Revolutionise your case acceptance with SmileCard

Dental practices have for many years offered a variety of methods to assist patients to pay for dental treatment. While a popular method in years gone by was to issue the account a few months after treatment took place and then eventually get around to hassling the patient to pay a few months subsequent, this is generally no longer the case.

Since the costs of dental practise started increasing and practitioners began to see that their returns were not always meeting their expectations, there has been a slow but steady change to tighter fiscal policies when dealing with patients. The vast majority of dental practices today typically ask for payment from the patient at the time of treatment.

Dental practices soon followed the way of every other consumer businesses and decided to make it easier on the patient by providing them with a universally accepted method of payment - the credit card. People are very used to purchasing everything with credit cards and practices, while slow in the early days to forgo part of their treatment fee for this service, have generally all now started offering patients this convenience.

By accepting a credit card, you are selling the debt the patient owes you to a third party (Visa, Mastercard, etc) for collection. The card company knows that the patient is good for the money because they already have an established credit history. The percentage you forgo, which with some cards is less than 1%, ensures that your payment is guaranteed and usually arrives overnight. You have effectively referred the collection of the money to a specialist as you would a difficult clinical case.

That was then, this is now...

Dentistry is evolving rapidly and the business side of the practice needs to keep pace with the clinical realities.

It's a favourite philosophical catch cry of the dental practice management consultants, but it makes a lot of sense: Diagnose every patient as if treatment were free. Once you have that diagnosis and have pitched it to the patient clinically, the business side of the practice needs to be able to support you because, regrettably, comprehensive dentistry can be expensive and does indeed require payment.

The first point to remember is that dental practices that take it upon themselves to extend credit from their cash flow to patients will inevitably run into problems. Problems that dental practices are not set up to address. Even a low level of bad debt can significantly affect your profits.

Credit cards are a good start as a payment option, however, if you look at the marketing of products that compete with a patient's acceptance of your treatment plan, which is not in fact an alternate plan by the dentist down the road but rather overseas holidays, plasma TVs, a new car, et al, then you may agree the business side of dentistry needs to play catch up. Enter: patient finance.

Smile now, pay later...

Where complex and expensive treatment has been accepted in the past, patients have sometimes organized their own credit in the form of bank loans or other lines of credit. In many other cases, however, the proposed treatment, be it functionally vital or cosmetically optional, has never been realized. Or, the treatment has been carried out over many months and multiple appointments, whereby you effectively treat within the patient's cash flow.

This latter method does see treatment undertaken, however, it is far more costeffective (for example less IC costs) and efficient (less chance of cancellations, etc) for the treatment to be delivered in the shortest possible time in as few appointments as possible.

The notion of purchasing a car piece by piece is of course ridiculous yet the concept of fixing your teeth in this manner is seemingly acceptable. One major difference between the two is that when you go car shopping, you are purchasing based on the monthly repayment, not the full price of the vehicle.

True, we are not moving to the... well here's treatment option number one at $299 a month and here's the deluxe package at $385... but there is a happy medium that can see the needs of the practitioner met as well as accommodate the patient's ability to afford treatment.

Patient finance is of course not a new concept. It is used extensively in the US and even in Australia, there have been different facilities around for some time in various forms.

The SmileCard from Dental Financial Services is a new dental-only facility that has been developed to cater to the specific needs of dental practices. A key feature of the card is that it can only be used for dental treatment (not to purchase all those competitive products). Further, once your patient has been approved for their SmileCard, they can only use the credit facility with your practice.

Legally, a patient cannot finance a dental procedure until the work has been completed, so the SmileCard is a revolving line of credit not dissimilar to a normal credit card. In most cases, a patient can be approved for the card on the spot over the phone.

SmileCard offers different interest rate packages ranging from an interest free product (where a fee is charged to the dentist) to rates that are comparable to the lower end of the credit card market. The SmileCard information pack outlines in detail all the different options available.

As part of the SmileCard package, you will receive training on the best ways to introduce the option to the patients as well as posters, leaflets and other point of sale material to help you.

By offering SmileCard to your patients, it will allow you to achieve your goals of delivering comprehensive, implant and cosmetic dentistry today, while allowing the patient the flexibility to pay the procedures off over time. It is a win-win for both parties.