News

Five Reasons Why Your In-Office Membership Plan Is Failing

Five Reasons Why Your In-Office Membership Plan Is Failing
by Jordon Comstock

I have helped thousands of dental practices across the nation set up and manage in-office dental plans where patients pay a monthly or yearly fee to the practice to get benefits and discounts. Over the past few years, I have noticed five common trends among practices whose office membership programs have failed.

Not Having a Proper System

One of the biggest reasons why these plans don’t work is because the practice doesn’t have a system working for it. I see too many offices setting up these programs using three-ring binders. They put financial data and patient data in the binders to help them track the patient signups for their program, which is against PCI compliance.

It also causes too much manual work for the front office team as the program grows and cannot scale as they reach hundreds or even thousands of patients. Each day or week, the front office team has to flip through the binder and manually look at each patient’s file, and then they have to call those patients and get permission from them to run their credit card.

This can take so much time, especially if you want to grow your program to a significant number of members. When you don’t have a proper system for managing your program, the process gets stuck in your front office team’s head, which means if they quit or get fired, the program will fail because of a lack of a proper system.

Other practices will try and use practice management software. But this software wasn’t built to manage dental membership plans. It was built to manage schedules and insurance. The problem with using practice management software is that you never truly know how many members are signed up or what type of revenue your program is generating for your practice. These are two key performance indicators that you need to understand success and growth.

Read full article on Dentistry Today.