Last week, I shared with you the three biggest mistakes that Practices make in dealing with insurance…today we are going to talk about the mistakes your patients make and actually how to avoid them ever becoming an issue and interrupting your process, experience, treatment planning at all.
I will say, just as I did last week and I want to reemphasize, you do not have to accept the reality of insurance in your practice and in the minds of your patients. Even getting just a little bit better at this will have a substantial impact on your daily results, your monthly cashflow, and your overall profitability.
Digging deeper, standing stronger, treatment planning better, and closing cases above insurance minimums and deductible limits will result in instant growth in your practice.
You have to do one thing before anything else – that is…
Take Responsibility
You are not a victim of insurance, actually, your patients are. Insurance can be a tool for you and for them as long as it’s used properly.
If no one has told your patients the truth about insurance, then how on earth are they suppose to understand it and make good decisions about it. They are only the consumer not the manufacturer of this and you are the provider who is facilitating it.
Take responsibility for the insurance and choose to be it’s master instead of its whipping boy. And then you’ll make magic happen.
Besides, even with a lot fewer patients you can retain more profit and larger bundled treatment plans from less people and come out way ahead than trying to do such little mundane insurance based dentistry in volumes. You’ll run out of time to make any money and your overhead will creep up and your profits will disappear.
There is only one way to beat this and that is to find your Insurance Cure for your Practice.
Good news… I’ve got one way (actually the only one right way) to deal with Insurance successfully, profitability, without losing yourself or compromising your integrity or clinical philosophy. I’m presenting it next week.
You want in; you should register here, now: The Dental Insurance Cure Webcast >>>
Make a special note that it’s happening on Tuesday, May 17th at 8:00pm ET – you are going to break free from any impact insurance is having on your practice. We will control it, beat it, cure it, profit from it or destroy it altogether.
In this unique and advanced webcast, I will be presenting my most sophisticated Insurance Domination Training and System for beating the insurance companies once and for all by profiting, controlling, and capitalizing on the opportunities you have. So you can stand out head and shoulders above the competition and kick discount, corporatized dentistry in the face while converting and saving otherwise respectable and worthy patients from the evils of watered down, insufficient, insurance dependent dentistry.
It’s time we took back our proud profession and restored the integrity and prestige of dental care to put the control and influence of treatment back into the hands it belongs in – yours.
Even bigger than the mistakes I shared with you last week are the ones made when actually encountering the insurance discussion with individual patients you see every single day in your Practice.
Here are the most challenging insurance interruptions to your patient experience by your patients and what to do about them.
It first begins understanding why patients are the way they are and then (and only then) can we remove the dependency of dentistry and combat the inclination and impulse of the patient to based their treatment decisions and financial investment on and around the insurance.
We are going to set you up for success by preempting the conversation and ensuring the Patients are given the opportunity to make a good decision for themselves, rather than just default to insurance mentality, which is all they know to do.
And that my friend is one of the most important statements you will read and you should make certain your team knows. The reason patients talk about, bring up, and use insurance in making decisions is because they have nothing else to go by, they have no other way to judge what they should or shouldn’t do. Depending on how you present it and how much authority you have taken over their experience, education, treatment plan, and method of conveying information so they feel informed and empowered, you can prevent their need to be protected by the insurance company and doing dentistry by default.
Here are the big 4 pillars of Insurance Success we must embrace and integrate in order to guide your patients to a smart successful decision.
We must control their Expectations of Care
We have to keep Positioning of Benefits in perspective
We always want to properly Present Insurance Contribution
And
We will need to continually Remind Patients who they want to be in charge of their healthcare decisions on investment and treatment.
I couldn’t encourage you enough to stay ahead of these problems to offset, preempt all of these conversations by using effective strategies before; not after the fact.
As soon as you have to play defense against the insurance company, it is going to look as though you are trying to run up their bill or are justifying treatment and while that’s not a good thing it also wastes a lot of time.
So they key is to have a strategy and a process in place. We’ll take them one at a time, quickly, to prepare you for the advanced training next week.
Control Expectations of Care…
This can be done in many ways. The first one is to make known your practice philosophy. For our clients, we do this on the phone, we do this in the online welcome experience, we do this in the New Patient Welcome Package. There are so many places that this is done.
The best one though is on the Pre-Appointment Phone Call where you are simply conveying to the patient your expectations for their visit and also asking for theirs.
You will know their dependence on insurance based on how they respond and the questions they ask. Now depending on whether or not you are taking insurance, you will engage them over the phone to ask for all of their insurance information so you can have everything verified up to date and ready to execute a closed treatment plan during their first visit.
If you are not dealing with insurance then you don’t have to ask. If you are, you must be prepared, otherwise you are not going to have a successful same-day close, collection, and scheduling of the presented treatment.
Leave nothing to chance or surprise.
Positioning of Benefits…
The best way to make sure your Patients do not get surprised by insurance is to tell them (when they are sitting down going through the pre-clinical interview portion of your new patient experience) how insurance benefits work and reminding them about your philosophy.
Your approach to dentistry is to always put the patient first, do what’s best for the patient based on their goals and objectives and what they want to see happen for their health, mouth, future.
Insurance on the other hand has the opposite goal in mind, do as little as possible and delay as much as possible until the patient has no choice but to pay everything themselves and get no help from insurance …and therefore the insurance company maximizes their profitability.
That is the key and the truth. Insurance is designed to maximize their profitability by doing as little as possible for their customers.
At your office we use insurance as a tool to get healthy and help our patients. There is no reason to not bring up the way insurance will be handled if the patient is insurance dependent so you begin educating them before you get to actually financial discussions.
If you do not bring it up or if you make any of the 3 big mistakes I shared with you before, you aren’t being proactive when it is necessary and will default to the defensive position.
Presenting Insurance Contribution…
This is very easy. You present it as part of the total plan. Plain and simple. You pass right on over it and stay focused on both the patient and the comprehensive treatment plan that was designed around the patients’ goals and objectives.
When insurance is presented first you lose.
When insurance is presented last you lose.
When insurance is all that is presented you might as well not have even played the game or took the time to deal with the patient to begin with.
You want insurance to be incorporated into your treatment plan if you are using insurance in your practice. If you are not, then obviously, it’s for the patients to deal with not for you to even bring up.
Where ever you put the focus, is what the patient will focus on. If you followed pillars one and two then this is even easier than you can imagine.
We present insurance as a bonus, a surprise, a cherry on top. It’s good news and free money be grateful for; even if it’s a dollar because most get nothing and pay everything on their own. Celebrate and keep right on going to the patients’ responsibilities for the investment to their health.
And finally, Staying in Control…playing Doctor as I like to call it.
You will, on occasion, have to remind patients who is in charge of their health and those two people are You and Them. That’s it. And as both your professional responsibility and liability, you are not willing to let some company that profits from their patients doing what’s in their worst interest not in their best interest to dictate care or clinical approach.
If you are willing to stand up for what you believe in and the patients feel your passion and genuine care over them, you will be so surprised at how many of these battles you will win and how much of 100% of diagnosed treatment you will get accepted instead of the fraction that is ‘insurance based’ from the treatment plan.
This is really where the magic is at. The key is to not be focused on how much you hate insurance but how much you want to help your patients get healthy. Let your passion for care and your treatment philosophies take precedence.
It is okay to be offended and to firmly and confidently educate patients on what making insurance decisions about their dental care really means. Delayed or not healthy at all. Replacement and ineffective long term solutions. It’s like fixing a broken down care by replacing just enough parts to get it running, while knowing that only makes the other parts more susceptible to further damage versus doing everything all at once for optimal performance.
Providing optimal care means not just talking about it.
It means standing up for it.
It means influence around it.
It means doing whatever you can to make sure that happens.
Alright, so your homework for today is to identify which of these pillars you are great at and which you must improve.
Just look at where you are going on defense instead of staying in control and on offense against the insurance mentality.
And don’t forget, do it right now, register for the Insurance Cure and advanced presentation to beat out and eliminate the cancer in your practice once and for all…
Register to Attend the FREE Training: The Dental Insurance Cure Webcast >>>
