Dental insurance AR

Your Claims Aren't Denied — They're Just Waiting for Someone to Call

Most Canadian dental practices do not have a collections problem. They have a follow-up problem. Claims sit in the 30–90 day bucket not because insurers rejected them, but because no one had time to check status, fix a documentation gap, or escalate before the window closed.

The hidden cost isn't the denial — it's the silence

When a claim is submitted electronically, the practice often assumes adjudication is in progress. In reality:

• The claim may be pended for information that was never clearly requested.
• Coordination of benefits (COB) may be blocking payment on the secondary plan.
• The patient may have hit an annual maximum — but no one reconciled against the benefit summary.
• The front desk meant to call Sun Life or Manulife "next week" — and next week never came.

None of these show up as a red flag in your PMS. They show up as aging AR — quietly, claim by claim.

What your front desk is actually doing

Insurance follow-up is repetitive: dial the carrier IVR, navigate six different menu trees, wait on hold, read a claim number, ask for status, note a reason code, call back if the rep couldn't help. Multiply that by every claim past day 32 (or day 21 for TELUS AdjudiCare) and you understand why offices hire a part-time billing person — or simply write off balances they never had time to chase.

The 30 / 60 / 90 day pattern

Experienced billing leads watch three thresholds:

• Day 30+ — Claim should have adjudicated; status check warranted.
• Day 60+ — Likely documentation, COB, or routing issue; escalation needed.
• Day 90+ — High write-off risk; often needs a senior rep or formal appeal.

The practices that collect best are not the ones with better fee schedules — they're the ones with a system for follow-up on every claim that crosses day 30.

What you can do this week (without new software)

• Pull your insurance AR aging report and sort by carrier — one carrier usually dominates the backlog.
• Block 90 minutes twice a week for status calls only (not patient scheduling).
• Track reason codes in a shared sheet — patterns repeat across claims.
• Read our carrier-specific follow-up guide for IVR and timing quirks.

When follow-up should run itself

CollectRx was built for Canadian dental practices that want insurance AR follow-up to run on a schedule — carrier calls placed Mon–Fri 8am–5pm Eastern, PHI tokenized before any AI processing, results written back to your workflow. It covers Sun Life, Canada Life, Manulife, Green Shield, RBC Insurance, and TELUS AdjudiCare (~78% of private dental insurance in Canada), plus CDCP recovery paths.