Patient Financing

Hi, I’m Dr. Todd Shatkin and welcome to this Monday Morning Minute. Today we’re going to talk about patient financing and how patients can afford wonderful dentistry.

Now, a lot of people come in and they don’t have a lot of money. We’ve talked about this before. Some people have a lot of bone and no money. Some people have a lot of money and no bone. The great thing about mini implants is you you can do the dentistry on either of those kind of patients because you don’t need a lot of money and you don’t need a lot of bone. So we do many implants all day long on patients who some have a little bit of money, some have difficult financial problems. But what we do is we finance a lot of the work we do, and we have different finance companies that offer different types of programs for different type of patient situations.

So, for example, if I want to give a patient 24 months with no interest to pay for it, I’ll usually use either care credit or health credit services because those are my go to financing companies for patients for 24 months with no interest. If I need an extended term, I’ll usually choose health credit services over care credit only because the interest rate is lower for the patient.

And really, we want to look out for the patient number one. And number two, the patient’s monthly dollar amount that they can spare for dentistry is going to be limited. So if you charge them 9% as opposed to 16%, their payment is going to be significantly less. It’s not just the fact that you want to save your patients money, but you also need to provide them with services so they have a lower payment, so you can do more dentistry at a lower payment. So that’s the key. Now, if those two finances don’t work out, we have two other companies I deal with quite a bit GreenSky and lending club. Those are my next choices.

GreenSky is a wonderful company, and they go all the way out to 90 months financing. So if a patient needs more time to pay, we can stretch it out all the way to 90 months. And they offer the first six months interest only so they can have a lower payment for the first six months. And the lending club offers various different plans. So that’s kind of my last option in my office.

There’s a lot of companies out there that you can offer financing through, but I can tell you, for many, many years I only dealt with one company. And over the past several years, I’ve added up to four different companies for my patient care. And what’s happened is we are very, very successful in getting them financed with one of these companies. Sometimes even we use two or three.

For example, on a full mouth reconstruction case, if we need $35,000, we may have to get $15,000 from 115 thousand from another and 5000 from a third. It all depends on the patient’s credit worthiness and how much they can get approved for at what interest rate. So we kind of play the game a little bit to try to get the patient the very best rate and the very most amount of money they need for the procedure. So I hope that’s helpful to you.

And we have our wonderful patient Sam here, who I’m going to actually do porcelain veneers on. And she may want to do some financing. Right, Sam? Of course. Because I don’t know, if you’re fresh out of school, you may not have $12,000 sitting around, right? That’s for sure. So interest free financing might help you. If we can give you two years to pay for it with no interest. That would be amazing. Yeah. So we’ll talk about that a little bit more. But until then, thank you for joining me on this Monday Morning Minute. Health Credit Services is now Ally Lending.