A new fee structure can come as a shock for some patients, especially if it’s not expected or understood. This can lead to challenges for your reception team as the changes are questioned, including a feeling that they need to justify the adjustment. However, it’s possible to strike a balance between a fee increase and keeping everyone informed and supportive. Particularly with open communication with your patients and your team.
Before your dive into implementing a new fee structure, you might like to check out this article - ‘Reviewing Patient Fees – A How-to for Your Practice’.
Below we’ve collated some suggestions to help you to execute a change in fee structure in an effective and efficient manner - from keeping your team in the loop, through to supporting patient retention.
Ensure your fee change is objective
A change in fee structure can involve something specific, such as increasing an individual appointment fee or implementing a charge for repeat prescriptions, through to a strategy shift such as moving from a bulk billing to a mixed billing model.
As outlined in our fee review article linked above, when modifying your fee structure it’s important that you keep the process objective. It’s also essential that you’re consulting your mid to long term strategic goals in your review, and that the decision is not a knee jerk reaction to a recent event or situation. Your review might be prompted to some extent by such a situation of course, but taking a bigger picture approach is going to serve you well over the longer term.
Keep your team in the loop
It might seem straight forward that ensuring your team members are up to speed with fee changes is important, but in the busyness of the day-to-day in a practice, it can easily be missed!
Depending on the approach in your practice, you might seek input from various members of your team about the proposed changes – their different perspectives and interactions with your patients can lead to really valuable insights. Then, once the changes have been determined, we suggest that you communicate the timing and reasoning behind the fee structure change to your team members, and invite them to ask questions. Having this understanding is going to really support their communications with your patients.
Protect your front of house team
Most practices will have some patients that don’t agree with the fee structure change, and with your front of house team usually being the ones to convey that information, they’re most likely going to be the ones to whom your patients express their dissatisfaction. It will really help these team members if you’ve talked through with them previously about how they can respond in such situations.
Such training will help your team members to develop strategies and empower them to deal with negative patient interactions generally. One approach is to go through some hypothetical scenarios with your team, and work together on how they could respond in such situations. It will also help if they’re comfortable with your practice policy and process for escalating a complaint, whether it’s to a more senior colleague, the practice manager, director etc.
Ensuring transparency, notice and informed consent
Informed financial consent is the provision of cost information to patients prior to treatment. By informing your patients of the fee structure change by email, physical notices at the practice and verbally when booking their appointment, your patients will be well informed and kept in the loop.
We generally recommend giving your regular patients a month’s notice of a fee change, but you’ll need to adjust this based on your particular practice to ensure that they have sufficient notice before their next appointment. Suggestions include sending out emails, bulk text messages, or including the information in your monthly newsletter if applicable. It’s also important to make sure that all other methods through which you provide fee information to your patients are updated, for example appointment confirmation information or on your website.
Notices about the coming changes in reception and waiting room will also help. Patients will appreciate these, particularly if they include an invitation to query the reception team or their clinician if they’d like more information.
With all these factors covered off, most practices find that the majority of their patients are quite understanding of reasonable fee increases. They’re generally aware of rising expenses in other areas of their lives (many of which they don’t get prior notice of!) so with good communication you’ll ensure their relationship with your practice is as strong as ever.
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in other key areas such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
Need some help or advice…?
And if you’d like to get articles, tips and news delivered straight to your inbox…
Sign up for our monthly newsletter email update!
