By Bridget Burris

Advertising, attracting new patients and closing the deal are all labor intensive, expensive processes in orthodontic practices. You work hard to render good treatment, give good service and run a practice that patients are proud to do business with. But once the case is sold, how can you be sure that you are getting paid for all your hard work? It’s easy to let contracts slip through the cracks and the more your practice grows the easier it is. Having struggled with this ourselves I thought I would take a minute to share with you the systems we use to insure that all the contracts we sign are actually entered and started. Here are the three methods I would suggest that every owner employ to triple check that you’re getting paid for your hard work:

• Use a tracker on Google documents or manually and have the TC enter every new patient appointment, the result of the appointment and the contract if it is a start. Look at the tracker daily. Here is a random screen shot of the one we use showing most of the possible actions that could occur:

• You need to have a procedure code in your software that is linked to a start so that you can print a report with all the start codes daily and compare it to the report on contracts entered and to the TC tracker.
• You should print a report on all credit balances weekly as this will show cases that were sold but the contract was not started. The report will show these omissions as a credit because it’s not on the sales tracker and the clinician didn’t push the start procedure code when they started treatment chairside.

It’s vitally important to track your case starts daily. To do otherwise is to miss out on payments from patients, insurance companies and Medicaid. It’s a terrible thing to let the money you’re owed for your hard work slip away – especially considering how easy it is to track this stuff! Have a great week.