Running a successful dental practice means finding the right balance between reasonable fees while charging enough to be profitable.

As you probably know, your patients are shopping around looking for a decent price for dental cleaning costs, teeth whitening, and other procedures. Given that 74 million Americans don’t have dental insurance coverage, the fees for dental procedures can be a sore spot.

In this article, you’ll learn how to charge reasonable fees for dental procedures without scaring off patients or accumulating unpaid billables.

The 2-Part Formula for Charging Reasonable Fees

Though there are several ways to ensure your fees contribute to a healthy bottom line, everything can be classified into two categories:

1. Creating a dental practice where reasonable prices are justified

2. Ensuring that patients are able to pay your fees

Justifying Your Fees

Everyone has a different definition of what a “reasonable” fee is. Patients generally want prices that are low as possible without compromising on quality of care. Dental practices typically want to ensure they can charge enough to keep the lights on and maintain a positive cash flow.

These two perspectives can find a middle ground if you demonstrate that your fees are commensurate with quality dental care.

We recommend the following strategies to justify your practice fees:

• Build relationships with your patients. When your patients know, like, and trust you, they’ll be more willing to accept your fee structure.

• Listen to your patients. Ask for feedback about everything in your practice, from fees to how well your staff treats people. Satisfied patients are less likely to quibble over money.

• Invest in training. Consider providing continuing education and personal development courses to everyone on staff. By upping the skill level of your team, you’ll have high performers that allow your practice to command higher rates.

• Know your competitive advantage. Every office is unique, so find what makes you different. It might be a particular specialty, top-of-the-line equipment, or a highly experienced staff. Once you identify the traits that make your practice unique, be sure to communicate them in marketing campaigns and other patient touchpoints.

• Get patient referrals. When patients have a positive outcome with your office and refer their friends and family to you, they already have a positive association with you. They are more likely to accept your standard fee because they are confident the price is fair for the level of service they’ll receive.

Collecting Payments

When you tell a patient they need to have something done, they might become hesitant to follow through with care once they find out how much it costs. Depending on the importance of the procedure, a patient may either decide to shop around at other practices or undergo the procedure and figure out how to pay for it later.

While it’s not uncommon for dental practices to have payment plans and other systems that make dental crown costs, fillings, dentures, and root canals more affordable, not all systems are created equal.

Practices have found that having the right features in a payment system can facilitate collecting more payments while saving staff time and avoiding difficult conversations (without having to reduce fees). On average, practices that adopted Dental Intelligence Payments collected an additional $25,000 in the first three months of using the software. The right payment system ensures that more patients pay their bills on time and pay their balances in full.

Specifically, Dental Payments by Dental Intelligence offers the following features that facilitate payment collection:

• Email statements and past-due notices to patients with the click of a button
• Send customizable text and email messages
• Set up flexible payment options, including HSA, credit cards, and payment plans
• Deploy text-to-pay options for instant payment

Determining What Fees are “Reasonable”

You might have some fee numbers in mind, but before you set these figures, make sure you know where your business stands and what you need to charge to be profitable.

At a minimum, you should have the following figures at the ready:

• The average fees for various dental procedures in your area
• Your overhead expenses
• Third-party reimbursement schedules
• A plan for annual fee increases (and respective amounts or percentages)

Knowing these numbers allows you to work backward in determining what fees are reasonable for your individual practice.

The Right Systems Can Boost Practice Profitability

Charging reasonable fees is necessary to keep your practice financially stable. Many offices fear that charging what’s fair can result in an influx of patient refund requests or default balances. To see how Dental Intelligence can help, schedule a demo today.