How the right message, at the right time, boosts collection rates

When dental practices bill their patients, how those requests are made can have a major impact on whether or not a balance is collected. We don’t just mean providing convenient payment methods or sending frequent statements–we’re talking about how practices leverage their billing language.

After all, to encourage action from your patients you need to be compelling. That means crafting a message that balances a tone that is friendly and professional, yet drives urgency.

Striking this balance can be difficult, and for some practices, even when the perfect billing notification is discovered it’s still not enough to collect balances efficiently.

Sometimes patients need a more dynamic approach for prompting payment.

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STATIC VS. DYNAMIC BILLING LANGUAGE

When practices bill with Pearly, patients with eligible balances due for payment are automatically enrolled in a dynamic workflow that sends a sequence of digital statements with ways to pay. These workflows, which we call outreach flows, can be configured for every practice down to the specific language used for each notification.

Some practices dial in a message that they use for all notifications. This message gets sent via SMS, email, or as a physical statement, and doesn’t change for the duration of an outreach flow.

Other practices leverage Pearly’s dynamic billing language platform, which allows for up to 10 message templates to be used in outreach. These templates are rotated throughout the billing cycle to reduce patient message fatigue and to promote action from patients through gradual escalation.

But which approach leads to better patient-portion collection?

To understand the efficacy of static vs. dynamic billing language, we sampled over 450,000 instances of outreach flows to see which form of patient communication yielded better results for practices.

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METHODOLOGY

For this analysis, we looked at 457,426 patient-portion billing outreach flows that lasted for longer than 10 days. Filtering for these outreach flows guaranteed the billing system to send at least 2 billing notifications. Because notifications begin to rotate through a sequence after the first send, this sample puts dynamic and static messaging head to head.

We looked at all types of practices including general and specialty dental, from private practices, dental groups, and 200+ location DSOs. We also sampled across all available US patient demographics.
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RESULTS: COLLECTION RATE

Controlling for these parameters, we calculated that there is a 7.3% overall improvement in collection rate when practices vary the language of their billing communication templates.

Digging into this rate of improvement across days past due buckets, we see that there is a spectrum of improvement across all brackets of aging balances.

Surprisingly, the highest performing bracket for dynamic language was the <30 days past due bucket, which showed nearly twice as much of an improvement than other brackets.

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RESULTS: PAYMENT VELOCITY

But for some practices, a marginal improvement to collection rate isn’t enough to justify developing a more sophisticated billing communication system. Collection rate isn’t always the Holy Grail of collection metrics.

Another metric that we measure for practices is payment velocity as indicated by “days to pay”. If cash flow is a concern, then this can actually be more important than a flat collection rate. If you’re aiming to optimize the speed of your patient payments, dynamic messaging outshines static messaging by a wide margin.

Dynamic messaging provides a 25-day reduction in days to pay across all DPD buckets (representing a ~31% improvement). This means that patients take action and pay almost a month faster when language in notifications is varied. Looking more granularly, we see that there is a reduction of days to pay across all days past due buckets.

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While a 31% overall reduction is a significant improvement, what is even more impressive is the difference that dynamic messaging makes in the 90+ days past due bracket. Here we see a 49.7-day reduction in days to pay, representing a 41.3% improvement.

So there you have it–dynamic language is more effective than static language for collecting patient balances efficiently.

This finding shouldn’t come as a big surprise. As we mentioned previously, patients don’t want to be bombarded by the same monotonous “you have a bill” notification. By varying the tone, language, and even the format of your messages, patients will be more dynamically prompted to take action and pay their bills.

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BILLING LANGUAGE EXAMPLES

We understand that every practice has a different voice and tone that they want to use with their patients; however, we have seen a lot of success with message templates that we have optimized over hundreds of iterations. Below you will find some examples of the Pearly App billing templates that you can use for your billing outreach.

BEST PRACTICE RECOMMENDATIONS

There are five core communication best practices that we want you to take away from this Huddle post. These are derived from collections data in our Pearly database and represent some of our top performing practices:

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1. Use between 6-10 message templates and rotate between them every instance of outreach.
   
   
2. If you communicate with patients on multiple devices, send different messages to each device during each wave of notifications.
   
   
3. Include an escalation stage if bills aren’t paid within a certain period.

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4. Remember that there are language preferences that correspond with each device that you are delivering to. SMS messages should fit the tone for a reader using a phone, for example.
   
   
5. Constantly measure and swap out underperforming messages. You can  use AI LLM tools to quickly generate and test messages.

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When practices use Pearly for billing outreach, they have access to a suite of billing tools for dynamic communication with patients. Practices that leverage more features see better results. 

If you’re looking for a way to use dynamic workflows to boost your practice’s collection rate and drastically improve cash flow, reach out to one of our product experts for a quick demo of Pearly’s RCM software platform.

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