How to Increase Dental Insurance Collections

You sit at your desk, staring at the Open Dental collections report. Production is steady, maybe even up. But those insurance balances just keep climbing. It isn’t from a sudden drop in patients or clinical output. Something is leaking in the process, and you can see it in the A/R columns getting longer by the month. The question is never just “why are insurance collections dipping”—it’s “where exactly is money getting stuck while everything else keeps moving?”

What this problem actually looks like

From my front desk days, I remember closing out the end of month and noticing the same handful of claims still unpaid—some 45, 60, 90 days out. The clinical team felt like they were running on time and documenting, patients kept coming in, and still, insurance money trickled in slower than the pace it was billed. Sometimes it was missing x-ray attachments. Sometimes a tiny eligibility gap no one spotted before the crown prep. And often, it was a scramble to re-verify benefits because the info from last time didn’t match the new policy year or plan change.

The owners I worked with always asked two questions: Is it our team, or is it the payers? After hundreds of hours in every role, my answer is usually “both.” The patterns show up as: rejected claims for simple documentation gaps, delays hunting down insurance details that weren’t caught at scheduling, and posting errors because EOBs got mismatched. On busy days, following just one missing piece down the rabbit hole can burn an hour—a cost you feel in both payroll and cash flow.

Where this usually breaks and what it costs

The potential leak points are rarely dramatic, just steady day-to-day mismatches between clinical action and the back-end billing work. Take benefit verification: ADA best practices say you should confirm eligibility before every visit (ADA). But when the phones are ringing and a new patient walks in late, that step gets skipped or rushed. Miss a waiting period or frequency restriction, and you’re looking at denied claims or partial payments you can’t collect from insurance.

Multiply that by the usual schedule load, and manual admin costs balloon fast—across the U.S., dental administrative transactions hit $3.2 billion annually, with $2 billion in savings left on the table because of slow, error-prone processes (CAQH Dental). What this looks like in Open Dental: A/R over 60 days creeping past 20 percent, owner compensation delayed as office cash gets tied up, and extra hours lost to tracking why claims didn’t pay the way you expected. The consequence usually lands as stress for the front office and real money missing from the bank account at the end of the month.

What we would do this week

• Audit your top ten unpaid insurance claims for the last 60 days. Look for patterns: eligibility issues, missing documents, coding slips, late claim filing, or posting errors. This will tell you where your workflow needs tightening most.
• Review your appointment confirmation workflow to include real-time insurance benefit verification, not just at new patient entry but before every scheduled visit. Build a simple script for your team and block out 10 minutes for this check in the daily huddle.
• Set up a weekly mini-reconciliation: Compare payments posted in Open Dental with EOBs received, focusing on fast payment matching for high-dollar claims or chronic problem payers. Address discrepancies right away before they age out further.

Where DayDream helps

DayDream blends experienced dental billers with automation and AI to lift insurance collections and cut the manual grind. The team takes on verification, claims, payment posting, denials, and follow-up, mapping full benefit breakdowns right into your Open Dental fields so nothing falls through the cracks. Their automation speeds up repetitive tasks like posting EOBs and payer outreach, while real billers tackle the judgment calls. This means a ~5% boost in collections, about 60% less manual billing work, and payments coming in roughly 50% faster compared to the old way. Real-time dashboards show you denials, claim trends, and collection activity so you always know where things stand.

If you’re caught in that cycle of climbing insurance balances despite steady production, you’re not alone. The pressure is real, but process changes and targeted help can close the gaps that cost you time and money. For a frank conversation about where your insurance collections are leaking and what’s practical to fix, book a short consult.