3/27/2020
Surviving Coronavirus
The ADA recently advised dental offices to close except for emergency procedures. Several states have ruled that businesses close and residents remain at home. These attempts to try and tamp down the impact of the coronavirus have left practices facing challenging financial decisions. Here are some suggestions that may help.
Communicate with Your Patients
Keeping open lines of communication is critical during a time when your office has been forced to close. Emails, texts and regular social media posts are effective ways to keep your patients engaged. You need to create the perception that your office is not closed but operating in a different manner due to self-isolation. Topics to cover are the need to continue good dental hygiene, how to contact your office in case of an emergency, and how patient appliances are continuing to provide the desired outcome even though visits to the office may be temporarily missed.
Engage Patients Through a Teledentistry Solution
By utilizing a teledentistry solution, such as Rhinogram, you can monitor the progress of existing patients and keep them highly engaged with your team during this downtime. If an appointment was scheduled during the office closure, send instructions on how to text selfies so you can perform the same observation as if the patient came to the practice. Some practices are even offering sizable discounts for new starts who will communicate through a teledentistry platform and be ready to start as soon as business returns to normal.
Don’t Assume Patients Cannot Pay
Some practices have contacted our office asking us to defer all patient payments for one, two or even three months. Nothing will ruin your practice like removing your revenue stream! Presently our call center is seeing only 1 in 5 calls related to the coronavirus. Some of those callers are asking for payment relief, but most are asking simply that we move the payment to another date that works within their new work and pay schedule. If the majority of your patients are still employed but working from home, don’t cut off your income.
Exercise Patience
From our governments to business leaders, from elderly to young, we are learning more each day about how to effectively operate under the threat of this virus. Each day brings new information and a different way of working. Your reaction to this crisis needs to be in slow, measured steps. Many of you are concerned about the financial impact of this crisis. What you don’t want to do is react too quickly and ensure failure. Make small adjustments as needed rather than large sweeping changes overnight.
We are advising our practices to let patients communicate what they need. If they have lost their job, they will call and ask for help. We’re here to help them. What does that help look like? For some it may be simply putting off today’s payment until next week. For others it may be deferring 1 payment to the end of the contract. In severe cases it might mean deferring payments until a new job is found. But even in the severe cases, we act one payment at a time instead of deferring payments for 3 to 6 months…small, measured steps.
Know Your Patient’s Financial Character
During the last several years of a robust economy, practices have largely ceased obtaining credit recommendations on new patients. Over the last few years, some consultants have preached a low down payment, fill the chair approach to obtaining new starts. It is precisely in times like these when your portfolio will reveal the risk contained in it. If you have filled your chairs with too many C-level patients, your income is going to suffer and delinquencies will rise rapidly. How do you know which patients fill your chairs? The only way you can know is by having obtained a credit recommendation such as ZACC. You need to ensure that your financial portfolio is balanced with a proper ratio of A, B and C level patients whose treatment and payment plans have been structured according to risk.
It is true that an A-level patient can lose their job as easily as a C-level patient in the circumstances we face today, but credit grades are an indication of character. A-level patients are committed to meeting their obligations. Even if they become unemployed, they will do what is necessary to meet the obligation as soon as possible. C-level patients are accustomed to walking away from obligations that are no longer convenient.
From our credit risk assessment tools to our payment management solutions, OrthoBanc can help you maintain a healthy financial portfolio that will survive sudden economic changes. If you would like our help, please contact us at (888) 758-0585, option 2, or by email at marketing@orthobanc.com.
Bill Holt – OrthoBanc’s President/CEO
