Pricing transparency is hard to achieve but important for your dental practice’s success. By offering accurate service quotes up front, you can improve patient satisfaction, increase payment fulfillment, and speed up processing. Thankfully, numerous tools can help your practice provide dental cost transparency.
At Dental Intelligence, we offer an advanced platform for dental payments that helps you collect more funds while offering flexible payment options. With our software, you can track dental pricing in real time while streamlining the claims and insurance verification processes with Dental Intelligence Insurance, so your patients aren’t shocked by their bills. Read on to learn everything you need to know about price transparency in dentistry.
Why Price Transparency Is Challenging in Dental Practices
Ideally, your dental practice would have a single price for every service that all patients must pay. Unfortunately, dental services involve many complex factors that make pricing transparency difficult. Each final quote depends on the following:
In many scenarios, the provider cannot calculate the patient’s out-of-pocket costs during the appointment. Instead, the dentist makes a rough estimate based on how much the service typically costs for other patients with similar insurance plans. Unfortunately, seemingly small factors, like the patient’s diagnosis or deductible, can greatly influence the final cost.
The Importance of Pricing Transparency
Pricing transparency affects your practice in numerous ways. While accurate quotes may be hard to deliver, they can improve member experience figures, fulfillment rates, and more.
Faster Payment Fulfillment
If you expect a bill of around $100, but it’s $500, you will likely hesitate to pay it. You may call the office or your insurance company a few times to ensure it’s right and take your time paying it if you can’t afford it.
As a dental office, when you tell your patients exactly what costs they can expect up front, they can either accept or decline services based on their financial situation. Pricing transparency improves payment fulfillment rates after sending out bills because patients know what’s coming. Pricing transparency helps your office get paid faster and can reduce the number of bills sent to collections.
Improved Satisfaction Rates
Transparency is vital in providing excellent experiences. When a patient gets a surprising bill in the mail, they may complain, which could make your practice look bad. Providing clear and accurate prices can boost satisfaction rates.
If your patients often leave poor reviews about hidden costs, surprise bills, or high fees, you should consider restructuring your system. Prioritizing price transparency will allow patients to decide what they can or cannot afford.
Legal Adherence
As of January 2021, under Federal Law, the American Hospital Association (AHA) requires hospitals to post standard charges for service, including out-of-pocket cost estimates for at least 300 services.1 The No Surprises Act requires providers and hospitals to provide uninsured patients with Good Faith Estimates.
While these laws may not apply to insured patients at dental practices, your office should still consider the new regulations. As the legislation expands to support price transparency, dental practices may soon be legally obligated to provide the same level of accurate estimates.
Faster Processing
When you adopt solutions for price transparency, your practice can enjoy faster claims and insurance verification processing. Essentially, you will provide the patient with their estimated quote based on their insurance plan and services.
Because these steps have already been taken for you through an automated system, your team won’t have to go through the complex and time-consuming steps of submitting manual claims. As a result, your practice can enjoy faster payment fulfillment from insurance companies and improved acceptance rates.
How To Offer Transparent Pricing in Your Dental Office
The best way to offer pricing transparency at your dental office is by adopting automated insurance verification tools that can take the guesswork out of patient payments. Such tools create accurate treatment pricing information in real time during the patient’s visit based on their insurance information and provided services. After showing the patient their quote, they can either accept or deny the service, so you can directly submit the claim to their insurance.
Collect More Payments with Dental Intelligence
With Dental Intelligence, your practice gains pricing transparency, flexible payment options, automated insurance verification, and much more. Schedule a Dental Intelligence demo today to see how our dental software can help your practice provide transparent pricing.
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