If you could save hundreds of dollars and hours of time per
month, would you be interested? When I looked at how much money our office was
spending on paper and the amount of hours I spent on busy work, it amazed me
that I ever got anything productive done and that our office was actually
profitable. One of the specific tasks I modified in my own practice (and I now
teach to anyone that will listen) is how we run the billing statements in the
practice.
I was working with a doctor in Anchorage, Alaska, many years
ago and he asked me to skip over teaching his team how to send billing
statements because his office was going to collect 100% at the time of service.
At the time I honored his request, but about six weeks later, he was rethinking
his decision because his accounts receivable was creeping up and needed to stop
the bleeding. Sending patient billing statements is one of those necessary
tasks, but it doesn’t have to be expensive or time-consuming.
There are two things you can change with the way you send
out billing statements to patients and it will change your life forever.
- Stop sending statements once a month and start sending them out a couple times a week. My recommendation would be to post the weekend mail and do a statement run on Monday then do a statement run before the weekend. Here are the benefits . . .
- It spreads out the task into smaller pieces. So instead of spending days on your statements, you can spend a few minutes a couple times a week.
- The doctor will like how it evens out the cash flow.
- You will like how it evens out the phone calls.
- You will get paid faster.
- Use Quickbill. This is where you will save a ton of money. The national average says it costs you about $5.00 per statement to send out a paper statement, but Quickbill is less than $1.00 per statement. I am a control freak so I was very skeptical when it came to having someone else send my statements, but the only thing you lose control of is the printing, folding, stuffing, stamping, and mailing. You keep all the control of writing a personal message on your statements, you still get to decide who gets one and who doesn’t, you can still have your logo on your statement, and your patients still get a return envelope. You eliminate the busy work.
Dayna loves her work. She has over 25 years of experience in the dental industry, and she’s passionate about building efficient, consistent, and secure practice management systems. Dayna knows that your entire day revolves around your practice management software—the better you learn to use it, the more productive and stress-free your office will be. In 2016, Dayna founded Novonee ™, The Premier Dentrix Community, to help cultivate Dentrix super-users all over the country. Learn more from Dayna at www.novonee.com and contact Dayna at dayna@novonee.com.