Eighteen minutes to ask where a claim is

A treatment was finished weeks ago. The claim went to the insurer, and the payment has not arrived. Someone at the front desk calls, waits on hold, reads out the patient's details and the date of the visit, and waits again. In the end there is an answer, or the promise of one.

It is a small question: where is this claim? In the United States, a benchmark called the CAQH Index has tried to estimate what that question costs a dental practice, in minutes and in dollars.

What the benchmark measures

The CAQH Index tracks how administrative transactions between US healthcare providers and insurers are carried out, and at what cost. Its 2024 edition, produced by CAQH with NORC and published in February 2025, combines transaction volumes reported by insurers with a voluntary survey in which providers estimated the time and cost of each task, weighted and extrapolated.

That provider survey was collected between July and September 2024, and the report treats 2023 as its reference year. More than 600 provider organisations took part, across medicine and dentistry combined, and the tables do not say how many dental respondents stand behind each estimate.

Eighteen minutes, six minutes

For US dental practices, the 2024 edition estimates that checking a claim's status manually takes about 18 minutes of work and costs $12.01 per transaction. Done electronically, the same enquiry is estimated at 6 minutes and $3.71.

Checking whether a patient is covered follows the same pattern. In the same survey of US providers, an eligibility check was estimated at 12 minutes when done manually and 4 minutes when done electronically.

One detail is easy to miss. The report classifies an insurer's web portal, or an automated phone line, as partial rather than fully electronic. A practice that checks claims by logging in to an insurer's website is, in the report's terms, somewhere in between.

These are survey estimates. They describe what practices reported; they do not come from an experiment in which practices moved to automation and were timed before and after. The cost figures also leave out the full work of preparation, follow-up and implementation.

How payments move

The 2025 edition, published by CAQH and DataSpring in February 2026 with data for 2024, continues the same series; it is not an independent study. Its adoption figures come from transaction volumes reported by insurers. For dentistry, that sample covered 118 million members, about 40% of members in the US, along with 205 million claims and 915 million transactions.

In that 2024 data, only 33% of dental claim-payment transactions reported by US insurers were fully electronic. The payment process, in other words, is still split across different ways of working.

The figure is easy to misread, so it is worth being plain about what it is not. Its denominator is transactions, not practices. It does not tell us what share of dental clinics work by hand, and the size of the insurers' sample says nothing about how many clinics took part in the time surveys.

Nor should the two editions be blended. The minutes and dollars above come from the 2024 edition, collected in 2024 with 2023 as the reference year; they are not estimates from the 2025 edition.

What the numbers support

Kept in their own context, these figures support a modest conclusion. In US dental practices, finding out where a claim stands, and whether a patient is covered, is repetitive work that takes measurable time, and the time reported varies with how the work is done.

They do not support a figure for what any practice would save. The report's national cost totals include insurers as well as providers, and time that is freed up is not necessarily an equivalent saving in wages.

SoliumOS is built for the administrative work around care, and this is a familiar part of it. It prepares the work inside the clinic's own cloud, and the clinic's team approves every step. The CAQH Index does not measure our product, or any product. It measures the work.

Sources

• CAQH, in partnership with NORC (2025). 2024 CAQH Index Report. CAQH, February 2025.
• CAQH and DataSpring (2026). 2025 CAQH Index Report. CAQH and DataSpring, February 2026.