Dental Practice's Solution for High Patient Financing Fees

Are CareCredit fees hurting your practice? High costs are part of keeping a dental practice running, and those operating expenses come out of practice revenues before any income is seen. Is the 10 to 15% of billed revenue charged by CareCredit accepted as an operating expense or is it an outrageous fee that dental practices view as an necessary evil?

Prior to Covid-19 the challenge for patient payment and practice collections were staggering. How much more has the pandemic contributed? Rather than self-pay costs being minimized, costs have skyrocketed leaving medical and dental practitioners holding much of the cost and increased overhead.

• Patient healthcare costs – including both deductibles and out-of-pocket maximum payments – have increased by almost 30% percent since 2015. • The average deductible is $1,820 and the average out-of-pocket maximum cost is $4,400. • 83% of Physician Practices with under five practitioners said the slow payment of high-deductible plan patients are their top collection challenge, followed by the difficulties that practice staff have at communicating patient payment accountability (81%). Deductible Breakdown For Family Coverage Employer Health Insurance: • 7% have no deductible • 3% have a deductible under $500 • 11% have a deductible between $500 and $999 • 29% have a deductible between $1,000 and $2,999 • 26% have a deductible between $3,000 and $4,999 • 23% have a deductible of $5,000 or higher. Practices have seen increased overhead: Patient Financing - CareCredit, a major financing source for medical and dental practices, charges the practice 10-15% of billable revenue in addition to charging patients upwards of 30%. Adding to the pain are declines to patients with lower credit scores leaving many without the services they need and reducing practice revenue. Which creates more unpaid patient accounts and expensive collection costs. The Solutions: Choose lower cost financing options for elective procedures in minutes.

1. With one online application that takes less than two minutes to complete, fixed-rate medical and dental loan offers come from top online lenders. The majority of approvals have no markup or percentage charged to or paid by the practice. Patient loan interest rates start as low as 4.99% and approvals with credit scores as low as 550 help fund more services. 2. Customized self-pay payment plans requiring little to no service. Payment is made automatically with credit cards or checking accounts on file. Automatic recurring payments are made on regular intervals until the bill is paid in full.

Schedule a DEMO StrongBox practice management experts know the importance of having customized patient payment plans and understand that practice administrators’ most time-consuming tasks, such as bill preparation, mailing, follow-up billing, collections calls, check processing and more can be virtually eliminated with our Revenue Cycle Management (RCM) and patient financing services software. Software that augments appointment software currently used by practices. The StrongBox platform enables practices to significantly increase the efficiency of collecting patient-due amounts. With StrongBox, practices achieve collection rates above the industry standards, accelerated revenue generation and realization, reduced days in accounts receivable, minimized cost of collections – all yielding significant value to your practice. Credit Card Processing Fees – Processing fees are rising as credit card use increases. Until now practices have had no choice but to accept the price of processing fees. High credit card processing fees are a large portion of the overhead of a thriving practice. Million-dollar practices can expect to pay in the vicinity of $30,000 or more annually in merchant fees. StrongBox Solution Our Financing solution, the Recurring Payments feature and Patient Payment Portal reduces the cost of billing and bad debt to improve accounts receivable profiles. And, as part of our program, StrongBox eliminates the cost of accepting credit and debit card payments and offers ACH bank to bank payment flexibility. Which means the practice no longer pays processing fees, freeing those funds for a better purpose. In Summary. • Reduce practice overhead with the StrongBox eSolution. • Provide more patient financing with less cost to the practice and affordable patient rates. • Customize patient payment plans to insure self-pay costs are paid. • Eliminate practice credit card processing costs. Interested in learning more? Schedule a DEMO