Dental CEO’s: How much are you writing off in PPO Insurance plans?

Many of us track our “numbers” in order to see how we are performing or to compare how our practices are doing over the course of the year.

This is an essential part of running a successful business. “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” is a common phrase used. Also, we need to know our numbers to gauge us vs. the industry standards.

One “number” that you may not be tracking is the amount of write offs in PPO insurance discounts. This number might stagger you, I know it staggered us.

We have been regularly tracking what we have been writing off to the two plans we belong to, Delta Dental and MetLife. While the Delta Dental number has been maintaining around the same each month for several years, the MetLife numbers were growing exponentially.

As our MetLife patient base grew, so did our write offs. We contacted MetLife every year to try and negotiate a higher reimbursement rate (at least for inflation for crying out loud) each year the answer was flat out “NO”.

Our numbers did the talking, so last October we told MetLife we were leaving the PPO network as of Jan 1, 2015. Their response was….”so long”.

We sent letters to our 800+ MetLife patients stating the fact that we would no longer be “in-network” providers. It was a bit scary to do this.

We have been out of network dentists for 3 months and tracking any patients that might have informed us that they were no longer coming to us because of this fact.

Tune in next month as I give you the response from the patients, the numbers and how we have been doing so far with this new policy.

Call to action: If you are not tracking your PPO write offs, start now. Go back as far as you can and record it. Please contact me if you do not know how to do this and I will walk you through it.