Donna Hall talks to Gaby Bissett about what exactly a dental membership is and why it could be key to your business.
What is a dental membership?
So a dental membership is something that you can have in place in your practice that gives your patients a way of budgeting for their routine care. Where it should always start for any practice is – what do we want to achieve with a membership? What purpose is it going to serve?
The purpose for the patient is that it’s a way of spreading the cost, attending the dentist regularly, keeping healthy. For you as a practice owner, there’s lots of benefits too. For example, having people paying in monthly means they’re prepaying for their appointments. As a result, they’re going to attend.
So you’ve got that win-win scenario where your patients are healthy, they’re attending regularly, and that gives you that opportunity to spot problems. It means you can talk to them about treatments that might be of interest, but for the patients, in a world where budgeting is becoming tougher and tougher, everybody wants a way of spreading the cost. It’s a great mechanism for them.
As we come off the back of Covid-19 times, and practices reopened and got back into the swing of seeing patients again, the demand for membership is going up and up and up.
Bespoke to practice needs
We’ve had lots of practices that have come back and said: ‘Actually, I’d like more of my patients on a plan, because we can really see the benefit of that.’ But also patients are demanding that mechanism now – they’re happy to pay privately but need a way of making that affordable.
We try to be very bespoke to what a practice needs. So we’re certainly not a one size fits all. Dentists like to work in different ways. They like to include different appointments within a membership. Most of our patients are on what we would call a maintenance plan. So that’s where you’re thinking about your checkups, your hygiene, your X-rays, some treatment discounts.
But there’s other plans that sit outside of that. You might want to include treatment as a way of patients being able to pay that little bit more every month. But they’re budgeting for treatments that they might need in the future.
You’ve also got things like hygiene-only membership. These are so popular with practices that hold an NHS contract. They have a hygienist in place and lots of their NHS patients tap into that private service for hygiene.
There’s also children’s plans – I’m seeing more and more demand for those in my area now because if people aren’t able to take any more patients on the NHS, they want an affordable way to be able to see the children.
What is the benefit of a membership plan vs pay as you go?
The benefits as a business is that secure income, month in, month out. Quite often I get asked why put them on a plan over pay as you go? What’s the benefit to the patient of being on the plan in terms of how you cost your membership? This is bespoke – we don’t give you a price and say that’s what you have to charge.
Every practice will have their own membership fees. For example, some practices will choose to offer their membership at a slightly discounted rate.
When you’re saying to a patient, ‘Look, I can save you money, we can spread the cost, but also we’ve got a worldwide package in there as well that’s going to help you with the unforeseen’. So it really is about the patients receiving more. It’s about them feeling part of your club almost and part of the practice.
This is something that you can’t get as a pay as you go patient.
It isn’t just about saving money. It’s about saying to patients, because you’re a member of the practice, we are going to see you regularly. We’re going to get those appointments always booked in the diary so that we know that we’re seeing you at the right intervals and should you need a little bit of treatment, you’ve a discount built in there as well.
What happens if a patient want to cancel?
We try to make it as fair as possible. We tend to find that patients stay on a plan for an average of around 12 years. So it really is a long term relationship that you’re starting with these patients.
If you had a patient that did genuinely need to cancel – sometimes that can be because they’ve moved away or their circumstances have changed – then we simply ask for a month’s notice from you or from the patient.
We make sure that it’s fair. Everybody knows what they’re signing up to from the beginning, and because they’re paying in advance, you’re not giving anything that they haven’t already paid for.
So you’re not going to find yourselves out of pocket for your checkups or your hygiene, for example, because they’ve paid in advance for those appointments.
We’d also work with the practice to make sure that they are following up with patients who might wish to cancel. Sometimes it can be as simple as they didn’t know the name on the direct debit.
We encourage practices to have a follow-up process so that they always know why a patient’s cancelled. Quite often it is something really simple that actually they can overcome with the patient.
How can a practice make a membership plan the default?
For me, it’s about your front desk team talking about the plan from that very first phone call with a patient. It’s not something that should be sort of left on a leaflet in the waiting room.
We want patients to be having that instruction from that first phone call. We do work on a membership basis here, Dr X will talk to you about that when you come in for your first appointment.
Some practices like to follow that up with an email where they might talk a little bit more about the membership on offer. But we want the membership to be prescribed. We want the dentist to put the patient on the right membership for them.
We’ll really work with you to make sure that your dentist knows how to talk about it in the surgery so that again, at every touch point in the practice, the patients are seeing that the membership is the way you’d like them to attend.
It’s about making sure that everybody in the practice knows about your plan – from your nurses to your front desk team to your clinicians. Everybody in your business should be able to talk about the membership with confidence.
