Eligibility, benefits, and prior auth, beta
Coverage settled at booking,not discovered at the window.
Beta
Real-time eligibility and prior auth
Settling coverage and prior auth at booking instead of at the window
Echo confirms the plan is active, in-network, and covers the visit as part of booking, tracks the prior authorizations your procedures require, and keeps patients updated on status, so coverage is settled before check-in rather than discovered at the window.
In short
Key takeaways
- Automated verification confirms a plan is active, in-network, and covers the visit, without a staff member on a payer portal or a hold line.
- Echo runs the check as part of booking, so the appointment is created with coverage already settled rather than pending.
- Verification runs whenever the booking happens, including the evening and weekend bookings that used to sit untouched until morning.
- A plan that can't be confirmed becomes a task with context, in time to fix or reschedule, rather than a denial after the visit.
- Prior authorization is tracked on the same rail: Echo knows which procedures need one, chases status, and tells the patient where it stands.
- This capability is in beta and expanding across payers and plan types.
The capability
What eligibility and prior auth software has to do
Automated insurance verification confirms that a patient's plan is active, in network, and covers the visit without a staff member calling the payer, and tracks the prior authorization a procedure needs before it can go ahead.
A nightly batch check beats calling payers and still misses the two costly cases. The patient who booked this afternoon was not in last night's file, and a prior auth does not fail at the window, it fails weeks later when nobody chased it.
Echo checks coverage inside the booking conversation and flags what it cannot confirm rather than guessing. Verification is in beta and expanding payer by payer, so ask on the demo about the plans you see most.
The problem
What breaks without it
How Echo does it
What insurance verification looks like with Echo
- Verification is manual, slow, and easy to skipA staff member on a payer portal or a hold line, per patient, competing with a ringing phone.
- Runs inside the booking flowEcho collects payer, plan, and member ID in the conversation and checks eligibility in the same flow.
- Unverified coverage becomes a denialBy the time it surfaces the work is done, the money is hard to recover, and staff spend weeks on appeals.
- Problems become tasks, not denialsAn inactive or out-of-network plan is surfaced with context, in time to fix or reschedule before the visit.
- After-hours bookings arrive unverifiedA 9 p.m. or weekend booking sits untouched until someone gets to it, if they get to it.
- Verifies when your staff can'tBookings made out of hours are checked when they're made, not the next morning.
- Prior auth stalls, and the procedure date slidesThe request goes to the payer and nobody has time to chase it, so the patient calls repeatedly to ask.
- Prior authorization tracked and communicatedEcho knows which procedures need one, keeps status moving, and tells the patient where it stands.
- Checking every patient by hand doesn't scaleThe routine majority absorbs the time that the genuinely complicated cases needed.
- Your team works exceptions onlyThe routine majority is handled automatically, so a person touches the ones that need a decision.
Mobile first, light by design
Turn every patient conversation into answers, not reports.
Because Echo answers the calls and books the visits itself, it sees every conversation, and reads them back against your live schedule as answers about your practice.
So ask the questions that actually run the practice.
- Ask it to call a patient back, from your palm.
- Pull today's numbers without opening a report.
- No extra tab to monitor or workflow to change.
- Built to stay hidden and work for you.
- Get push notification when a human needs to step in.
Ask in plain English, get a number, a chart, or the transcript behind it, then hand the follow-up back to the agent who owns it, from your phone.
Incoming messages
Patients reach you
Booking requests
New patients and reschedules booked straight into the schedule, by your rules.
After-hours calls
Nights, weekends, lunch, and every busy moment in between, answered, never voicemail.
Patient messages
Texts, emails, and web forms answered on their own, handed to your team when it matters.
Outgoing messages
Echo reaches patients
How it works
How verification fits into a booking
Verification is designed to be invisible to the patient and automatic for your team. Here's the sequence.
Echo captures coverage during the call
As it books, Echo collects the insurance details it needs, payer, plan, member ID, in the natural flow of the conversation, the same information your front desk would ask for.
It checks eligibility and benefits
Echo runs the eligibility check against the payer to confirm the plan is active, in-network, and covers the visit type being booked.
The result travels with the appointment
Confirmed coverage is written back with the appointment in your EHR; anything that can't be confirmed becomes a task with context for your team to resolve before the visit.
Procedures that need prior auth are flagged and tracked
Echo knows which visit types require authorization, raises the request as a task the moment one is booked, chases status on your cadence, and keeps the patient told, so the procedure date holds instead of sliding while everyone waits.
Your team works exceptions, not every check
Instead of verifying every patient by hand, your staff only touches the ones that need a human decision, so the routine majority is handled automatically.
Why practices choose Echo
What makes Echo different
Only three things matter: whether it knows your booking logic, whether it completes the work inside your system, and what it costs your front desk to adopt.
- Scheduling rules engineEcho lands the slot your front desk would have picked, not whichever one happens to be open.
- Deep integrationsEcho reads and writes the fields your workflow actually runs on in your EHR/PMS, so the work leaves your desk instead of coming back as a task.
- Mobile firstOne light app that pings your team only when a person is genuinely needed. No dashboard to check each morning.
| Capability | Echo BookingCarries the task to done | Hiring more staffFront desk headcount | AI healthcare receptionistA voice bot on the phone line |
|---|---|---|---|
| When coverage gets checked | During the booking call, in the same conversation that created the appointment. | Later, on a portal, if someone gets to it before the visit. | Never. It can discuss coverage but cannot confirm it. |
| A booking made after hours | Verified when it's made, because verification doesn't keep office hours. | Sits unverified until someone works the queue in the morning. | Unverified, and there's no queue to work it from. |
| A plan that comes back inactive | Surfaced as a task with the detail attached, with time to fix it. | Found at check-in, with the patient standing there. | Found by the biller, after the claim is denied. |
| What the patient will owe | Flagged before the visit, so the conversation happens in advance. | Estimated by hand, when there is time. | Not calculated. |
| Verifying every patient, every day | The routine majority is automatic; your team touches only the exceptions. | The step that gets skipped first when the phones are busy. | Not part of the product. |
Done, start to finishPartly. Someone at the practice still finishes itDoesn’t do it at all
Related reading
Keep exploring
Works with your system: Echo reads and writes in real time, verifying insurance and booking, confirming, and logging every result directly in Open Dental, Dentrix, Dentrix Ascend, Eaglesoft, Curve Dental, Oryx, Denticon, PrognoCIS, eClinicalWorks, Practice Fusion, NextGen Healthcare, Athena, Prompt, Acuity Scheduling, and WebPT, with no separate queue to reconcile and no migration.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
It's confirming a patient's coverage, that the plan is active, in-network, and covers the visit, without a staff member calling the payer or working a portal. Echo runs this eligibility and benefits check as part of booking the appointment, so coverage is settled before the patient arrives.
It's currently in beta and expanding across payers and plan types. The capability is live and improving; a demo will show which payers and visit types are covered for your practice today.
During booking. When Echo schedules a patient, it checks coverage in the same flow, so the appointment is created with insurance already confirmed rather than sitting in a queue for someone to verify later.
Echo flags it as a task with the details attached, inactive plan, out-of-network, missing information, so your team can resolve it before the visit instead of discovering it as a denial afterward. It doesn't silently book over a coverage problem.
Yes, that's one of the main points of automating it. A patient who books at 9 p.m. or over the weekend has their coverage checked when the appointment is made, rather than waiting unverified until a staff member gets to it in the morning.
They're written back with the appointment in your EHR or practice-management system, so the record your front and back office work from shows confirmed coverage, instead of results scattered across payer portals and notes.
No. It removes the routine, repetitive verification work so your billing and front-desk staff spend their time on the exceptions and the claims that genuinely need a person, rather than checking eligibility one patient at a time.
Prior auth runs on the same rail as eligibility, and it is in beta alongside it. Echo knows which visit types your practice requires authorization for, raises the request as a tracked task the moment one of those is booked, follows up on status at the cadence you set, and tells the patient where things stand rather than leaving them to call and ask. What it does not do is make the clinical case for medical necessity; that stays with your team.
Because nobody has told them anything since the request went out, and the procedure they are waiting on is often the reason they are in pain. Echo removes the cause rather than absorbing the calls: it communicates status proactively when it changes, and confirms the procedure date once authorization comes through, so the repeat calls stop happening in the first place.
Payer coverage is expanding during the beta. Because verification is built into the same platform that books the appointment, new payers become available to every practice as they're added. Book a demo for the current list relevant to your patient mix.
Echo integrates directly with your EHR or practice-management system, Open Dental, Dentrix, eClinicalWorks, Athena, PrognoCIS, and more, so it can attach coverage results to the same appointment it booked, in real time.
Because a coverage problem found at check-in is the most expensive and awkward moment to find it: the patient is standing at the window, the visit is about to happen, and the options are a hard conversation or a write-off. Verifying at booking gives everyone time to fix it, or to reschedule, before it becomes a denial.
Ready when you are
See insurance verification in your practice.
A 30-minute demo, run against your real schedule, in your EHR, under your rules.