Collections for dental practices
Patient balances after insurance are where the money sits. The agent calls politely, references only the invoice number, and never discusses care.
Dental AR is bimodal: the insurance side usually pays, the patient-responsibility side usually does not — at least not the first time you ask. A post-adjudication patient balance is large enough to matter to the practice and small enough that the patient forgets about it twice. Front-desk staff are already running check-in, check-out, scheduling, and hygiene handoffs; cold-calling last month's balances does not happen, and nobody wants to staff a dedicated AR role at a five-operatory practice. The balances stack up into a five-figure monthly drag on cash that compounds every quarter it goes untreated.
You chose dentistry to be a dentist. You have a stack of patient balances under a few hundred dollars each, no staff bandwidth to chase them, and no appetite for a collections agency that will cost thirty to forty percent and may contact a patient in a way that blows up your Google review score. What you want is a polite voice layer that treats your patients as carefully as your hygienist would.
You batch statements once a month and hope. The follow-through is a series of text messages the patient silences within a day. A short phone call from a polite agent is a step up in effort that you personally cannot make time for across hundreds of active patient accounts, and the per-call ROI is too low to justify hiring for it.
You have KPIs on days-in-AR that corporate asks about every quarter. The practices that hit the target have either a dedicated AR person or luck. A deterministic calling layer removes the luck variable and gives every practice in the group the same operational floor, which is what standardization is supposed to deliver in the first place.
A sample call: the agent reaching a patient about a post-insurance patient-responsibility balance, with no clinical or diagnostic content referenced.
We reuse a small set of short, generic voice samples to demonstrate tone and cadence. The production voice agent references your specific invoice numbers and customer names at call time \u2014 not the content you hear here.
Dentists worry that calling patients about balances will damage a five-star Google rating that took a decade to build. The worry is rational and the bar is right to be high. Two things make these calls safe. First, the agent never discusses clinical information — not the procedure, not the provider, not the diagnosis. It references the invoice number and the outstanding amount, and nothing else. That is the HIPAA minimum-necessary floor, and it is also what patients hear from a hospital billing office when they call back. Second, the agent is polite, short, and immediately hands off to your office the moment a patient raises a dispute. Patients who forgot a balance appreciate a sixty-second reminder they can resolve on the spot. Patients who have a real concern get a human callback within a day, with context, and no adversarial pressure. The practices we work with see balances clear faster without a single negative review mentioning the call.
If your practice runs QBO for AR, we read invoice status and patient contact info with read-only access. No write permissions, no modifications to your ledger, no impact on audit trails. One OAuth handshake is the entire setup on the QBO side.
Collected funds route to your own Stripe account on your existing payout schedule. We never hold patient payments in transit, never act as a middleman on the money, and never become a custody point for anything patient-related.
Any unpaid invoice three or more days past due enters the call queue. Zero-balance visits and fully-insured claims are skipped automatically, and patient-local time zone is respected on every call.
9 AM to 8 PM patient-local time, weekdays only. The agent references the invoice number only, takes a card directly on the call, or texts a pay link for the patient to use at their convenience.
A daily email lists outcomes per patient: paid, promised, disputed, or unreachable. You only pay the 10% success fee on balances actually collected, and disputes route to your front desk with context attached.
The agent references only the invoice number and the outstanding amount. It never discusses diagnosis, procedure, treating provider, or any clinical information. Calls stay inside a minimum-necessary disclosure footprint, which is the HIPAA standard for payment-related communication. Call recordings are stored with the same access controls as your billing system, and retention windows follow the same policy. For the full picture on our compliance posture, see /compliance.
The agent does not adjudicate insurance questions — that is your billing team's domain and it requires clinical context the agent intentionally does not have. If the patient raises a coverage dispute, the call ends immediately, a dispute flag goes on the file, and the case routes back to your office for human follow-up with the appropriate context. The agent never repeats the disputed claim, which keeps the conversation clean for whoever picks it up next.
Yes. Per-patient exclusions live in your dashboard, and you can also exclude by class, by provider, by balance threshold, or by any flag your practice management system exports through QuickBooks. A patient mid-orthodontic treatment, mid-implant case, or mid-periodontal protocol can be blanket-excluded while patients with closed cases and lingering balances are called normally.
No. Your practice management software still sends statements on your existing cadence. Syntharra adds a polite voice follow-up on balances that remain unpaid three or more days past due. We integrate at the QuickBooks Online layer because that is where final invoice status lives; your PMS workflow is untouched, and no clinical data ever leaves your clinical system.
Yes, at the start of every call, along with a call-recording notice. That compliance language is fixed in the Retell flow itself, not generated at runtime by the LLM, so it cannot drift and it cannot be skipped. The disclosure is deterministic by design, which is what you need for a defensible compliance posture if anyone ever asks.
For full detail on TCPA and FDCPA compliance, see the compliance page.
No monthly charge. We earn when you recover. Pricing detail.
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