#260 Out of Network on the Phone: The Script that Converts

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Most dentists don’t realize they’re losing up to 100% of out-of-network patients before they ever step into the office. 

In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down the exact phone conversion system your front desk needs to handle out-of-network calls the right way. You’ll learn the scripting framework that builds trust, how to position your practice without losing patients, and the internal systems that make OON cases easy to say yes to.

This is real dental marketing and practice management from SMC, backed by data from over 1,195 practices. If you want better phone conversion, stronger new patient growth, and a system your team actually believes in, this is the playbook.

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Dental Marketing Goat, the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape.
Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National - recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

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Today, I want to talk about a post that popped up in Dental Nachos. If you're not part of Dental Nachos, go check them out. It's a Facebook group, Dr. Paul Goodman. It's an amazing group and a lot of interaction in there, a lot of uh different problems and different ways to solve problems. And this particular problem popped up, and I think a lot of offices deal with this. So here's the question Can someone help with a narrative with patients who call to make an appointment? But because we're out of network with their insurance provider, we very seldom get them to make their appointment. Now that's really important to understand is that if you don't do this right, you'll lose 100% of your patients. Okay. And to make this even worse, most offices lead with, What's your insurance? So if you're leading with what's your insurance, you're losing probably about half of your patience because of that, even when the patient isn't asking about the insurance. So here's their question Is there any way to word it as not to put a negative spin on the call, but still be up front and not be deceptive? Thanks. So there's a couple different ways to work through this, but I'm just gonna give you the way that our coaches, I literally dropped this in our in our Slack channel with all of our coaches, and I said, all right, guys, what's the framework to handle this? And it's it's more than just the words, okay? And at the end, I'm gonna give you a whole training on it. But if you don't understand these steps that I'm about to explain at the beginning, then the the training won't really matter uh for your team. Okay. So the first thing is you want to build out systems. How does your office actually serve out-of-network patients? This is so important. Do you actually have a process or a system? Do you look up coverage? Do you look up on the phone and then call back? Do you wait till they get an office to look it up? Do you bill for their claims? Do you collect the difference? You have to define all of this really, really clearly for your team to be trained properly on the phones. If you don't have what kind of out-of-network office that you are, because there's like five or six different ways to do this, and none of them are wrong or right, it's just different ways to do it, then you're not gonna be able to train your team because they're not really gonna be sure how to tackle that. Now, step two, once you once you are clear on that, then what you want to do is you want to go to your team and you want to ask them, would what would you uh what would it take for you to go to an out of network office? This answer is gonna really tell you a lot about how your fit team feels about your current system. Okay. So if you, if you, my front desk team, if you had an insurance that was out of network, what would it take for you to go to that office? And they're gonna, if they're just like, oh, I never would, you there's no chance that they're ever gonna be able to schedule anybody, they're just not because they already have blockers up personally that they don't understand how this works, or they don't really believe in the way that you're doing it. So you either might need to go back to the drawing board, or you're gonna need to work through some of their issues that they're gonna have. Or maybe they're simple issues. Like I've seen teams just they just want to do a complimentary benefits check, and that solves it. Okay. This, those first two steps are huge. What is your system? And is your team bought in on the system? Not did you just tell them about it, but how do they feel about patients who are out of network coming in? I'll give you another one that I've seen that happens all the time. You tell them, like, oh, just get all the patients in. It's fine. Just tell them whatever, get them in. And then they get them in, and then when the patient gets their bill, because you didn't set up how they were supposed to be billed properly and the and in network, out of network, all those kind of things, they get really mad. The patient gets mad, and guess who they yell at? They yell at your team. Not you, they yell at your team. Now your team is super gun chai on these types of patients. So you got to work through all of that, you gotta explain all of that, you got to get them talking about that. Okay. Now, once you have that, when the person actually calls, the biggest barrier is your front desk person doesn't think it's worth it for themselves. So if they're not sold, then the patient won't be sold. So the scripting will go something like this. But again, I want to stress if your team's not bought in, they are never going to be able to get patients through. So here's the scripting goes something like this. Absolutely, we have several patients in our practice with the same uh insurance as you. Can I share with you how it works? We're considered a non-participating provider, but the good news is we have a great system and we make it as easy as possible. Insert system of how you're gonna take care of them and then offer whatever the benefits check or however you're going to do it. This works well because you didn't say no, you led with confidence, and then you gave them a process uh for the service, and it's not a burden to them. You're not like, here's what I've seen some offices do. Well, call and see what you know, their your insurance is gonna charge. That's like this is a pain in the rear end. No one's gonna do that. Okay. So that's the basic framework that will work, but it will never overcome your broken system, and it will never overcome your team not being bought in. Now, if you want a whole training on the front desk, I have that. Just comment down below, we'll get that to you. And if you think I handled it incorrectly or that there's a better way to handle it, I would love to hear that. Drop the comment down below. Thanks so much.