Accounts receivable industry’s leading information portal, NexaCollect, has launched a dental recovery division that now provides facts and advice regarding the dental debt collection. After assisting physicians and small businesses for the last three years, it was decided to make dental as an independent unit since it wasn’t efficiently blending into the medical division, primarily focused on physicians.
The dental collections industry has rapidly created utilities that integrate with popular dental Practice Management Software (PMS) solutions like Dentrix, Denticon and Dentimax. Most of these implementations have read-only access to the core billing system and automatically transfer the delinquent accounts for debt collection based on pre-set preferences of the dental office.
In America, only about two-thirds of the people have dental insurance compared to about 90% who have health insurance. Most individuals do not consider dental insurance as essential as medical insurance; this is the primary reason for a large number of accounts receivable in the dental industry.
Dentist offices regularly put patients on a payment plan, an obligation which many patients are unable to fulfill. Hiring a dental collection agency to recover unpaid bills once they are due for over 90 days is a fairly common practice. Since dental debts can be compared to unsecured loans, that must be recovered quickly and diplomatically. The older an account becomes, the harder it gets to recover. By partnering with top-notch dental collection agencies, Nexacollect can serve dental offices efficiently. Each partner collection agency is checked for complaint rate, recovery rate, experience in the dental industry collections and adherence to laws and regulations surrounding the medical debt collections. Each collection agency must also be checked for security and HIPAA compliance.
There are over 200,000 dentists in the USA. Unpaid dental bills run into billions of dollars every year. Without engaging a good dental collection agency, most of these delinquent accounts will go unpaid. Collection agencies must follow the TCPA and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA) to ensure that patients are not harassed, abused or misguided. Dental offices can choose whether to report these accounts to credit bureaus or not. Higher balances can be forwarded for legal action as well. However, most dentists avoid this step since it is deemed too intensive.
An average dental practice forwards 10-20 unpaid accounts every month to a collection agency. Most opt for collection letters service before the debt collector initiated collection calls. Patients are far more likely to settle the account by making the full payment or partial payment when a collection agency demands payment from them versus when the staff of a dental office was attempting to collect.
By separating the dental collections as a separate entity from its medical division, Nexacollect will serve dental practices far better. Good collection agencies must work with patients to erase their debt rather than working against them. Patients who cannot pay money up-front can be put under a payment plan so that the debt can be paid off in 4-6 installments. Collection agencies must work with patients amicably to protect the reputation of dentists as well. For any more information regarding dental collections, contact Jessica at support@nexacollect.com or call 1-844-Nexa-123.
