Labor costs are climbing, reimbursements are lagging, and patient payment responsibilities keep growing.
In a recent panel discussion with Becker’s Healthcare, dental industry leaders explored specific tactics and tools for improving dental practice profitability and thriving despite these challenges.
The recurring theme? Technology and automation.
The dental software market has exploded in recent years, with offerings in areas like insurance verification, claims management, and patient and payer collections.
Here’s how dental offices use technology to improve cash flow and enhance the payment experience for staff and patients.
1. Speeding Up Insurance Verification and Reducing Denials
Outdated insurance workflows in dental practices often create bottlenecks and lost revenue, and communication with insurance companies can be fraught.
“There’s a lot of cost, time, and drama on the front end, before you see a patient,” explained panelist Derek Giddon, DDS, Founder and CEO of AirPay, a software solution that automates dental insurance verification and payment processes for dental offices.
Before an appointment, staff spend time validating insurance and figuring out what a patient will owe for their visit. After an appointment, staff spend time submitting claims, appealing claims, and chasing down claims and payments.
“It’s a really tough situation for practices to be in,” Giddon said, and he knows. Before founding his software company, he was a dentist practicing in Brooklyn, NY.
Automating Verification Before the Visit
Technology helps dental organizations automate time-consuming tasks like insurance verification. These systems automatically pull primary and secondary insurance information from the practice management system to verify it before an appointment. This helps practices avoid denials and significantly reduces the manual workload of contacting carriers and navigating online portals.
Catching Preventable Issues Early
Automated verification systems flag errors like patient name typos, incorrect plan details, and mixed-up ID numbers. Identifying and correcting data hygiene issues before the visit prevents claim denials and time-consuming resubmissions.
Once coverage is confirmed and denials are reduced, the next opportunity to protect revenue comes at the point of care.
2. Collecting More at Point of Care
Collecting payments upfront reduces aging AR, but conversations about finances can be uncomfortable for both patients and dental office staff. Dental organizations must be thoughtful about the patient experience while prioritizing prompt collection.
Capture Pre-Authorizations and Keep Cards-on-File
Software like Rectangle Health’s Practice Management Bridge enables automatic payment capture for smoother transactions.
“It starts with having an accurate estimation when they come in,” explained James Swan, Senior Director of Enterprise Solutions at Rectangle Health. With a pre-treatment cost estimate, staff can more easily collect co-pays or charges for uncovered services at the point of care. “Ideally, through a card on file,” Swan added, “with pre-authorization to bill that card for services provided.”
Drive Fast Action with Bulk Text-to-Pay
Bulk text-to-pay reminders are a fast, easy way to collect payments for post-care patient balances.
“Our teams had a really hard time discussing balances with patients,” said panelist Elizabeth Davis, VP of Revenue & Payer Relations at PepperPointe. “Being able to text patients in bulk was a way to improve our patient experience, make life a little easier on our staff, and drive our revenue.”
And it works.
“We’ve seen significant growth in collecting that patient AR with very little time,” Davis shared.
While streamlined payments boost cash flow, many DSOs still struggle to find and train skilled staff, another area where automation proves essential.
3. Training Staff Faster and Scaling with Fewer Hires
“The rising cost of labor and the ability to find people skilled in the revenue cycle have been challenging,” said Davis. She went on to describe how DSOs can address these challenges using technology and automation.
AI and automation tools allow organizations to hire people with less experience. “They’re not as expensive,” Davis said. “But we can also train them faster and scale our teams to be a little bit smaller using the technology.”
These tools facilitate onboarding with features like prebuilt training workflows and automated task prompts. Technology does more of the heavy lifting when it comes to complex workflows, so new hires don’t need decades of industry experience to be effective.
With new software tools, users don’t need extensive prior knowledge to verify insurance, process payments, or generate reports. Davis described the ease of using software to send a bulk text-to-pay link to patients with an outstanding balance.
Before automation, teams spent hours making manual phone calls to collect outstanding balances.
“We’ve not had to have people on the phone chasing patients,” Davis said, describing how automation with Rectangle Health’s Practice Management Bridge changed the game.
Automation tools enable practices to operate efficiently with fewer staff by streamlining routine tasks and minimizing manual effort.
4. Improving the Patient Financial Experience
Profitability isn’t just about backend efficiency. It also depends on the patient’s financial journey, which starts well before treatment. Poor financial communication in dental offices leads to bad reviews, delayed payments, and patient churn.
Giddon pointed out that negative online reviews for dental clinics usually aren’t about receiving poor care. They’re about a poor financial experience and a lack of transparency about payment. Technology addresses this by providing complete transparency and helping practices meet patients where they are.
Provide Clear, Early Cost Estimates
Patients want to know exactly what they’re going to owe, and practices want to be able to collect same-day payments.
“We can’t do that without tools like AirPay, which give us a great breakdown and let us know what the patient’s responsibility will be,” Davis said. Verification tools like this empower staff to answer billing questions confidently and tell patients exactly what they owe.
Offer Convenience Throughout the Patient Journey
In addition to transparency, patients want convenience.
“Consumer expectations have changed in the past five or 10 years,” Giddon said. People enjoy the modern retail experience of shopping online and having fast, seamless payment options.
“They want that personalized experience,” Swan said. “It’s no wonder they want it for dental care as well.” Features like text reminders and easy payment portals make the payment experience much more convenient for patients.
5. Empowering Staff to Focus on Revenue-Generating Work
In the past, front office work involved hours of listening to hold music and licking envelopes. Technology can automate much of this repetitive, manual work, freeing teams to focus on higher-value activities.
Replace Manual Work with Smart Automation
Davis described a situation in which a practice struggled to fill holes in their schedule because staff were too busy collecting payments. Instead of tying up staff with billing and collections, practices use automation to free up capacity for more strategic tasks.
Davis’s offices use AirPay, Rectangle Health’s Practice Management Bridge, and InsideDesk, a claims management tool. AirPay automatically verifies insurance using information from over 1200 payers. InsideDesk automatically checks and updates claim statuses using AI. And Rectangle Health automatically captures and posts payments.
“Now we’re letting technology do a lot of the work, and we can really focus on the things that we actually need a person to do,” Davis explained.
Using digital tools to automate repetitive billing and claims tasks allows teams to concentrate on tasks that need a human touch, like greeting patients, filling schedules, and fighting true denials.
Support Decentralized Teams
As a former dentist, Giddon offered unique insights about the unique needs of individual dental practices. For practices without support from a DSO or DPO, there’s no centralized RCM team, and staff often wear many hats.
“For those types of practices, it’s really essential to adopt tools and get some help,” Giddon said.
As practices embrace tools that streamline today’s workflows, the next frontier lies in integrated platforms that work even better together.
The Future of Revenue Cycle Management Technology
We asked panelists for their thoughts on the future of RCM technology and tools.
Swan pointed out that there are more technologies than ever before. With practices often deploying multiple software tools simultaneously, interoperability is key.
“The technologies that are going to ultimately win in this ecosystem are those willing to share data and provide the best experience for our mutual clients,” Swan says.
Davis agreed, emphasizing that streamlining communication between payer, patient, and practice is essential for a software platform to be successful.
Giddon added that many dental software companies initially viewed his company as an unwelcome competitor.
“None of the practice management systems would work with us because we were doing something they technically did already,” he said. “Fast forward, and we now have official partnerships with all the major practice management systems.”
These partnerships emerged from recognizing that not every system can do everything perfectly or do it the best. There is room for many tools, but they need to work together to provide a good user experience.
How to Start Small and See Big Results
To start seeing results with technology, focus on your biggest pain point, implement one tool, and expand from there. Change is hard, but the payoff is worth it.
“We’ve had some challenges with people adopting the technology,” Davis admitted. “But once they do and they see the results, it really speaks for itself.”
Davis also recommends emphasizing the patient experience. “We want to do this for the patient,” Davis tells staff. “That’s what really hits home.”
Want to learn more about the technology solutions practices use for improving dental practice profitability? Watch the full panel discussion featuring three seasoned experts in dental software.