Growth is every dental practice's dream. More locations, busier appointment books, and new providers joining the team. These are the metrics we celebrate. But here's what nobody tells you: for the people managing your revenue cycle, rapid growth can feel less like winning and more like drowning.
Here's how it typically plays out: A practice is humming along nicely, then suddenly, they expand. What worked perfectly fine at 10 locations falls apart at 20. The billing team, which handled 500 claims a month, is now staring at 2,000, and the cracks start showing everywhere.
A Real DSO Scenario
A mid-sized practice in Atlanta was doing well—patient volume was up, revenue was climbing, and everything looked healthy on paper. But behind the scenes? Their Revenue Cycle Management team was barely keeping its head above water.
The issue wasn't complicated: they were still posting insurance payments the old way. Someone had to manually chase down every EOB, match it to the right claim, enter all the data, and reconcile everything with their bank deposits. When you're handling 50 payments a day, that's tedious but manageable. When you're suddenly dealing with 150? It becomes impossible.
This is the growth paradox. The very success that should be making things easier is instead creating operational chaos.
Why Throwing More People at It Doesn't Work
The instinct when you're overwhelmed is to hire more people. And sure, that helps in the short term. But it's not solving the real problem—it's just spreading the same broken process across more bodies.
Manual payment posting doesn't scale. It just doesn't. The math is brutal: more patients mean more claims, which means more payments, which means exponentially more EOBs to track down and post. Add in the fact that every insurance company formats its remittances differently, and you've got a recipe for constant errors and delays.
Plus, here's something practices don't always consider: when your team is spending six hours a day on data entry, they're not spending time on the stuff that actually moves the needle—like following up on denied claims or optimizing your fee schedules.
A Different Approach
Ponce Dental Studio, a privately owned studio based in Atlanta, Georgia, faced exactly this challenge, so they tried something different. Rather than hiring additional staff, they implemented Remit AI’s intelligent payment posting automation that integrated directly with their Open Dental system.
The key was deep integration. This wasn't another standalone tool creating more work—it connected via API to automate the actual posting process.
How it works:
The system automatically matches bank payments (EOBs, ERAs, & Checks) to open claims. For straightforward payments where insurance is paid as expected, it posts everything automatically at the line-item level and closes the claim with zero human intervention.
For exceptions—underpayments, adjustments, or denials—it still posts automatically but flags for review. The team makes decisions on complex cases rather than entering data.
The Results
Within 30 days, Ponce saw a measurable impact:
- 49% fully automated posting with no manual touch
- 50% faster reviews on flagged exceptions due to pre-digitized data
- 3x overall productivity from combined automation and efficiency gains
- Cost per payment dropped from $2.70 to approximately $2.00
Beyond the metrics, the team dynamic shifted entirely. As their RCM manager put it: "I see payments posted super-fast now. It's leading to faster balance-billing and improving our cash flow. We actually got our first bonuses last month for increased collections."
The team went from overwhelmed to capacity-positive. That's the real win.
The Takeaway
When growth hits, your systems either bend or break. Ponce chose to bend — and now, they’re growing faster because of it. If your RCM team is drowning in manual reconciliation, it simply means that your processes have outgrown your tools, and you’re heading towards a break.
It’s time to take the big step towards API-based automation. This is a tested and proven decision that enables practices to scale sustainably—transforming administrative burdens into operational advantages. The practices that embrace intelligent systems today are positioning themselves to grow without the growing pains.
And their teams get bonuses instead of burnout.
