Dental Practice Advice-What the ADA won’t tell you-
Let’s touch on some dental practice advice which all my clients know about already but the ADA certainly won’t share with you.
Dental insurance has played an amazing role in the profession and in the good it has done for millions patients over the years. If we back up in time to when this employee benefit came to be, the annual maximum bought a LOT of dentistry. Fast forward 40+ years and the same maximum doesn’t do nearly as much.
We can debate the current state of insurance till the cows come home but overall from a selling perspective it is still a very good thing to have around. Why? Because we can easily manage patient expectations around it as part of a check-list approach to selling. Again, some practice advice…. no check-list means less ability to manage patient expectations and 95% of the profession bang their heads again and again on this without doing anything differently! All they need to do is take some dental practice advice from me and all will be clear. A positive start in the right direction is by checking out my #1 best selling book on Amazon.
What the ADA Won’t Tell You Part 1
There’s one hidden side of insurance that few in the profession as solo business owners understand and it is the role money plays between our associations and the insurance beast. If you look carefully at sponsorship from major meetings like the ADA’s down to your state society, you will find financial “relationships” happening that make organized dentistry beholden to these interests. Needless to say when one is financially beholden to someone or something, it influences actions. Your dental leader’s tepid response to insurance over the years is an example of this. Of course, no one will write or speak about how much of a role this influence plays into top level down decisions that eventually affect you as an individual. This first story not being told to you about “insurance money influencing dentistry at the top” isn’t even the most important one. That train has left the station. Regardless of our opinion on this, nothing you or I can do will change it even though ultimately it greatly impacts your practice and thousands of my client’s practices. One thing that separates my clients from the 95% remaining dentists is that they have used the dental practice advice and marketing ideas I have gathered and have risen over the clutches of the insurance beast.
What the ADA Won’t Tell You Part 2
Now here’s the far more interesting and important story that isn’t being told to you and that does have a happy ending–should you choose to benefit. This second item that you won’t read about in the ADA news or in any organized dental journal is that even when you are contracted with dental insurance (HMO, PPO, Delta) there are still legal and ethical ways to get your full fee OR to get very near full fee if you adhere to the Smart Discounting system that I developed.
Yes, you can have every dental insurance contract under the sun and still get your full fee. So…how does THAT work? Well, first off all there are special legal documents required that creates a new relationship between you and an individual patient that supersedes any and all insurance contracts. Secondly, to get your full fee does require leadership based discussions with your patient (be that via yourself or a competent staff member) getting them up to speed at what the discounted fee can and can’t buy and the options. Because of the reality that conversations take time, these special tools (legal documents) along with those leadership based conversations are the most valuable for your larger cases. It’s simply not worth you or your staff’s time on “regular” dentistry. For basic dentistry up to 3 or 4 teeth, you are simply better off selling more effectively inside the contract. FYI – even under insurance a selling system is a must if you want to be efficient.
So, how does one get these documents? Well, you are free to figure this out for yourself, to think things through a bit, and hire an attorney to draft them OR you can join the 5% in the profession who have access to them as part of the brand new training in The McAnally Selling System. When the training covers the Financial Presentation portion of selling, these documents are discussed and dispensed for your use. It is up to you to take my dental practice advice and make your practice more profitable and help more patients along the way.
