4 Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Dental Membership Plan

All businesses are knee-deep in planning for a successful year ahead, and your dental practice is no different. You're likely looking for new strategies to help alleviate some of your biggest challenges, whether it be new patient growth, current patient retention, or overcoming the challenges around staffing shortages. 

With over 75 million Americans lacking traditional dental insurance, having an alternative solution if more important than ever. Dental membership plans are becoming an increasingly popular way for patients to receive dental care and can be an effective strategy for solving challenges around new patient growth, low retention rates, and case acceptance rates for your cash-paying patients. By offering a membership plan, dental practices can provide their clients with discounted rates on services while increasing their overall revenue and decreasing their reliance on traditional insurance.

When evaluating options for implementing a membership plan in your dental practice there are many different factors to consider. Let's review a few important questions to ask during the evaluation stage to ensure your select a membership plan that will fit your practice's needs.

4 Questions to Ask When Evaluating Membership Plans

1. How will a membership plan impact our bottom line?

As the total dental market and inflation continue to grow, the cost of doing business has gone up, but reimbursements from insurance have gone down. By breaking your reliance on traditional insurance, you can increase practice profitability and improve case acceptance rates in the process. A membership plan lets your practice control the pricing narrative and keep 100% of profits from services rendered. 

On top of that, a membership plan creates recurring revenue from your cash-paying patients with auto-renewals when their subscription plan is due. Subscription plans drive behaviors in their members to take advantage of all their plan benefits. In most cases patients that are part of a membership plan will spend 2.5x more per year compared to non-members. 

2. How will a membership plan help standardize our offices?

Implementing a membership plan will help unify the way all of your practice locations manage the billing cycle for cash paying patients. The right platform takes care of automating recurring invoicing and payments and standardizes fess schedules across the board. 

When it comes to standardization of a membership plan across your offices you'll also want to know whether your membership plan partner takes care of the compliance side of offering a membership plan. Compliance rules vary state by state and can be a tricky component of membership plans, so ensure that your plan partner is compliance with all regulations before moving forward.

3. How will a membership plan decrease and streamline admin tasks?

We know that staffing shortages are a big problem for many dental practices today. Anything you can do to help relieve in-house admin tasks can help make your plan and practice even more successful. Make sure you're asking questions around how the membership plan partner handles marketing and support of the membership plan. Will you receive standard membership marketing materials, or does the partner work with you to build branded materials that align with your practice's brand and message? What other tools, training, and support will they provide your staff with so it's less of a burden on your already overworked staff? All are important aspects to consider.

4. How will I measure the success of my membership plan?

In order to ensure the success of your membership plan, it is important to consistently track and measure performance. By tracking metrics such as patient satisfaction, patient retention rate, acceptance rates, and profit margin, you can tweak existing aspects of your plan or add new benefits to better meet the needs of your patients. Partnering with a membership plan will give you access to a dashboard with all the tools needed to make sure you're keeping tabs on plan performance. 

Ready to shop around for a plan that fits for your practice? Here at Membersy, we work alongside your team to design your plan, allowing you to set your own rates to best fit the needs and demographics of your patient base.