How can I get my Dental Practice off of PPO's?
Many see the PPO as a necessary evil to keep their dental practice alive in this day and age. I happen to believe that you don't have to allow your practice to be dominated by PPO's if you do a few simple things to decrease their impact on your practice. Now I am not suggesting that everyone should get off the PPO, but if you want to decrease their impact on your practice, here are some tips on how to accomplish this.
1. How good is your case acceptance? Most practices I see have about a 55% case acceptance rate with the help of insurance. If you were to simply dump the PPO without making some improvements in this area, you are asking for trouble. Improvement here is a must before you can even consider making changes to how many PPO's you have in your practice.
2. How do you currently acquire new patients? Do they only come to you because you are on various insurance lists? If so, you will obviously have to make some changes here. How else can you attract new patients, preferably cash paying ones? There are lots of answers here and Groupon is not the answer!
3. Now you need to analyze the impact of PPO's within your practice. We would want to know the following items: how many patients per PPO do you have, how much is the write off on average for each PPO, what is the total impact on the practice for each PPO? Once you have the answer to these questions, you can now formulate a plan on which you might want to remove first.
4. You will need a great story to tell patients as to why you are opting to go out-of-network and it certainly can't be about your profitability. They don't care! It needs to contain some benefit to them, or they will leave.
5. You need a well crafted response when they call to ask your team questions. How your team response to their questions will determine if the patient stays or leaves the practice. This is a crucial step!!
6. Lastly, have a plan with how to deal with your emotional fall out from this change. You might see holes in your schedule, how will you respond to these? Too many doctors get upset with their front desk when their are holes, this would not be the best response! Have a plan on how to stay calm through this change.
If you take a methodical approach to this process, you can get to the other side of this challenge with a more profitable and lower stress practice, but it will take work!!
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