Choice Payment Services — Patient Financing Implementation Playbook

For DSOs & Multi-Location Groups

About This Resource

Choice Payment Services offers dental practices payment processing and patient financing solutions, including point-of-service payment tools, patient financing options, and payment plan management. At DSO scale, the relevant questions are about standardization, enterprise reporting, multi-location rollout capability, and whether the fee structure holds when applied across a large, diverse practice network.

Who this is for: DSO Chief Revenue Officers, VP of Operations, RCM directors, and regional managers evaluating patient payment and financing platforms to deploy consistently across 5+ locations.

What's covered: DSO-specific use case, enterprise rollout strategy, integration requirements, key evaluation questions, and red flags at scale.

What Choice Payment Services Does at DSO Scale

Choice Payment Services provides dental practices with an integrated suite of payment tools: point-of-service payment processing, patient financing options, and payment plan administration. At the enterprise level, the platform should aggregate these capabilities across all locations under centralized reporting and a single contract structure.

DSO-relevant capabilities:

• Enterprise dashboard for centralized visibility into payment and financing activity across all locations
• Standardized patient financing workflow deployable at every location
• Payment processing at scale — potentially replacing existing per-location terminal contracts
• Location-level and roll-up reporting on payment volume, financing utilization, approval rates, and outstanding plan balances
• Centralized contract and enterprise pricing (one relationship vs. fragmented location-by-location arrangements)
• Patient financing for patients who may not qualify for bank-financed programs like CareCredit

The core DSO value: Many multi-location groups have fragmented payment infrastructure — acquired practices running different processors, inconsistent financing programs, and no centralized visibility into what's happening at checkout. Choice Payment Services' value proposition at DSO scale is consolidation, standardization, and the reporting depth to manage revenue cycle performance across the entire network.

Why DSOs Benefit

Payment Infrastructure Standardization

DSO acquisitions frequently inherit whatever payment setup the acquired practice had. Over time, this creates a fragmented landscape: multiple payment processors, varying merchant rates, some locations offering financing and others not. That fragmentation creates audit risk, reporting gaps, and missed volume pricing leverage.

Consolidating onto a single payment and financing platform creates a standardized revenue operations layer — one fee structure, one reporting view, one vendor relationship — that reduces administrative overhead and improves central finance team visibility.

Case Acceptance Consistency

Case acceptance rates vary across DSO locations for many reasons. One controllable variable is whether patient financing is consistently offered and actively presented during treatment planning. A DSO-wide financing platform creates the infrastructure for a consistent financing presentation protocol and gives RCM leadership the data to see which locations are actually using it.

The Uninsured Patient Opportunity

For practices with significant uninsured or underinsured patient populations, Choice Payment Services' financing options — particularly for patients who don't qualify for traditional card-based programs — can convert declining patients into scheduled, paying patients. At DSO scale, even a modest improvement in financing approval rates for near-prime and subprime patients represents meaningful incremental production.

Implementation Model

Phase 1: Current State Audit (Week 1–2)

• Map existing payment processing infrastructure across all locations: processors, terminal contracts, expiration dates, and monthly merchant fees
• Identify which locations offer patient financing and what programs are in use (CareCredit, Sunbit, in-house plans)
• Calculate current blended payment processing rate across the network — this is your baseline for evaluating Choice Payment Services' enterprise rate
• Identify locations where terminal contracts allow for easy migration vs. those with early termination penalties

Phase 2: Pilot Cluster (Weeks 3–6)

• Select 3–5 locations where terminal contracts are flexible and where there's meaningful uninsured patient volume
• Complete Choice Payment Services setup: payment processing, financing workflow, PMS integration
• Run parallel operations (Choice Payment Services alongside existing terminal) for 2 weeks at pilot locations
• Track: processing rate vs. prior, financing approval rate, checkout workflow efficiency, staff adoption

Phase 3: Regional Rollout (Weeks 7–12)

• Expand to a full region based on pilot performance
• Standardize the financing presentation protocol across locations (scripted language, training resources)
• Train regional managers to monitor financing utilization in the Choice Payment Services enterprise dashboard
• Manage terminal contract transitions location by location as contracts allow

Phase 4: Enterprise Deployment (Weeks 13–24)

• Complete rollout to all remaining locations as terminal contracts expire or allow migration
• Migrate central finance team reporting to Choice Payment Services enterprise reporting
• Establish enterprise KPIs: payment processing error rate, financing approval rate by location, financed treatment volume per location, outstanding plan balance

Integration Considerations

At DSO scale, integration quality determines whether a payment and financing platform delivers consistent value or creates inconsistent workflows and errors.

Critical integration verification:

• Multi-PMS support: DSOs with mixed PMS environments (Dentrix at some locations, Open Dental at others) must confirm that both integrations are native and equivalent in functionality — not one full integration and one manual workaround
• Terminal hardware compatibility: Confirm Choice Payment Services' terminal hardware is compatible with existing workstation and point-of-sale setups across all locations — or plan for hardware replacement costs
• API access for reporting: Enterprise DSOs often want to pull payment and financing data into a central BI platform (Tableau, Power BI). Confirm API availability and data export formats
• Centralized admin and access management: Can the corporate team manage user access, configure platform settings, and push updates across all locations without location-by-location manual administration?

Key Questions to Ask Choice Payment Services

1. What is your enterprise payment processing rate, and can you beat our current blended rate? Run your total monthly processing volume through their fee model before any other evaluation. If their processing rate isn't competitive, the consolidation value proposition doesn't hold.

2. Who carries the credit risk on patient financing plans? This is the single most important financing question. If Choice Payment Services funds the patient and pays the practice upfront, the practice has no collections exposure. If the practice holds the receivable, clarify that explicitly.

3. Do you support multi-PMS environments? If your DSO runs multiple PMS platforms, verify native integration for each one — not a primary integration and a manual workaround for the rest.

4. What is the enterprise reporting structure? Can your central finance team see all locations' payment volume, financing utilization, approval rates, and outstanding balance in a single dashboard? Can they drill down by location, provider, or procedure type?

5. What does enterprise implementation look like at 10–20 locations? Ask for specifics: dedicated implementation manager, location-by-location onboarding cadence, expected timeline per location, and training resources.

6. What happens when a patient defaults on a financing plan? Understand the collections model, who bears the loss, and how this is handled without creating negative patient experience that reflects on the DSO brand.

7. Are there enterprise volume pricing tiers that reflect scale? A DSO running 50,000 payment transactions per month should not pay the same per-transaction rate as a solo practice. Negotiate accordingly.

8. Can you provide 2–3 DSO references at 10+ locations? Validate performance at comparable scale before a system-wide commitment.

Red Flags to Watch For

• Processing rates that aren't competitive with your current blended rate. Consolidation is only valuable if the economics are equal or better. Don't pay a premium for convenience.
• No dedicated enterprise implementation team. Multi-location rollouts without a dedicated implementation manager consistently result in inconsistent adoption, delayed timelines, and early churn.
• Credit risk ambiguity on patient financing. At DSO scale, unclear liability for patient receivables creates balance sheet and collections exposure that your legal team will flag.
• PMS integration quality that varies by system. At enterprise scale, every location must have the same-quality integration — not a flagship integration for your most common PMS and a workaround for the others.
• No roll-up enterprise reporting. A platform without centralized reporting across locations is a single-location tool sold as an enterprise solution.
• Financing approval rates that don't expand your patient reach. If Choice Payment Services approves only the patients who already qualify for CareCredit, the financing component isn't creating incremental revenue — it's adding platform cost.
• Long-term enterprise contracts without performance guarantees. Avoid multi-year commitments without the ability to exit if adoption or performance doesn't materialize.

Avized Verdict

Choice Payment Services presents a viable option for DSOs looking to standardize fragmented payment infrastructure and add consistent patient financing options across their network. The enterprise value case depends on three factors: whether their processing rate beats your current blended rate, whether the financing component genuinely improves case acceptance for patients who don't qualify for traditional programs, and whether their enterprise reporting is deep enough to support central RCM oversight. Validate all three with a 3-location pilot before any system-wide commitment, and negotiate contract flexibility at the enterprise level.