Talking to Your Patients About Their End Of Year Benefits

It's about that time of year again, Holiday and Crazy Families. Don't get distracted and forget to have your dental team talk with you dental patients about end of year insurance! What can you do to drive end of year insurance benefits and end of year business? What is the best methodology? Pushing to use remaining insurance before the end of the year is not a new concept and probably isn't new to any of you but it's our methodology in how to notify your patients that can make all the difference!

Are you using snail mail? Definitely not our first choice because it's slow, expensive, and time consuming but if it's all you've got go for it.
Our first choice is email. Now, this is the important part, not just any e-mail address will do. You'll need to collect the email address that goes straight to the patient's phone, not the email address they give out to stores and other people who will potentially spam their inbox. A subtle difference that will get massively different results. If you're not already in the habit of asking your patients for the email address that goes to their phone, start today! In fact if you use EagleSoft there is a feature that will prompt you for an email address for every patient that doesn't have one! How cool is that? You won't even have to remember yourself it remembers for you!

Another wonderful option is a software such as Revenue Well (if you haven't heard of this before, do yourself a favor and google it!). Revenue Well is a sophisticated program that integrates with your software to help you reach out to your patients regarding every aspect of their experience with your office whether that is about their account, their appointments, family members appointments, and even prescribed treatment. This is ideal because it allows you to identify which patients in your practice have prescribed treatment and remaining insurance benefits. After all, it wouldn't make sense to send a letter to every patient because every patient doesn't have outstanding treatment!
Both Eagle Soft and programs such as Revenue Well give you the ability to narrow down exactly the type of patient you want to reach by giving you search options such as the amount of insurance dollars remaining and what service they have prescribed in their treatment plan. That results in a much focused defined list that should in theory provide you with a very qualified list of patients that are excited to take advantage of this opportunity.

Now that you have your focused group of patients the next question becomes what are you going to put in the letter/email? You'll want to be as specific as possible to draw out imagery and create an emotion response. Use words like "waste your money", I don't want to waste your money by letting your insurance benefits expire. Name the treatment and the date you first prescribed it. Without the date, it could seem like you just discussed it with them last week, when in reality it has been months. This can make a huge difference, Mr/Mrs Jones we talked about you needing a crown in February. Now all of a sudden the patient is feeling like holy cow! It's been that long?! This alone will create some urgency but to help create even more let your patients know how busy your schedule gets this time of year and encourage them to call the office today to ensure they get an appointment!

Lastly, it's important to let the patient know that procrastinating can cause things to get worse and end up costing more money and you don't want to see that happen.