Zentist Selects Dental Express for Pre-Funding Using Artificial Intelligence

(US and Canada) Zentist, the automated dental insurance claims processing platform, today announced that San Diego-based Dental Express will join a select number of growing dental service organizations (DSOs) participating in its financial pre-funding pilot program for the $156 billion U.S. dental services industry.

The program applies machine learning models to dental insurance claims data enabling DSOs to be paid in real time on certain types of claim submissions. Anticipated outcomes include lower insurance reimbursement risk, improved liquidity and near-term financial health allowing participating DSOs to better fund their current operations in addition to investing more in their future growth.

"As part of this industry-first pilot program, Zentist will be predicting a large volume of dental insurance payments with a high degree of confidence and then pre-funding the accounts receivable of DSOs and their affiliated practices," said Zentist CEO Ato Kasymov.

"By shortening the window of time between claim submissions and cash collections and pre-funding certain types of insurance claims so we don't have to wait on monolithic payers, Zentist will be enabling our DSO to scale much faster," said Dental Express Chief Operations Officer Teresa Williams.

Zentist has been working closely with Ms. Williams who is a 26-year veteran of the DSO industry. She previously led operations at Dental Depot, growing it to over 500 employees with practices in Oklahoma, Texas and Arizona. Ms. Williams relocated to the west coast in 2014 to help launch Dental Express which today has seven locations in the San Diego area and plans to add more.

"Dental Express's mission is to expand its patient-centric model, open more practices and provide affordable, family-friendly dental care," said Ms. Williams.

Since opening its first location in 2014, Dental Express has built six additional de novo practices serving the greater San Diego area with their genuine "For You, About You" philosophy.

Leveraging a proprietary revenue cycle management (RCM) automation solution has already contributed to a 35% increase in top line revenue for the DSO. This has been accomplished in part by freeing up clinical and administrative employee time so they can deliver better care to more patients rather than deal with the growing complexities of dental insurance billing.