Common Obstacles With Dental Insurance Companies For Obtaining Coverage Details

When the patient asks us ‘’Can you find out what my coverage is?’’, we all suddenly feel a massive panic attack coming. Dental insurance companies have made it so difficult to help our patients and we end up failing to give them all the answers to their questions. Dental insurance companies aren’t made to help the client, they exist to make money. 

Dental insurance companies make up all these rules that are hard to follow and keep track of, as well as prevent direct communication and information exchange between us and them.

Why? Because we would have all the information and we would help our patients understand their plan so they can use their benefits that they are entitled to.

There are some arduous ways to get only certain information.

One option is calling them. Some insurance companies will give you a general breakdown that is not detailed, some will include some brief frequencies, some will only disclose the percentage of the coverage, some will only provide eligibilities for certain procedure codes and some will dismiss you after painfully waiting on the line for more than an hour, saying that they don’t disclose plan details without the consent of the member. Another challenging part of it is, when you speak with certain customer service representatives, they can’t answer all your inquiries and are not always sure what they’re talking about due to lack of knowledge or training.

Second option (for only specific insurance companies that allow online services for providers) is to check plan details online. In some cases it works for certain things that you want to find out, but there are always some uncertainties and missing information. In some cases the plan doesn’t go through and we have to spend our time calling and waiting on hold anyway.

Third option is to send an estimate. We might get a response right away, or the response will be sent through mail. The response gets sent to the patient and then we have to get in touch with our patient, who is a person with a lot of things on their hands. It takes at least two phone calls to be made to obtain the information from the patient. Either that or having the patient call the insurance to give consent to disclose the estimate results to their dental care provider.  After that, we have to call the insurance company to obtain info and then get in touch with the patient to discuss results.

Meanwhile, going through all the time consuming options, the phones are ringing. We as receptionist have to juggle to answer patient inquiries while dreading that the customer service representative will pick up the line and hang up. That distracts us from devoting our full attention to our patient on the phone or the patients that are walking in that deserve our full attention.

Also due to all the privacy policies that they’ve increased over the years, they don’t disclose any plan changes or inactivation with us and the patient has no idea what is happening, which also creates problems for the patient and it requires them to inquire and consume their time.

Patients are not familiar like we are with dental policies and they rely and put their trust in us, but I always have to rely on my experience to fill in the gaps and with that method, I can’t really guarantee that it will be correct, because every policy is unique and I still get surprised with some quite interesting and different rules that the policy contains. This explains all the precious time we have to spend to obtain information that are limiting, not always correct and it makes us unable to help our patients the way they need us to.

We can now say goodbye to all those struggles thanks to Zuub’s automated dental insurance verification!

They have a direct integration with over 280 insurance companies, you’ll have all plan details within seconds and the fee for the service is not comparable with how much time you’ll save and gain the patient’s confidence. It is particularly crucial with new patients. Their scrutiny is not done until they leave the office. Just imagine how much easier it will be for them to proceed with their needed treatment when they have their answers.

When I found out about this automated dental insurance verification software, I was relieved that there’s finally a solution for my struggles as a front office staff, because a lot of questions and concerns from the patient are related to insurance details. Since we can have all these information at our fingertips, our patients can be assisted as they deserve.