The Challenge
Long before a patient sits in their chair, dental teams are on the phone with insurance companies, verifying coverage, reviewing benefits, and documenting eligibility information. The process is essential, but can consume hours of staff time each week.
At Tudor City Dental in Manhattan, Drs. Adam Boris, Marc Wilk, and Lee Plutzer built a practice committed to the patient care journey, but honoring that committment meant the front desk team had to spend 20+ hours a week on hold with insurance providers.
“Somebody would have to call the insurance company and ask, ‘'Do you have a history of this procedure or this code? When was the last one?’ And they wouldn't be forthcoming with the information,” Dr. Plutzer says. “You had to ask specific questions about specific codes in order to get the correct information.
Two years ago, they handed the job over to Pearl.
The Approach
For nearly four decades, Drs. Boris, Wilk, and Plutzer have been focused on refining the patient experience at their private, fee-for-service practice. However, manual verification became a heavy burden for their staff to bear, taking their focus away from what mattered most: the patients.
Tudor City Dental’s existing tools pulled EDI information, but it was limited and unable to provide clinicians with a clear picture of their patients’ benefits chairside. Newer associates often had to leave the operatory mid-appointment to answer basic coverage questions.
After equipping their practice with the full Pearl suite — including Precheck (now Pearl RCM), for automated insurance verification — every clinician on the team gained instant access to what the x-rays were showing and what the patients’ plans would cover.
The Impact
By cutting weekly verification time from 20 hours down to just five, the practice reclaimed valuable administrative hours while seeing a drastic drop in claim rejection. “We know what’s going to be covered, and we have the history of when things were done previously in advance,” says Dr. Plutzer.
Because Pearl pulls per-tooth treatment records across clearinghouses, insurance payors, and patient explanations of benefits (EOBs), the guesswork is eliminated. When a patient says their x-rays were taken two years ago, Tudor City can confirm the associated treatment instantly, down to the date and tooth-by-tooth history.
The front desk, freed from the phone, can now focus on the patients standing in front of them.
Pearl in Action on a Busy Day
In a practice this size, small inefficiencies compound fast. Pearl helps Drs. Plutzer and Wilk smooth out the workflow in three key ways:
- Starting the Day Ready: Each morning, Dr. Plutzer pulls up a view of every scheduled patient, including their coverage status, annual maximum, and amount remaining. Anyone with nothing left is flagged before they walk in, so the financial conversation begins before the appointment, not after.
- Answering Coverage Questions Chairside: When Second Opinion surfaces a finding, the next question is almost always whether the dentist thinks treatment is needed — and if so, whether that treatment is covered by the patient’s insurance. Pearl’s benefits breakdown answers that question instantly, organized by procedure code with frequency limits and exclusions clearly outlined. Now, new associates can confidently handle coverage questions that once needed decades of insurance plan familiarity.
- Letting the Front Desk Do Their Job: With verification handled automatically, and benefits details displayed in the patient schedule and chairside, the front desk staff spend their time on what actually requires a person: welcoming patients, managing a steady flow of check-ins and -outs, and keeping things moving in a practice seeing hundreds of patients a week.
