How to find a dentist at the best possible price
Do you recognize this scenario?Patient picks a dentist, books an appointment, shows up at the right time, receives a diagnosis, listens to the procedure cost estimate, and leaves the dental office without booking a follow-up appointment because the quoted price is just too high!
What an extremely frustrating experience for both the patient and the dentist and, sadly, one that is happening more and more often nowadays.
While many people pay their dental insurance premiums every month, dental insurers unfortunately do not cover all types of dental procedures. They also do not pay for 100% of the costs of some covered, but higher-priced, procedures.
Often, this translates into relatively minor, yet still annoying, out-of-pocket expenses.
However, in more unfortunate cases, patients‘ budgets can take a huge hit for several months or even years, especially when out-of-network dentists are involved.
In-network dentists accept a given insurance provider’s fee schedule for covered dental procedures and pay out pre-specified amounts to dentists for each of these procedures.
Thus, insured patients who stay inside their insurance providers‘ networks usually pay nothing or only a fraction of total procedure costs. Lucky them!
However, in cases where higher-cost procedures are involved, either for treatments with partial (e.g., root canals, crowns) or for those without any insurance coverage (e.g., teeth whitening), patient out-of-pocket expenses may balloon quite a bit.
For example, while dental insurers usually pay in full for basic procedures, such as fillings, a patient may find himself on the hook for 50% or even more of the cost of more modern procedures, such as composite fillings, which can cost as much as EUR 200.
And as if things were not complex enough, an additional complication arises when out-of-network dentists come into the picture.
Those dentists have much more pricing flexibility since they are not bound by dental insurers‘ fee schedules. This allows them to charge significantly higher rates (sometimes even 2x as high) than in-network dentists for the same procedure.
The unfortunate result of this are significant pricing differentials for the very same procedure between different dental practices. A lack of price transparency at its finest, or, more aptly put, at its worst.
Given all of this chaos, it’s easy to imagine an annoying scenario just like this one:
„So here I am, off to my cleaning appointment with my new dentist in Vienna – nice greeting – things are going well – hold on, this whole procedure will cost EUR 120???!! I cant afford that much! And then there’s my friend who told me that he got the same procedure done with a different dentist in Vienna for only EUR 75. No way – I am out!“
In such situations, patients lose their time and patience, dentists lose time and potential new patients and, as a „cherry on top“, both parties part ways with a bad taste in their mouths – definitely not a great status quo.
This is why we build the DentalAce platform with its online service request system to buck this trend:
Log into the portal as a patient, create a request with your desired price for the dental service you need, receive invitations from dentists who can perform the procedure you need at the price you quoted, pick your favorite invite and accept it, and arrive at your appointment!
It is our goal to leverage this unique feature to boost the prevalence of price transparency in Vienna and, eventually, in all of Austria.
If you have ever had a similar experience, feel free to share it with our community to compare „war stories“ with others, get some advice, or to just let off some steam.
