KeyBank Launches AI Copilot to Help Dentists Drowning in Paperwork

Dental offices, like most healthcare facilities, have piles of billing and insurance paperwork. Insurance forms must be filled out and sent to the patient’s insurer. The insurer’s explanation of benefits must be deciphered and analyzed. The client must be billed and the payment processed.

AI could automate much of that work, according to Cleveland-based KeyBank and its new fintech partner Zentist, which will announce the collaboration on Wednesday. KeyBank will introduce Zentist’s Remit AI software to its network of dental practices.

Attracting more dental customers through Zentist, which already works with 2,500 dental practices, could help KeyBank grow deposits and lower operating costs, according to Jon Briggs, executive vice president and head of commercial products at the bank.

“Deposits are back in fashion,” Briggs said in an interview.

The idea of ​​providing employees with a virtual assistant or co-pilot has become popular in the financial services sector. Citi has implemented generative artificial intelligence for developers to help them write code faster by reusing pieces of existing software. TD delivers next-generation AI to software developers and customer service representatives. JPMorgan Chase Uses Large Language Models to Detect Fraud and recently made available to all employees models to help them prepare emails and reports.

“I think the co-pilot use case is probably going to be one of the most common,” Michael Abbott, global banking leader at Accenture, said in a recent interview. “I think of it like playing chess and hearing (Russian chess grandmaster Garry) Kasparov whisper in your ear, ‘This is the right move to make next time.’ You still have to make that move. It’s still your decision. You still have to look at it and say, Is this the right thing to do?”

Providing customers with such co-pilots is rather new.

“When banks think about scaling these types of co-pilot ideas to their customers, they’re best served by focusing on specific use cases that solve a well-defined problem for a specific group of customers,” said Daniel Latimore, research director at Financial Revolutionist. “When they have success with early initiatives, they can build on those wins to expand their offering.”

KeyBank, which has $188 billion in assets, has focused on the health care industry since 2017, when it acquired Cain Brothers, a corporate and investment banking firm in the health care sector. In 2019, the bank acquired Laurel Road, an online fintech lending company that helps doctors deal with medical school debt.

KeyBank also launched virtual account management for businesses in May this year through a partnership with fintech Qolo. It helps businesses manage multiple accounts from one place, which could be particularly appealing to dental practices, which are typically amalgamations of multiple dental practices operating under unique laws and regulatory requirements, Briggs noted.

“Virtual account management can make it much easier to manage a complex supplier hierarchy where money flows in and out,” Briggs said.

Over time, virtual account management will likely be integrated with the Zentist platform.

“Our customers don’t want to come into our four walls; they want the work to be done natively, in their enterprise resource programs” and other software they use every day, Briggs said. “So we spend a lot of time partnering or building to provide application program interface connectivity to be able to bring our capabilities into their ERP systems to be able to do that.”

Since most people still pay dentists with paper checks, KeyBank can also offer dental offices its safe deposit box services to accept and process all of those checks.

Zentist’s Remit AI aggregates and consolidates insurance payments by enabling bots to log into insurance portals to collect data explaining benefits, then normalizes that information into a single dashboard and login management. The software uses AI to analyze and organize data from multiple sources into a unified format that can be accessed from a single database. It can generate reports that can be customized by location or across multiple locations.

“People today have to read PDFs of their benefits explanations—whether it’s a facility with a thousand practices or a single dentist,” Ato Kasymov, CEO and co-founder of Zentist, said in an interview. “There’s an incredible opportunity to apply optical character recognition to these documents, analyze the data from them, figure out why a payment was declined and pass the balance on to the customer.”

According to Kasymov, some dental practice revenue cycle management teams have become 55% more productive by using the technology. “Even if they’re efficient, they might have 25 people, but half of that team could do the same amount of work using our software,” he said. The entire process from billing to payment can be reduced from more than 20 days to 10 to 12 days.