Top Five RCM Pain Points

Talking to dental practices about their challenges uncovers some common themes.

Tracy Levitz

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December 12, 2022

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It’s no surprise to us that administrative workloads and wrangling revenue cycle management top their list of pain points – after all, that’s why we’re here! Let’s take a look at the Top Five RCM Hassles as reported to us by those of you on the front lines in the back office and ‘upstairs.’

1. Denials, Denials, Denials

You can’t deny it (sorry, we couldn’t help that). Denials are the perfect trap. A Change Healthcare study found 63% of claims were recoverable but cost more than $100 each to pursue an appeal. We don’t think that even fully represents the time your staff can spend trying to figure out what went wrong and crafting an appeal. What’s worse, that same study also found 86% of denials may be avoidable altogether.

2. Good Help Is Hard To Find (And Keep)

RCM requires specialized knowledge and an eye for detail. Staff with this skill set do not grow on trees. This situation has been made all the more challenging thanks to a pandemic-impacted labor market. More often than not, practices find themselves having to train new hires and that takes time. So much time. For example, consider explanations of benefits (EOBs) and electronic remittance advice (ERAs). They arrive in as many different formats as there are payers – and your staff needs to become fluent in all of them.

3. Technology Is Supposed To Make Things Easier, Isn’t It?

From practice management software to automated insurance billing solutions (ahem), there is a surfeit of choices with which to equip your practices. Research, purchasing, implementation and finally, training your staff on these new tools takes - one more time, with feeling - time.

4. More Time, More Money …

… More problems, to paraphrase the old song. We’ve previously mentioned the CAQH 2021 Index Data that estimated dental practices seeing 750 patients per month may be losing up to 40 hours in that month to manual and partially manual tasks related to billing. But we didn’t need someone else’s study to tell us that.

5. Getting Everybody On The Same Page

Growth is great but it would be even better if all of the offices joining your group came with the same RCM systems, processes, and staff. A patchwork of inherited systems is not only inefficient, it makes it hard for management to get an accurate read on performance. Waiting on payments and processing paper checks across multiple locations throws an additional wrench in cash flow.

In Conclusion

There’s a theme here and it’s that there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. Practices are constantly trying to meet the challenge of providing exceptional patient care while balancing billing-related work that multiplies with growth.

This is the part where we tell you that we’ve got you covered. We invite you to learn more about Remit AI - our automated answer to these problems, or attend our Dental RCM Bootcamp to learn the hacks, tips, and tricks to get your RCM systems under control.

FAQ

What are the top RCM pain points for dental practices and DSOs?

The five most common RCM pain points are: (1) manual payment posting that consumes billing staff hours and introduces errors, (2) high claim denial rates from eligibility and coding issues, (3) lack of visibility into AR aging across multiple locations, (4) inefficient EOB and ERA management requiring logins to dozens of payer portals, and (5) slow denial follow-up that converts recoverable claims into write-offs.

Why is manual payment posting still such a major problem in dental billing?

Despite widespread availability of electronic remittances, many dental practices still post payments manually because their practice management systems lack automation connectivity, or because paper EOBs from certain payers require manual entry regardless. Manual posting is slow (3–5 minutes per payment), error-prone, and creates reconciliation discrepancies that take additional time to resolve.

How does a high dental claim denial rate affect practice revenue?

A denial rate above 10% compared to the best-practice benchmark of under 5% indicates systemic billing issues that directly reduce collection rates. Each denied claim requires additional staff time to investigate, correct, and resubmit. Claims not resubmitted within the payer's appeal window are written off permanently. At scale, a 10% denial rate can represent hundreds of thousands of dollars in annual lost revenue.

What makes dental AR visibility difficult for multi-location groups?

Multi-location dental groups typically have payments arriving from dozens of payers, processed by different billing teams across locations, and posted into separate PMS instances. Without a centralized platform aggregating this data, leadership cannot see which locations have the highest AR days, which payers are slow to reimburse, or which claims are approaching filing deadlines until problems have already compounded.

How does managing multiple payer portals create RCM inefficiency?

Each payer portal has different login credentials, navigation, EOB formats, and update schedules. Billing staff logging into 20–40 portals daily waste significant time on navigation rather than revenue recovery. This fragmented approach also creates gaps payments processed in a portal that staff forgot to check that day can sit uncollected for days or weeks.

What is the fastest way for a dental practice to reduce its top RCM pain points?

The highest-impact first step is centralizing remittance management consolidating EOBs and ERAs from all payers into a single platform. This eliminates the portal-juggling problem, enables faster payment posting, and gives teams real-time visibility into what has been paid versus what is still outstanding. From this foundation, denial management and AR prioritization become significantly more effective.

How does RCM automation address the top dental billing pain points simultaneously?

A comprehensive RCM automation platform like Remit AI addresses all five pain points at once: auto-posting eliminates manual payment entry, AI-powered denial categorization accelerates follow-up, centralized analytics provide multi-location AR visibility, automated EOB collection removes portal management, and claim status monitoring prevents aging claims from expiring without action.