Designing a Dental Patient Payment Experience That Actually Works

Have you ever wondered why it takes so long for your patients to pay their bills? While there are certainly a vast number of ways to notify your patient base about past-due balances, actually prompting them to complete the transaction is a compounding challenge for practices carrying a lot of aging accounts receivable (A/R).

This is a “last mile problem” that can impact practice growth.

For practices that only send paper statements, there is only so much you can do to prompt your patients to provide payment. Besides using compelling language, providing a method to pay, and being persistent with mailing, many of the improvements will only have a small marginal impact on overall collection rates.

For practices that are a bit more sophisticated and offer an online pay portal or mobile payment options, the good news is that there is a lot you can tweak to optimize the checkout process.

For thousands of practices that we have evaluated, simply accepting digital payments is not the be-all and end-all for patient-portion collection.

In many cases, the user experience is not conducive for frictionless payment–in fact, it might actually be deterring patients from completing checkout.

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What E-commerce and Patient Payments Have in Common

We often compare collecting patient payment to the e-commerce checkout experience. In e-commerce, every element in the cart-to-checkout process can be A/B tested to fine-tune conversion rates from one page to the next.

The images and icons used, the language, the button size and color, everything can move the needle 1% here and 1% there until the page is well-oiled and optimized for completing a transaction.

There’s very little difference in dental patient payments; you need to test everything to reduce friction and make the experience enjoyable rather than a pain point.

Pitfalls Of Bad Patient Pay Portal Experiences

• Your ID verification process is too rigorous – While it’s absolutely crucial to have a HIPAA and PCI compliant checkout experience, there is a balance between security and accessibility that your payment portal needs to strike.
  
  

• Lacking adequate payment options – We determined in a previous study that the more payment options you offer, the higher the collection rate. It is best to cater to as many patient preferences as possible, even if it means accepting non-traditional payment methods. Everyone has a go-to payment method, and offering it increases the likelihood of payment.
  
  

• Your statements are opaque or confusing – Patients need to know what they’re paying for and why. If the digital statements you provide your patients are not easy to access and understandable, they will be a sticky point in your payment process.
  
  

• There are too many steps to check out – If you’ve ever shopped online, you’ll have an expectation for the checkout experience. Cart, shipping address, payment information, checkout confirmation–maybe an upsell or two along the way. For patient payments reducing or consolidating as many steps as possible is ideal for a fluid payment experience.
  
  

• Your pay portal is not appropriately branded – In marketing terms, “scent” is a consistent experience from page to page with a familiar brand style and tone.
  
  For designing your payment experience, you can establish trust by maintaining your practice’s brand throughout the entire checkout process.
  
  

• It’s just “janky” – Nothing stops someone from pulling out their credit card faster than a sketchy, low-quality, checkout page. If your pay portal has mis-aligned buttons, broken image links, or just feels “janky” overall, your patients will hesitate to complete their payments.

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Best Practices for Designing your Patient Payment Experience

Now that we’ve discussed what not to do, let’s talk about best practices for your dental pay portal.

• Don’t fall for the pitfalls – Start by doing the opposite of the aforementioned pitfalls of the pay process. Have a secure, but accessible ID verification process, offer transparent, easy-to-read statements, make it not “janky”, etc.
  
  

• Add tracking for portal performance – What gets measured gets managed. And when it comes to pay portals, measuring performance is essential. Understanding checkout timings and conversion rates across steps in the process will give you the data you need to see where patients are getting stuck. The more that you can accurately measure, the better.
  
  

• Make it personalized for the patient – To reduce confusion, make sure to personalize your pay portal with at least the name of the responsible party or patient. Other personalization elements like upcoming visits can be added as long as they don’t distract from checking out.
  
  

• Limit distractions for the patient – Speaking of distractions, keep your pay portal experience streamlined with the fewest number of inputs necessary to check out. Use no more than 5 steps for this.
  
  

• Provide a comprehensive support system – At the end of the day, there will always be patients who need help. Sometimes it’s simply clarifying a charge, and sometimes it’s holding their hand through the entire process.
  
  Regardless of how well-designed your pay portal is, you will need to provide an accessible way for guarantors to find answers to their questions or to contact the practice directly.
  
  

• Treat it like a well-oiled e-commerce checkout experience – After implementing all of these elected changes, you might find the need to tweak elements because of patient feedback. Remember to keep the e-commerce framework in mind when testing new changes.

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Benchmarking for your practice: The Pearly Pay Portal

As of writing this, we process tens of thousands of patient payments per month via our Pearly Pay Portal, which adheres to design best practices. Through monitoring conversion rates at each step and session timings, we adapt our portal to patient feedback. When we release new functionality, these conversion rates, and the speed of the checkout experience are a KPIs for our product team.

Your practice might use a service that provides a payment portal or has one built in-house for your patient base. 

If collecting more patient payments is a priority, then you need to design your pay portal to optimize the user experience. To that end, please consider trying our Pearly for a streamlined payment experience that follows all the best practices and regularly improves based on practice (and patient) feedback.

If you’re interested, book a demo with one of our RCM experts to get started and collect more A/R, faster.