Does your practice need an in-house financing program?

Working in the medical industry you know that bills can be overwhelming for patients. So why not provide them with an easy-to-use solution that will allow your practice to open a line of credit directly, without banks or the monstrous interest rates of a payday loan? 

After all, why should banks make the profit that your practice deserves? Not to mention that the patient will prefer to work with you rather than the middleman.

Due to the democratization of technology, medical institutions worldwide are now starting to offer payment plans to their patients. With today’s technology, insufficient funds are no reason to deny people the service they need. Lack of financing option would often lead them to seek less-expensive and lower-quality practices or avoid getting necessary treatment altogether. 

The development of financial technology made it much easier for service providers to offer in-house loans on costly procedures, especially to the clients they can trust. Lending used to be the turf of the big banks and to compete with them one needed to have extensive resources and a developed infrastructure consisting of technical staff, a fully-fledged lending department, and a complex proprietary solution to support it all. 

Why it’s important to offer in-house financing in today’s market 

Today, in-house financing made the switch from a paper-based source of headache for practices to an efficient, automatic monetization tool. It drives the growth of operations and helps them retain existing clients. But it’s worth noting that it only works as long as customer financing initiative doesn’t distract the staff from working with patients. 

After all, in the medical world, no amount of bells and whistles can beat the expertise of a qualified doctor. That’s why if you decide to launch an in-house financing program, you need to make sure it runs on autopilot and doesn’t require a ton of operational involvement. While making you money and helping your patients, it shouldn’t put a strain on your practice. Neither in terms of maintenance expenses nor in terms of the attention it requires.

You heard us right. In-house financing program doesn’t necessarily mean taking on a staff of credit officers on your payroll. If you choose the right intelligent lending automation solution, it can reduce operational expenses, as well as improve efficiency and the bottom-line.

Does your business need an in-house financing program

The way the market develops right now, there are no monetization models one can afford to ignore. Especially if they pose an added benefit for the end-user. If your practice has the best doctors – it’s got to be expensive. Then by default, you’re losing business and slowing down your growth because a practice across the street or even in the next city will offer financing of the same procedures. And people who can’t afford to pay for a procedure at once will go with the competitor. 

In our experience, many clinics do in-house financing on a smaller scale without even realizing it. 

What happens is they have patients on payment plans or they let people not pay for the service all at once. You may not call it financing, nonetheless, that’s what it is. But if you can’t scale it manually. Even more importantly, you can’t do it in a way that is fair to all consumers while making money. 

When you have one plan with one patient, you’re fine. Maybe you’re good with ten. But as soon as you get beyond that, you really need assistance. You need to know exactly what you’ve done, where your applications and contract documents are and how much your patients owe you. At a certain point, you just need an automated system. 

Time after time we’ve seen this happen to practices. At some point, it becomes clear that they’re losing business because they don’t offer financing or don’t do it the right way.

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Benefits of an in-house financing program

We feel like we’ve made a rather good case for any practice to at least consider in-house financing. But below we’ll list just a few of the tangible and intangible benefits a practice gets with a financing program.

1. Repeated business from customers who rely on your newly acquired financing options.
2. Smoothed out seasonality from recurrent payments. 
3. The additional revenue source for your practice with little to no extra effort.
4. Intelligent lending platform solution does all the heavy lifting without the management overhead. 
5. Competitive advantage over those who don’t offer a customer financing option.
6. Digital solution for lending allows you to keep up with the time and provide patients and employees with intuitive interfaces
7. Fully automated brand new lending process or digitalization of the existing financing program.

How to start offering financing in your medical practice

There’s no need to keep track of all the patients in a notebook, mark the collection dates in the calendar, and manually collect checks. A ready-made lending automation platform like TurnKey Lender can be deployed, integrated, and fully operational within days. 

And that includes an intuitive back-office for you or your employees and an easy-to-use front-office for your patients. The funds will be collected automatically, and credit risks evaluated, helping you create personalized plans to meet the patient’s needs. So all your client needs to do is simply fill out an application and get treatment.

All you need to do as a business owner is get in touch with the TurnKey Lender team and schedule a demo. 

Success story

To see how TurnKey Lender can help medical businesses transform and adjust to the digital age, we’ve prepared a case study about Sirena Credit Company. You can request the full version here. But in short, Sirena is an arm of a Chicago-based plastic surgery clinic that managed to achieve 7-figure growth for their financing program after implementing TurnKey Lender.  

The solution Sirena implemented automates the end-to-end lending processes from application input, to credit decisions, payments processing, collections, business reports, and relationship marketing flags that maximize customer lifetime value with upsell and cross-sell alerts. The system logic complies with applicable local and federal regulatory rules out-of-the-box. 

The deployment team created a custom credit scoring dashboard that was simple to understand at a glance. A credit algorithm recommends a loan amount and payment plan. The Sirena finance manager can accept the suggested amount, or manually override the system with a larger loan or a longer payment period.  

The platform was easy to deploy from the cloud. It was simple to learn, and simple to use. Technical support managers were available to answer any questions, and get the team up-to-speed quickly. When Sirena requested an option for a grace period on late payments, they learned that this feature was already pre-programmed as part of the foundation functionality. The support team showed them how to access the feature, along with the complete suite provided by the medical practice lending module.     

Sirena Credit achieved several program improvements with TurnKey Lender: 

• Doubled the number of new loans within one year. 
• Achieved 7-figure, year-over-year growth.
• Improved operational efficiency, reduced operational costs and salary expenses.
• Improved user experience for employees and patients.
• Improved brand image, and increased positive social media reviews.

Next steps

For modern practices, efficiently automated in-house financing is becoming a must rather than a nice-to-have. TurnKey Lender offers an intelligent solution that can be installed and fully operational in a matter of days and grants the following advantages and more:

• All-in-one nature with an option to choose the modules you need
• Flexible pricing model tied to the number of loans originated through the platform (this keeps us invested in helping your business succeed)
• AI-powered loan origination
• You can limit the allowed payment according to the amount the patient has previously spent on your services. For example, you can set the initial payment to be 30% of the previous spendings (you’re also free to adjust the number on later stages)
• The collection of the installments is fully automated. 
• The collection system integrates with local payment systems, which significantly cuts operational costs. 
• Automated workflows
• Adjustable scorecard and logic of the system. 
• The Collection module can administer and account for the debts, send payment reminders, and more.

Get in touch with TurnKey Lender team for a free demo and see what this intelligent solution can do for you first-hand.