The dental insurance industry makes it exceedingly difficult for many people to obtain dental insurance coverage and get necessary dental care. Forward-thinking dental service organizations (DSOs) are aware of this problem and are determined to find innovative ways to provide dental care in an affordable way to uninsured and cash-only patients.
During a session sponsored by Membersy at Becker's The Future of Dentistry Roundtable, Michael Shuman, CEO of Membersy, led a discussion about the benefits that a membership dentistry model brings to both patients and providers.
Four key takeaways were:
- The current dental landscape has barriers and obstacles for both patients and providers. With nearly 50 percent of Americans lacking dental insurance, over six million having lost their insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic and 50 percent of those who apply for financing denied due to credit requirements, the dental landscape has an abundance of opportunity to better serve non-insured patients. On the provider side, it does not help that insurance companies lack pricing transparency and deny providers the option to customize or set their own rates.
- DSOs can provide patients an alternative to insurance: membership dentistry. Dental providers can circumvent the broken culture established by dental health insurance companies by engaging with patients directly through creative and compelling membership programs.
"We've seen a real effort over the last several years to create a new culture in dentistry with pricing transparency, a more structured environment for cash-paying patients and how you serve those patients for the long term," Shuman said. He explained that this approach can help DSOs by generating a recurring stream of revenue, boosting practice profitability, increasing services rendered, enhancing patient experience, establishing patient loyalty, and expanding the patient base.
"The membership program creates a structured environment on how you service uninsured cash-paying patients and provides your staff with a tool that helps them close treatment," Shuman added, emphasizing that it eliminates pressure on treatment coordinators and office staff to try to "sell" treatments.
- Best practices for creating a membership-based program run the gamut. Shuman said that through its years of partnering with DSOs to help them initiate loyalty programs, Membersy has identified several business aspects that have an outsized positive impact. Those aspects include:
-Customization of branding, logo, pricing and fee schedule, which should be based on your practice’s needs and demographics.
-Build of a custom website and landing pages with effective marketing messages for uninsured patients, featuring bilingual member support, and a back-end dashboard to verify member eligibility and analyze plan metrics, branding and marketing materials
-Plan rollout to educate key stakeholders and coordinate regional trainings with practices, as well as in-person or virtual group trainings.
- Creating a subscription-based loyalty program can vastly improve the patient experience. When DSO patients become members, their behavior changes because "when you are a member of something, you're going to use that membership," Tracy Swanson, EVP of Sales added. Because of this psychological effect of membership, members are more likely to return for scheduled visits and agree to needed treatment, which leads to better outcomes and improved patient satisfaction. And because patients can save considerably by purchasing a membership plan compared to what they would pay for the same treatments at retail prices, it also improves their financial experience.