costly and elective so it is critical that practices offer an office payment plan that allows patients to pay over time with little or no penalty. In this turnkey transition, my wife ran the office while I focused on the clinical aspects of the practice. The practice we purchased had a coupon system in place for payments but we quickly learned that this could create massive headaches when we weren’t paid. My staff spent hours each month sending letters, making phone calls, and begging for payments. We quickly decided that automated payment drafting was a much smarter collection tool. When we decided to put a drafting system in place, we did everything manually. We would collect the appropriate information when the patient started and put that information in a three ring binder. Once a month, we would enter the checking account information into our local bank’s website and the credit card numbers into our credit card machine. As the practice starts grew, this manual process began taking more and more time each month. Patients would request different draft dates so we were running payments nearly every day of the month. I learned that it was taking 2 employees nearly 40 hours each month to enter the bank and credit card drafts. I also realized that most of our patients were choosing credit card drafts and our fees were soaring. I had “the way we do it now is fine” but we held on through the growing pains of this transition. Now, if I were to tell my staff that we were going back to manually entering information for bank and credit card drafts, I am certain that they would revolt! “Bottom line: If you are not already offering a monthly office payment plan to your orthodontic clients, you really need to consider how this will help your case starts.” heard of OrthoBanc* from time to time but always thought it would be ridiculous to pay someone else to do what we could do ourselves so cheaply. Once I saw the true cost for processing payments – as demon-strated in employee hours each month and exorbitant credit card fees – I decided that maybe it was time to consider outsourcing. Throughout the process of researching payment options, I was reminded of another issue that had caused my practice a tremendous amount of grief. Since we had been manually entering most of the bank account and credit card numbers each month, there was a lot of room for error such as entering the wrong account number. Occasionally my staff would even send through a payment on an account that had already been paid in full. All errors on our part elicited exactly the response you would expect when you mess with someone’s bank account. It is not much fun causing someone to have an overdraft charge because you drafted their monthly payment one or two months after they paid in full. We decided to switch to OrthoBanc. As with any new technology, product, or service implementation, it was a challenge to convince my staff that this would be better. I can’t tell you how many times I heard that, I knew that OrthoBanc would save us the staff time spent each month entering account numbers and processing payments. What I didn’t realize was how much using their service would lower our rate of late payments, non-payment, and NSFs. It seems that when a patient knows their account will be charged each and every month at the same time (and they can not call the office and ask us to stop the payment since it is auto-mated and outsourced), our payment becomes a priority. Something else I quickly learned once using OrthoBanc is that their complete payment management greatly decreased the work load of my staff. Whenever an attempted draft fails, they contact the responsible party and schedule the next draft. They also obtain new expiration dates for credit cards and give patients the ability to check their balance and print receipts online. If we were using a company that provided drafting only (no management) my staff would be responsible for the follow up on missed or failed payments, obtaining new expi-ration dates, and sending receipts. During training, my staff was taught the best way to present the in office payment plan (drafting.) OrthoBanc taught us to mention check drafts only during the initial presentation so that fewer patients would choose credit card drafts. (We still make that option available – we just don’t mention it up front.) Altering our fee presentation in this way has saved me thousands of dollars in credit card fees. They recently informed me that less than 20% of my payments are credit card drafts. They were giving me kudos because they find the typical practice average to be closer to 35%. Bottom line: If you are not already offering a monthly office payment plan to your orthodontic clients you really need to consider how this will help your case starts. Once you have made this decision, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you imple-ment automated drafting of credit cards and bank accounts in your practice. If you choose to let OrthoBanc automate this process for you, you will save countless employee hours each month and the training will include presentation skills that will save you money in credit card fees. *OrthoBanc, LLC also operates DentalBanc, a full-featured version of their orthodontic site that is tailored to the specific needs of dentists. www.orthodontics.com September/October 2010 35
Journal of the American Orthodontic Society September-October 2010: Page 35
