Larson Dental is a fourth-generation dental practice that has been serving thousands of Minneapolis-area patients for over 100 years. With two partners, an associate dentist, six hygienists, and five front-office personnel, Larson Dental’s 20-person staff serve customers with professionalism and care. When Larson Dental made the switch to Open Dental in 2016, they were looking for a way to streamline their payment processing. The issues they were experiencing are familiar to many offices.

The Challenge

Larson Dental needed:

• Flexibility in payment options. They wanted the flexibility to offer multiple payment options to customers, including secure ACH, credit card, debit card, check, and cash transactions. They needed to be able to accept payments in person or via online payment forms, and easy to set up automated payment plans.
• Predictable credit card processing fees. Larson Dental wanted to save money on credit card processing fees. For them, this meant eliminating the ambiguity around different fees and knowing exactly how much they would earn with each transaction.
• Too much time spent on payment management. Larson Dental wanted a snapshot of their financial health in real-time, for better cash flow management and revenue reporting. They wanted a payment solution that integrated with their practice management software. Such integration would eliminate their reliance on repetitive, manual, data entry with every payment transaction. In turn, their transactions would be automatically synced and available in Open Dental.
• Data security. Larson Dental needed to securely store all patient financial data, protected with the highest data security and encryption standards in the industry. They never wanted to have to worry about exposing vulnerable patient information when processing digital payments.
  

A Fully-Integrated Payments Solution

A payment solution that is fully integrated with Open Dental would provide Larson Dental with the ability to automate customer billing and accept a variety of payment methods. Additionally, Larson Dental needed to manage patient information without ever leaving the Open Dental platform. Dr. Larson had tested a handful of solutions, but none offered exactly what he needed. When his practice switched to Open Dental in 2016, he soon discovered that the PaySimple integration offered exactly what they had been looking for, all within the Open Dental platform.

“With PaySimple, we save an average of 15-20 seconds processing each payment, eliminating unnecessary steps as well as errors that can happen when manually processing credit cards,” says Dr. Cory Larson, DDS. “We can now also offer patients an ACH payment option, which gives them greater flexibility to pay the way they prefer.”

He and his team also appreciate how PaySimple empowers patients to pay in many different ways—including online. “The fact that we can set up an online payment form linked from our website is an added value,” he says. “This helps us make it even more convenient for patients to pay, and prevents us from having to follow up on as many missed payments.”

Open Dental and PaySimple are proud to support practices like Larson Dental. The partnership has led to greater cost and time savings for the customers we serve, as well as a more flexible and powerful payment experience for both dental practices and their patients. Read more about their success in the full case study.