by Sponsored Content: Pearly
It’s simple – dental practices treat patients and patients pay for treatment, right? Unfortunately (and more often than not), collecting payment is time-consuming, expensive, and painstaking and doesn’t always yield results.
Within revenue cycle management (RCM), establishing an efficient patient billing system should be a priority for all practices and DSOs that want to improve their bottom line.
In this industry report, the RCM team at Pearly dove into patient billing data to determine how top-performing practices are structuring their A/R collection process.
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE👉 Optimizing Patient Billing
All Practices Bill Patients Differently
When practices consider the best practices for patient billing outreach, there is a spectrum of processes across the dental industry. On one end of the spectrum outreach tasks are ad hoc, where paper statements are manually batched and mailed. Patients with overdue balances are also frequently called when office managers find the time.
On the other end of the spectrum, practices can have an optimized, digital outreach approach, where customized patient reminders are automatically batched daily via text, email, and physical letter notification channels.
Factors That Affect Collection Efficiency
There are a number of factors that can affect collection rate. Patient demographics, timing, and the age and size of a past due balance all play a role in billing efficacy.
To determine the current dental industry trends for patient billing outreach, a large sample of practice collections data was analyzed to determine how these factors impact the RCM process.
Best Practices for Patient Billing | Study Methodology
For this study, Pearly sampled from over 150,000 instances of billing outreach over 90 days, and uncovered how different factors such as language, balance size, patient demographics, and age cohort impacts the number of attempts required to successfully collect payment. The goal was to establish dental industry benchmarks for effective patient billing outreach across multiple specialities and practice size.
Understanding the timeline for days to pay post-visit has important cash flow and staff time implications. The learnings from this report are incredibly useful for any dental practice or DSO looking to get a better grasp on their collection process, and ultimately improve their bottom line.
We hope that this study (and future reports on the subject) provides some useful insight on the industry trends and the best practices for patient billing outreach.
DOWNLOAD THE INDUSTRY REPORT HERE👉 Optimizing Patient Billing
If your dental organization wants to collect more payments, faster, book a free discovery call with our RCM Experts at Pearly. With a suite of RCM tools that leverages smart automations to collect more A/R (faster), Pearly partners with private practices and 100+ location DSOs alike.
