Presenting Fees to Multiple-Sibling Cases

The multiple-patient consultation, while a nice business opportunity for your practice, presents some unique challenges in the case acceptance process.

The fact that you are evaluating and presenting treatment recommendations for multiple patients creates opportunities to make things complicated – quickly – for the visiting family. It’s worth mentioning that the more complicated a decision becomes, the more likely the decision-maker is to hesitate; in fact, the easiest decision here is often no decision at all.

This makes it important that your practice strive to simplify the presentation process as much as possible for the family.

I watched a recent presentation that followed a sequence common with multiple-sibling case presentations; the TC went over each patient’s treatment plan first, without fees. After the entire treatment steps had been covered for both patients, they then went over the costs for each plan.

Drawbacks to this lateral approach include:

• Presenting appliance reviews in sequence creates ‘information overload’ for the decision-maker;
• The decision-maker has to mentally match each fee being presented to each treatment plan presented earlier;
• All of the cost is presented at one time, concentrating the financial pain into a single presentation step.

A better approach to multiple-patient presentations is to keep it linear, meaning that each patient case is reviewed, with fees presented and concluded,  and that case set aside, before the next patient’s case is presented. Maintaining this order keeps the presentation simple, easy to follow, and easy to understand – making it easier for the parent(s) to say “yes” to treatment for both, or all, cases.

A final note – when presenting fees for multiple cases, be sensitive to the financial burden of paying for two (or more) cases simultaneously, and be willing to work with the family (within reason) on financing terms. The practice observed here offered a no-down-payment option on the second child, which, from observing the video, was much appreciated by the family.