Stuff happens and sometimes people get behind on their accounts. It’s just part of life in an orthodontic office. It’s vital that you keep a close eye on all accounts and communicate effectively with patients before, during and after treatment but when someone falls behind on payments it’s even more important that you keep the lines of communication open. In that vein, I thought you might find these 60 and 90 day letters we send out as part of our communication useful. We never want to hold the patient hostage no matter what is going on so in our offices getting the braces off and calling it quits is always an option and I would encourage you to do the same. When a patient is in Invisalign, these situations can be a bit more challenging but don’t forget that default in an orthodontic office happens much less than 5% of the time. Don’t make policy based on outliers! If you tighten your financing and systems so much that you avoid 99 percent of non-payers then you will run off hundreds of people who would pay you, given the chance.
To drive this point home when encouraging doctors to open up their financing and make orthodontics affordable I like to remind them that 95% of 2 million is much better than 99% of 700k! Think about it.