How Automating Insurance Verification 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 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 verification 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 and sufficient coverage and eligibility for those visits.

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

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

1. Save Time

Inherent is current manual verification processes is the exhausting time element that saps your staff members’ productivity and increases that workload to dozens of hours each week. One study found that each verification transaction takes a minimum of 12 minutes. And that doesn’t even factor in steps to confirm benefit eligibility or any needed followup tasks on payer and clearinghouse  websites and additional phone calls to payer representatives.

In contrast, automated insurance verification allows you to shorten each verification transaction by 10 minutes. This enables you to streamline your verification tasks and instantly view, request, and confirm patient insurances quickly and easily. Automated insurance verification solutions 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 eligibility and benefits verification.

3. Accelerate Collections

Insurance verification 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. Automated verification improves your cash flow and ensures you bring in the revenue needed to grow your practice. Similarly, insurance verification data issues are among the top reasons for claim denials. However, 85% of claim denials are preventable. Verification automation helps eliminate errors in the process and assures that only current and accurate data is collected from payers, minimizing costly claim denials and resubmissions.

4. Reduce Staff Workload and Burnout

Eliminating manual verification tasks, and the large amount of time these manual tasks and processes consume,, also reduces the stress and fatigue on your staff members. Lightening their load minimizes the likelihood of staff burnout while simultaneously increasing your employees’ job satisfaction.

5. Improve Productivity

Tedious manual verification uses up your staff members’ bandwidth, preventing them performing other priority tasks and giving the best possible service to your patients. Automation streamlines verification 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. Automated verification enables your team to book more appointments, get more administrative tasks done, and boost your office’s efficiency and productivity.

6. Enhance the Patient Experience

Your patients will enjoy a more positive patient experience as verification automation reduces errors inherent in manual verification tasks. That way, there’s no insurance 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 verification process prevents your dental practice from meeting performance goals of increasing production and efficiencies to grow your business. An automated insurance verification solution gives you the operational benefits and savings to shrink your A/R days, increase your cash flow, and extend a more satisfying patient experience.