The importance of having a dental membership plan for patients without dental insurance
Many dental offices have created dental memberships or dental clubs to offer discounts for patients who don’t have dental insurance. And there are many reasons to do this for the office and for the patients.
Many dental insurances subsidize preventative care and offer free cleaning appointments. It makes sense for the patient to have regular checkups to keep their gums healthy, and if a problem is discovered, it’s better to treat it before it grows into a bigger issue.
Most dental issues, like cavities, we may not be aware of and we may not feel any symptoms or any pain until the nerve of the tooth is involved. And by that point the tooth may have an abscess and we need to do a root canal and a crown.
So, it’s much better to let the patient know of any issues like this sooner before it turns into a bigger problem.
Dental membership plans for when your patients have no dental insurance
Dental memberships can have different structures. Sometimes there’s an annual fee that
includes certain procedures and there may be a reduced fee for the other procedures.
The goal should be to encourage preventative care. Patients call when they have a toothache because they know there’s a problem.
But we want to encourage patients not to delay getting the preventative care they need to keep their gums and teeth healthy so that they won’t have these bigger issues come up later.
The benefit of an annual-fee membership
Many membership plans may include an annual fee for the membership.
An annual fee can be paid all at once for the year or can be paid monthly. This fee may
include a reduced fee or included fee for things like cleanings exams and X-rays.
The larger procedures may have a different fee schedule specific for the plan, or it might
have the fee just reduced by a certain percentage from the normal fee.
It’s good to prepare a summary of the plan details that’s easy to explain to the patient.
For example, we don’t want small issues to become major problems. We like to have regular checkups to be sure that the teeth and gums are healthy. Therefore, at our office, we have a dental membership plan.
For patients who don’t have dental insurance, there is an annual fee of this amount of dollars and it gets you an exam cleaning and X-rays twice a year for X amount of dollars each time.
Plus, if you need a dental procedure, you save a certain percentage off the regular fee, and if you just do two cleanings a year, you will save this amount of dollars by being in the plan.
So a script like that makes it clear that the goal is to have a plan that’s simple to understand and easy to keep up with.
You want it to be easy for the front desk to remember the start dates and dates for the membership. And also we want a membership plan that encourages the patient to seek preventative care they need so that small issues do not become major and more expensive issues later.
It’s like a repetition to remind and make sure it’s clear to the patient.