Skip to content
Back to Blog

934: Metric Mondays: An Easier Way to Achieve a 182% Increase in Dental Practice Collections – Dave Monahan

Uninsured patients are afraid of the dentist. But it’s not the pain they're scared of! They don't have coverage, and they're anxious about the cost. In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dave Monahan, founder and CEO of Kleer, to share how to remove this barrier and grow your collections by 182%. To learn the easier way to get patients through the door and accept treatment, listen to Episode 934 of The Best Practices Show!

 

Learn More About Dave:

Learn More About ACT Dental:

More Helpful Links for a Better Practice & a Better Life:

Main Takeaways:

  • Focus on getting existing patients to come in more often and accept needed treatment.
  • Uninsured patients avoid dentists mostly due to lack of coverage and fear of cost.
  • Patients with coverage, such as a membership plan, come in twice as much.
  • Membership plans increase treatment presentation and acceptance.
  • You will keep more of what you produce with a membership plan.

Quotes:

“Obviously, to drive collections, you either need to bring in more patients more often, or you need to increase your fees. There are certain ways you can grow production, increase treatment acceptance, and so on. The question is, how do you do that? Some practices are going to go out and try to spend a lot of money bringing in new patients, and that's a difficult path to go down. It's an expensive path. Sometimes, it's successful. Sometimes, it isn't. The stats I see is it can cost anywhere between $200, on the very low end, up to $500 per new patient. Only about 40% of them come back. It's a difficult game, and you have to play it. But at the end of the day, it's not easy. What I see with offices is they don't really think about their existing patients. How do I actually engage my existing patients in a different way that brings them in more often, enables them to accept more treatment — the treatment they need — and drives things like gross production and collections? What we help practices do is think about your existing patients and how do we better engage them in the treatment they need, get them coming in more often, and accepting the treatment they need.” (2:20—3:24) -Dave

“We did a lot of patient research, and the patient research shows your uninsured patients are very concerned about coming into your office. The reason they're concerned about coming into your office is not that they're scared. It's not about being worried about pain or anything like that. It's actually because they don't have coverage, number one. Number two is they think it's going to be too expensive. Those are, by far, the two biggest reasons your uninsured patients don't come in the door very often. So, the question is, how do you address that in order to drive improvement in both production and in collections.” (3:27—4:04) -Dave

“Coverage, in the dental world, is about care coverage. Some people would say, ‘Well, that's an insurance plan,’ or somebody might say, ‘That's a discount plan,’ or whatever. In the dental world, it's that idea of insurance or discount coverage. Now, if I broaden that term and I think about subscriptions more broadly, you can say my Costco subscription is sort of coverage to go in and buy things at Costco, or my Netflix subscription is coverage for entertainment. So, what we do is broaden the term of coverage to mean subscriptions to your dental practice. What we've learned is — and we have all the data that supports this — if the patient has coverage — it could be insurance, it can be a discount plan, it can be a subscription or a membership plan like we provide — they come in about the same amount of times and they accept about the same amount of treatment across those different coverage options, which roughly is about twice as much as somebody who doesn't have “coverage”. So, coverage versus non-coverage means I have something that enables me to buy care in a more affordable, predictable, and transparent way, versus just walking in the door and being charged something I don't know what I'm going to get charged for.” (4:32—5:48) -Dave

“There's a case study up on our website and, basically, what we do is we integrate with the practice expansion systems of the offices we work with. We pull that data back, and we take a look at how do our Kleer-Membersy patients, people with coverage, behave relative to uninsured patients or cash-pay patients that have no coverage. What that case study shows is the average across our platform. So, if I went into why it happens . . . why suddenly you start to see 182% improvement in collections, well, I mentioned before these uninsured patients are worried about coming into your office because they don't have coverage, and they're afraid that since they don't have coverage, it's going to cost them too much. They're not going to be able to afford the care that they need. So, what do they do? They stay away. Or even if they are forced into your office because they have some pain, they just don't accept the care that they should. So, what does a membership plan do? It gets rid of that barrier. So, now they've bought into a subscription. They understand, one, it includes benefits. You can include cleanings, exams, and X-rays as part of the subscription they're paying, and then you can give discounts on other treatment that they accept outside what's included in the subscription. So, now they have coverage. Now, they have transparency and simplicity into what they're going to be paying, so what they end up doing is coming into your office.” (6:35—8:02) -Dave

“The first thing you see is [patients on membership plans are] going to come in twice as often as they used to. We see, on average across the platform, a 100% improvement in visits. So, now they're coming in. What's the key to treatment acceptance? It's getting them into the hygiene chair. Where does treatment acceptance come from? It comes from hygiene. So, by embedding cleanings in your subscription, they're coming in, getting their cleanings, and there's other care they need that gets presented to them when they're getting their hygiene visits. What happens? Treatment acceptance goes up 145%. So, visits went up 100%. Treatment acceptance went up 145%. And this isn't standard hygiene and things like that. This is restorative care and so on. It’s like, they needed this care. A lot of them haven't come in in a while. They're not coming in as often as they should. They have treatment needs. So, they're accepting at a higher rate than even their visitation rate. Then, obviously, that drives gross production. Your gross production, on average, goes up 172%. So, even a little bit above treatment acceptance. It means that production and some of the things that they're getting done are actually some of the higher value treatment than the lower value stuff. So, production goes up 172%. Then, you are providing some discounts inside the membership plan. So, on average, if you did an average across our platform across all hygiene and all other care provided under the membership plan, the average discount is about 15% is what you end up providing through the membership plan. But with that increase in production, the net effect on collections is, I know this sounds weird, but it goes up 182%, on average. So, gross production went up 172%. Collections went up 182%. Again, that has to do with the treatment mix and things like that, plus that 15% discount. But the net is, how do you get that to the 182% improvement in collections, which is the number you talked about, which was it improves from $317 per patient, per year to $893 per patient, per year. It's because you gave them coverage. They came in, they accepted treatment, they had some outstanding treatment, so they're getting caught up with some things. Then, the production and the collections fall out of that.” (8:02—10:19) -Dave

“The most important metric you have in your business is the collections. We absolutely are all about driving the collections within the offices. Now, if you think about gross production versus collection — so, let me give you a parallel. I just talked about what happens if an uninsured patient moves over to a membership. I talked about all the impact that has. Now, let's talk about if we compare the membership to an insured patient. On an average basis, a Kleer-Membersy membership plan patient versus insured, they come in about the same amount. They accept about the same amount of care. They drive about the same gross production. So, if you looked on the surface, you would say, ‘Well, it's no better than insurance,’ because it drove the same gross production. Well, now let's take a look at collections. I mentioned the average discount provided on our platform is about 15%. The average discount provided to insurance is a little above 40%. So, your collections looks the same, Kleer-Membersy versus insured. But the collections on Kleer-Membersy are way above insured. That's the key, is you're keeping more of that production. That is what you really need to focus on, is the net collections, or whatever you want to call it, net production or collections. That's the critical metric to look at inside the office.” (11:37—12:57) -Dave

“We look at insurance plans and what the average collections are on the gross production of the insurance plans. They vary a lot. On average, about 41% is what we see from a discounted perspective. It varies. We've seen some at 60% discount. We've seen some as low as . . . maybe 30%. So, we typically see anywhere between 30% and 60%. So, yes, it ranges a lot. And one thing that we have done for offices is actually look at that and profile the insurers and the relative discounts they're providing across all those insurers and the amount of production each one is generating. It's really eye-opening for offices when we do that. You get this curve of, you're in-network with ten insurance plans, and this one, you're collecting 60%. This one, you're collecting 40%. This one has gross production of, let's say, $500,000. This one has gross production of $100,000. It's eye-opening. Like, wow, I am dependent on something that is giving a 50% discount. How can I possibly continue with that? So, yes — it varies, and it can be over 50%. We've seen it.” (13:31—14:46) -Dave

“[Increasing collections] can happen in your practice. We see it over and over again. We have over 10,000 offices. We measure this on a daily basis. We've seen it's incredibly consistent office, to office, to office. Some people will say, ‘Well, this is too good to be true.’ These are real numbers coming from data from our offices. It's their data, not our data. You can have this impact. What I tell people is, if you believe it, it happens. Also, I'd say one more thing is when we implement, if you integrate with your practice management system, we’ll actually show you your data, and you can see it. You can judge whether it's good enough for you or not. If it's not working well enough, we say, ‘Yeah, that's fine. Let's part ways.’ We're not here to hold anybody hostage. But [increased collections] happens. It's happening every day, and it can happen in your office.” (15:15—16:02) -Dave

Snippets:

0:00 Introduction.

1:56 Engage your existing patients.

4:05 Coverage, defined.

6:06 Kleer’s case study data.

11:09 Collections is the most important metric.

12:58 Average discount percentages.

14:59 Final thoughts.

16:03 More about Kleer-Membersy.

Dave Monahan Bio:

Dave Monahan is the CEO of Kleer, an advanced, cloud-based platform that enables dentists to easily design and manage their own membership plan and offer it directly to their patients. Kleer is turn-key and free to implement. Their mission is simple: partner with dentists to increase the value of their practices by making dental care accessible and affordable to everyone. 
ACT Dental Team

ACT Dental Team

    Subscribe to our newsletter