Hi, this is Dave Kats, with Therapist Consultants and I have a tip for you.

You know I believe you I have a way that will make your new patients that schedule with you show up with great regularity. That is by asking them for 50% down to hold the appointment. Now that might sound like a bold thing but the first time I taught it, I had an audience of about 50 people and I said, “Is there is anybody in here that asks for 50% down?” Two middle aged ladies that were therapists raised their hand and they said, “We practice together,” and I said, “Do you ask for 50% down?” They said, “No, we just ask for it all down in advance.” So if you think 50% is a lot try all. When we schedule patients, after we schedule them for the time and the day then we say, “In order to hold that appointment, I ask you to put 50% down which will be $75. Which credit card would you like to put that on?”

Let me go over the script, it goes like this,...

I’ve noticed that some new therapists have a very low Patient Visit Average (PVA).

In other words, for the number of new patients they see, they don’t see those patients very much. I see some new therapists with a patient visit average of two, two and a half, three, maybe as high as five or six. But, I want to explain something. That’s probably not because you’re getting the patients better. It’s probably because they’re discontinuing care or you’re having them discontinue care prematurely. Now, what do I base it on? You say, “Maybe they are getting better. Maybe I’m getting better.” It could be, but that’s not what’s typical of the profession.

I will tell you that typically the average therapist sees the average patient 15 times over their lifetime, so your PVA should be 15. If you take the number of people that came in this month and divide it by the number of new patients that came in this month, you will...

If you take insurance and even if you are a cash practitioner, you should run an aging of accounts every month. What I mean by an aging of accounts is just a report that tells you who owes you money and how long they've owed you that money. And you have to decide based on that report what you need to do for collections.

I have here a hypothetical aging of accounts that I'd like to go over with you and show you what we would do if we found these on our aging of accounts. Let's look at the aging of accounts.

You can see the first person there is Bill Jones. Now he doesn't owe anything for 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, but from 90 days to 120 days he owes $100 and for over 120 days he owes $400. So he owes a total of $500. Now it appears to me that he has stopped coming in some time ago, about three months ago, and we have not collected from the times previous. Something went wrong, we sent it to the wrong insurance company, or we didn't bill it because we didn't have the right...

Therapist Consultants Collection Scripting from Kats & Therapist Consultants on Vimeo.

Dave Kats: Hi. This is Dave Kats and Dr. Michael Perusich with Therapist
Consultants and we have a video tip for you. There's a right way and a wrong way to
collect. There's right scripting and wrong scripting.
Dr. Michael Perusich: There is. Scripting is important when you're collecting money
from patients. You want to practice this. Little things like not saying "dollars". Let's
say, your charge for the session today is $150. You don't want to turn to the patient
and say, "Well, that'll be $150" because to the patient, that sounds like a lot of
money. If you just say, "Well, that'll $150 today. Would you like to pay that with cash,
check or charge"; It just really skims over it, not unethically, but it allows the patient
to just absorb that a little bit easier.
Dave: You said something also very good. If you give them a choice of yeses,
"Would you care to pay for that by cash, check or credit...