Bridging the Gap: Survey Reveals Top Pain Points in Dental Office – Insurance Interactions

This month, guest blogger and NADP Director of Research, Jerry Berggren, shares key insights on the AADOM survey results

Last year, NADP’s Future of Dental Care Access Task Force, “The Task Force”, engaged with the American Association of Dental Office Managers (AADOM) to collaborate in an effort to ease the pain points dental offices have working with dental insurance.

Phase I was a research project to identify those pain points that, if improved, would have the greatest impact on the working relationship between dental offices and dental plans. To that end, customer service performance directly related to patients – Benefit Verification and Treatment Preauthorization and Claims Processing – if improved, would have the greatest impact on the overall satisfaction dental offices have with dental plans.

We found some pain points, and this post is to let you know what we found.

But first…

Methodology

A link to an online survey was emailed to AADOM’s membership and we received just under 400 responses, about 1 percent of AADOM’s members. While this is lower than we had hoped, the survey did provide a valid sample with a margin of error of +/-6.5%. The survey was in the field from the latter part of February through April 2, 2025.

Nearly three-fourths of the respondents were Office Managers or had a similar title and over 80% of respondents worked for a single location practice.

The Survey

The survey was developed after speaking with members at AADOM’s Conference in September 2024 and from listening in on the educational sessions at that conference, including an emotional session that included a panel of NADP member dental plan representatives. The content of the survey included satisfaction with 5 key areas of interaction: Claims, Benefit Verification and Treatment Preauthorization, Reimbursement, Credentialing and Recredentialing, and interaction with Customer Service. The survey was designed to identify problems, and we did.

We wanted to see if there were problems that may have stemmed from the technology the offices were using to interact with dental plans. So, we tested whether there were any statistically significant differences based on which Practice Management Software (PMS) the dental office used. There were no statistically significant differences in any of the things we tested between those that used Dentrix/Ascend/Easy Dental by Henry Schein, Eaglesoft/Fuse by Patterson, Open Dental, Curve or some Other PMS.

Results

I won’t go into much detail here (NADP members will receive more detailed results in the coming weeks), but of the 5 areas we investigated Customer Service received the lowest satisfaction rating by far. About half (50%) of all respondents indicated they frequently had problems with Customer Service or almost always had problems and felt that the system was effectively broken.

The point of the survey, you’ll recall, was to identify the areas where improvement would have the most impact on relieving office manager pain points. To that end, we identified issues directly related to patients – Benefit Verification and Treatment Preauthorization and Claims Processing – if improved, would have the greatest impact on the overall satisfaction dental offices have with dental plans. A close runner-up involves the process for practices to get paid, so Reimbursement was also high on the list, especially where the claims process intersected with how much and how quickly a practice got paid.

Phase II – What’s Next

This summer, NADP expects to work with AADOM to form teams that will look at some of the key issues identified in the survey and develop industry-wide solutions and/or best practice guidelines for both sides to help reduce or eliminate the persistent friction that too frequently creates inefficiencies in delivering cost-efficient and quality dental care.

NADP will present progress on Phase II of our collaboration with AADOM at CONVERGE this September. For more information on CONVERGE, please visit www.nadpconverge.org.