Dental offices, like most health care practices, have mounds of billing and insurance paperwork. Insurance forms have to be filled out and sent to the patient's insurer. The insurer's explanation of benefits has to be deciphered and parsed. The customer has to be billed, the payment processed.
According to Cleveland-based KeyBank and its new fintech partner Zentist, which will announce a relationship on Wednesday, artificial intelligence can automate much of this work. KeyBank will introduce Zentist's Remit AI software to its network of dental service offices.
Bringing in more dental clients through Zentist, which already works with 2,500 dental offices, could help KeyBank increase deposits and reduce operating costs, according to Jon Briggs, executive vice president and head of commercial product at the bank.
"Deposits are back in vogue," Briggs said in an interview.
The idea of giving employees a virtual assistant or copilot has become popular in financial services.
"I think the copilot use case is probably going to be one of the most common ones out there," said Michael Abbott, global banking lead at Accenture, in a recent interview. "I think of it like playing chess and having [Russian chess grandmaster Garry] Kasparov whisper in your ear and tell you, 'this is the right move to make next.' You still have to make the move. It's still your decision. You still have to look at it and say, is that the right thing to do?"
Providing such copilots to clients is more of a frontier.
"As banks think about extending these kinds of copilot ideas to their clients, they're going to do best when they focus on specific use cases that solve a well-defined problem for a defined group of clients," said Daniel Latimore, chief research officer at Financial Revolutionist. "As they succeed with early initiatives they can build on those wins to expand their offerings."
KeyBank, which has $188 billion of assets, has had a focus on the health care business since 2017, when it acquired Cain Brothers, a health care corporate and investment banking business. In 2019, the bank acquired Laurel Road, an online lending fintech that helps doctors deal with their medical school debt.
KeyBank also launched virtual account management for businesses in May of this year, through a partnership with fintech Qolo. It helps businesses manage multiple accounts from one place, which could be especially appealing to dental service offices, which are typically amalgamations of multiple dental offices operating under unique laws and regulatory requirements, Briggs pointed out.
"Virtual account management can take a lot of the pain out of managing that complex hierarchy of providers where you have monies coming in and monies going out," Briggs said
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Eventually virtual account management will likely be integrated with Zentist's platform.
"Our clients don't want to come to our four walls; they want the work to be done natively, in their enterprise resource programs" and other software they use every day, Briggs said. "So we're spending a lot of our time either partnering or building to deliver application program interface connectivity to be able to get our capabilities into their ERPs to be able to do that."
Because most people still pay their dentists by paper check, KeyBank can also offer its lockbox services to dental offices, to receive and process all those checks.
Zentist's Remit AI gathers and consolidates insurance payments by having bots log into insurance portals to collect explanation of benefits data and then normalize that information, providing single dashboard access and login management. The software uses artificial intelligence to parse and organize data from multiple sources into a standardized format that can be accessed from a single database. It can generate reports that are customizable by location or across multiple locations.
"People today have to read explanations of benefits as PDFs — that's true for a 1,000-office location or one dentist," said Ato Kasymov, CEO and co-founder of Zentist, in an interview. "There's an amazing opportunity to apply optical character recognition to those documents, parse data out of them, figure out why a payment is denied and transfer a balance to the customer."
Some revenue cycle management teams at dentist offices have become 55% more productive by using this technology, according to Kasymov. "Even if they're efficient, they might have 25 people, but half that team could be doing the same amount of work with our software," he said. The whole billing-to-payment process can be reduced from more than 20 days to 10-12 days.
