Why Pediatric Dental Practices Benefit Most From Billing Automation

Pediatric dental practices face unique challenges when it comes to collecting patient portions. Consequently, here are the stats: 

• General dental practices typically collect around 91% of patient-responsible balances. 
• Pediatric dental practices often only consistently collect around 80–85%.

Communicating financial responsibilities to parent guarantors in a timely and accurate manner is a hurdle that most pediatric practices need to overcome. And managing both the billing communication and then keeping up with collection can be time- and resource-consuming. 

If handled poorly, it’s a lot of angry parents and unpaid bills.

This is where billing automation software steps in.

To maintain consistent billing operations, reduce errors, and ultimately enhance the patient financial experience, you’re going to either need a lot of dedicated, highly-trained staff, or the right software tool. Here’s why the latter is more cost-effective and better for your practice.

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What is the difference between “billing software” and “billing automation software”?

Before we dive into the benefits of automation, we want to clarify that billing automation software effectively does everything traditional billing software does, but with workflows.

This means that instead of auditing a specific patient account, deciding if the balance qualifies for billing, queuing up a statement and billing message, and manually sending it with a click, all actions are pre-determined based on rules set by a practice.

It’s the rules-based workflows that differentiate billing automation platforms from regular billing software.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the specific ways this kind of system can benefit pediatric dental practices.

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Proactive Payment Reminders for Busy Parents

Instead of phone calls, mailed letters, or manually send digital reminders, billing automation software can send timely reminders for outstanding balances. This proactive approach improves collection rates without requiring staff to dedicate any significant time to follow-up. 

With RCM platforms like Pearly, this automated follow-up can be sent with the right message, in the right tone, at the right time.

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Clearer and More Accurate Patient Statements

Billing automation ensures that patient statements are not only generated promptly but are also easy to understand. They can clearly delineate what the insurance has paid, what remains as the patient's responsibility, and even break down costs per child or service. This reduces confusion for parents and minimizes calls to the office for clarification.

What can usually happen is a lag between when services are rendered, and when bills need to be paid. Because the guarantor is almost never the patient, there can be confusion about that final bill–especially with multiple children. Parents juggling multiple schedules may forget payment due dates.

When the patient portion is clearly communicated upfront, and statements are accurate and easy to understand, the likelihood of billing disputes decreases. This transparency contributes to a more positive overall experience for parent guarantors.

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Flexible Payment Plan Options for Families

Families with multiple children often face significant out-of-pocket expenses for treatments. As a result, pediatric practices often need to offer payment plans to families. 

Billing automation equipped with Payment Plans simplifies the creation, management, and tracking of these plans, including automated recurring payments, which ensures consistent collections without constant manual oversight. If these plans allow for self-enrollment, even less time is required to collect payments through these plans.

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Simplified & Transparent Family Payment Management

Pediatric practices manage multiple children per family with varying treatment costs and payment schedules.

Automation software can consolidate patient-portion balances across siblings, creates unified family billing statements, and tracks payment allocation.

The result?

Parents receive one comprehensive bill and can make single payments covering multiple children's treatments.

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Financial Education and Transparency Tools

We’ve mentioned “transparency” a number of times in this article, and that’s because we believe that financial transparency is the #1 factor for impacting patient portion colleciton success in pediatric dental.

Parents may not understand dental costs or payment options available; however, with automated systems, your practice staff will have more bandwidth to provide educational content about treatment costs, financing options, and payment plan benefits.

Building trust through transparency should be a priority for pediatric practices. When families make informed financial decisions about their children's dental care, better oral health outcomes follow.

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Case Study: How Pearly streamlined Kids Care Dental’s patient billing process 

When Kids Care Dental encountered these classic pediatric dentistry patient portion hurdles, they considered billing automation to address many of these aforementioned challenges.

“Because of sending inconsistencies, there was often a delay in when parent guarantors would receive statements and confusion concerning services rendered. This led to a subpar billing experience, and over time led to reduced cash flow and increased balance write-offs.”

The end result for this DSO was an acceleration in parent guarantor payments, and a drastic improvement in the patient financial experience.

Focus on Patient Care, Not Collections

No one wants to spend hours auditing patient accounts and reaching out to patients for payment. And no parent wants to look at a bill and not understand what they owe and why.

For your practice, by automating the bulk of patient portion billing, pediatric dental staff can shift their focus from administrative tasks to what truly matters: providing exceptional care in a child-friendly environment. By allowing your practice to prioritize patient well-being and build stronger relationships with families, the real impact from adopting billing automation software will emerge from re-orienting your staff’s activities, rather than from the software itself. 

The same is true for other software solutions out there. They’re just tools that let you focus your attention to what really matters.

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