include on the list all plans that pay less than 80%. If your schedule is already rather or very full start eliminating them one by one from the top down. Our clients find that as soon as they make room for patients by ridding themselves of the worst plans, cash patients or patients with good insurance materialize out of thin air. But if you are nervous about it, do it step by step, one at a time.
You see, an additional problem with filling your schedule with the low paying patients is that you are then unable to see better paying ones easily or quickly or at all.
There is nothing worse than having a new patient wait two or three or more weeks to be seen. And while most dentists will fit emergencies into the schedule by hook or by crook, who wants to work through lunch and dinner while making all the other patients wait for hours?
Until your schedule frees up enough for you to be able to fit in new patients, emergencies, and large procedures within a day or two, do the following: every day leave an hour or so for them. This would be a different time of day each day to accommodate different schedules. You don’t want to lose a three unit bridge because the patient didn’t want to wait two weeks, do you?
If your schedule isn’t that full or you are too concerned about your ability to replace the welfare or low paying patients here’s another solution. Start cluster booking them into the less popular times of day when you normally have no or less patients. On welfare patients and any other group known for cancellations and no shows, you might also want to start double booking. It’s a bit nerve wracking if they all happen to show up but it’s less of a hardship than having no patients in a schedule which that morning was so booked you had to turn away a patient.
By the way, if that happens to you a lot, you might also want to keep a list handy of people who are willing and able to come in at very short notice. Whenever you book someone for more than a week away ask them if they’d like to be called if a sooner appointment opens up and if so add them to the list.
The very least you can do, to start with, is stop accepting additional patients from those particular plans.
Of course in the meantime you would want to promote as much as possible and to the best of your abilities to the type of patients you’d like to attract to your practice. The more you do this and the more successful your promotions, the easier it will be.
But even if you don’t know how to market yourself and your practice and it’s services in the majority of cases the mere fact that there is now some room on your schedule for other types of patients tends to “miraculously” draw them in.
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