How Automating Insurance Eligibility Benefits Your Dental Practice

Even as dental offices grapple with soaring costs and ongoing staffing concerns, a critical part of your administrative workflow is increasingly becoming more difficult. Insurance verification and eligibility is vital to ensure your dental practice gets reimbursed by payers and patients to increase your cash flow. In recent years, however, the process has become more complex, time-consuming, and expensive.

For example, the time needed for your front office to complete insurance transactions increased dental providers’ spending by 23%, the 2022 CAQH Index reported. Meanwhile, your admin staff spends dozens of hours they don’t have each week on verification tasks. They’ve got to know that patients who have upcoming appointments have active insurance, sufficient coverage, and remaining usage for those visits.

In this article, we’ll look at some key reasons why simplifying your insurance eligibility workflow provides extensive benefits to both you and your patients. We’ll also review how automated insurance eligibility solutions can help you reduce insurance process costs, shrink staff workload, and accelerate your revenue while offering a better patient experience.

Insurance automation is also the second step in Revenue Cycle Messaging™, an innovative strategy that leverages patient messaging to help you streamline care and accelerate your revenue workflow. That’s why an automated insurance solution is also key to revenue growth and increasing your collections rate.  

6 Benefits of Automating Your Dental Office’s Insurance Verification Process

1. Save Time

Inherent in the manual insurance process is the exhausting amount of time it takes your staff. It saps your staff members’ productivity and increases their workload to dozens of hours each week. One study found that each insurance verification transaction takes a minimum of 12 minutes. And that doesn’t even factor in steps to confirm patient usage or other needed followup with payers and third-party clearinghouses.

Quite the opposite, automating the workflow allows save 10 minutes per total transaction. It also enables you to streamline your insurance tasks and instantly view, request, verify, and confirm patient insurances quickly and easily. An automated insurance verification solution can save up to 40 hours a week of your staff’s time so they can focus on scheduling appointments and assisting patients.

2. Save Money

Research shows that the average cost for each manual verification is $7.11 compared to only $1.48 per automated transaction—a $5.63 difference. The study also found that providers could save $664M simply by automating insurance verification and eligibility.

3. Accelerate Collections

Insurance eligibility automation gives your workflow the efficiency, speed, and accuracy to expedite claim submissions and shorten your A/R cycle for quicker payer and patient payments. The ability improves your cash flow and ensures you bring in the revenue needed to grow your practice. Similarly, insurance eligibility data issues are among the top reasons for claim denials. However, 85% of claim denials are preventable. Insurance automation helps eliminate errors in the process and assures that only current and accurate data is collected from payers and clearinghouses, minimizing costly claim denials and resubmissions.

4. Reduce Staff Workload and Burnout

Eliminating manual insurance eligibility tasks and the large amount of this takes, also reduces the stress and fatigue your staff members experience. Lightening their load minimizes the likelihood of staff burnout while simultaneously increasing your employees’ job satisfaction.

5. Improve Productivity

Tedious manual insurance responsibilities use up your staff members’ bandwidth, preventing them performing other priority tasks and giving the best possible service to your patients. Automation streamlines eligibility transactions so that your admin team can devote a greater amount of their time to assisting patients, whether in-person, by phone, or via text messages. An automated insurance tool enables your team to book more appointments, complete more administrative duties, and boost your office’s efficiency and productivity.

6. Enhance the Patient Experience

Your patients will enjoy a more positive patient experience as insurance automation reduces errors inherent in manual eligibility tasks. That way, there’s no status, coverage, or usage surprises when your patients arrive at their appointment or get their bill. You get happier, more satisfied patients, which boosts retention rates and helps you attract more new patients.

Key Takeaways

A time-consuming and inefficient manual insurance eligibility process prevents your dental practice from meeting performance goals of increasing production and efficiencies to grow your business. An automated insurance eligibility feature gives you the operational benefits and savings to boost collections, reduce claim denials, and streamline your revenue cycle.