In Episode Five of the Best of Cash is King, AADGP President Dr. Brent Barta, Vince Cardillo, Founder & CEO of Maeva Dental Advisors and George Radigan, former VP of North American Dental discuss the merits of adding patient patient payment systems to your Practice
Transcription
Dr. Brent Barta
Anything that you guys are seeing related to Innovations in patient payment systems and I’m talking about something like text to pay, Patient portals, anything that you guys are seeing or that you’re looking at evaluating to put into place in your in your practices.
George Radigan
Yeah, so we’ve looked at a lot. I mean, I’ll tell you we have, we have 250 locations. So it’s a lot harder to implement. Something of that at mass that you’re turning the cruise ship now rather than a speedboat. There are a lot of great options to do that through, you know, Amazon pay. You no pay online, patient portal excetera.
I would tell you that that is definitely a key differentiator for practices. I’ll tell you personally.
You know, I travel a lot and I can tell you in every single city which hotels I can go to that I can check in online, I get my key on my phone, I go right to my room, I check out online and I don’t have to talk to anybody and my bills automatically paid, right? And that’s when you think about the majority of the patient demographic.
Now, you know, the moms are typically, the ones making the appointments and bringing the families and the majority now are the millennial generation or gaining, you know more momentum, right? So it’s also a generational thing where they want that convenience and I’m technically not a millennial. But also, if I have the passive path of least resistance to, to pay my bill and not go through, you know, to the office with the sliding glass window or actually cutting a check and mailing it in. I mean, I don’t even have checks, you know, if I can’t use something, electronically, I really just don’t even want to do it. So and that is more and more than mindset of the patient and the more options.
You give them in the easier. You make it on them, the more you’re going to collect and the the more of a, you know, a fan, you’re going to create your patient base. That is, you know, if there was somebody paying their dental, bill with one, click on, on Apple pay or something like that. Like, in that, that is something that’s Going to differentiate you from the practice down the street, but I will tell you if you’re thinking about it.
It’s way easier to implement at a smaller scale. Once you get up to critical mass because you’re talking about software integration and then compliance and, you know, it just kind of builds upon itself.
So I would encourage anyone to do that.
Vince Cardillo
Yeah, I totally agree with George said, I mean, the text, the pay is great. The problem is, you know, the the better ones are not integrated with the Dental software and the ones that say they are integrated with the dental software that kind of integrated with the dental software. So, you know, it’s it’s, they’re not just there yet, but it’s going to move that way. One of the things that we’ve seen having success is, you know, within the text reminder what the text of pay option, where it’s letting the patient of the parent, know what, you’re going to be responsible for this visit.
So that kind is already prepping them versus and they could pay it right there versus the patient coming out of the back and someone at the front desk on the phone and they wait and they could just get out there.
Like George said, people want to get in and out and Not want to have to stop at the front and the front of the phone and they don’t want to have to deal with the patient either if they don’t have to.
So just being able to create that ease of time and you know hurdles to get through in and out of an appointment is huge and it’s definitely it will attract patients and because it’s early on you could use it as a marketing tool.
Precisely.
Dr. Brent Barta
Yeah, and it’s coming so don’t pretend it’s not right.