Dental Tribune U.S. Edition

DENTAL TRIBUNE | July 2011 Industry Report 9A You’ve heard it on the news: banks just aren’t lending. In addition, more and more practices are discovering that third-party financing isn’t the best option for their patients who need high-dollar dental work. One of the main reasons for this shift is that third-party companies have started approving fewer patients due to stricter credit criteria. This can mean that a person with good credit, who would have qualified for an interest free payment plan in the past, is no longer able to receive financing for dental work. DentalBanc offers an alternative to third-party financing via credit checks and managed payment plans. Read below to learn about the ben- efits of assessing a patient’s credit risk and then contact DentalBanc to learn how Zuelke Automated Credit Coach (ZACC), used in conjunction with outsourced payment plans, can increase your case acceptance with- out creating extra work for your staff. With ZACC … • You can identify the patients whose risk of non-payment is close to zero. This allows you to offer flexible, internal, financial arrangements, which assures measurably bet- ter case acceptance. (Even a tiny improvement to the rate of case acceptance in the average dental practice will generate thousands of dollars per year in additional net income!) • You can identify patients whose credit history or financial instabil- ity yields a significant risk of non- payment. With ZACC’s seven degrees of risk, you can structure your finan- cial arrangements in a manner that will keep these risky patients from wreaking financial havoc on your practice. • You can significantly reduce the number of failed and/or cancelled appointments as well as have far few instances of clinical non-compliance. High credit-risk patients typically present a practice with more missed appointments and less clinical coop- eration. Identifying these high credit- risk patients in advance will greatly diminish both of these issues. • You can prioritize patient contact. An appointment coordinator AD Have you discovered what regular use of the Zuelke Automated Credit Coach can do for your practice? By Marla Merritt OrthoBanc Director of Sales & Marketing g DT page 10A About the author Marla Merritt is the direc- tor of sales and marketing for OrthoBanc LLC (OrthoBanc, DentalBanc and PaymentBanc). She has more than 22 years of experience in credit reporting and payment management. She wrote this article in conjunc- tion with Paul Zuelke, developer of the Zuelke Automated Credit Coach (ZACC.) OrthoBanc, LLC, currently serves some 3,500 practices nationwide and main- tains a 99 percent on-time rate for its clients.