How to scale real-time dental eligibility checks with portal scraping

If you’re building a dental eligibility product, you want accurate benefits data fast.

Real-time eligibility checks are quick, reliable, and inexpensive. They return benefits data – like coverage status, deductibles, coinsurance, and plan dates – in seconds and cost pennies per transaction.

Eligibility checks can return any benefit data that a payer chooses to include. Some payers return complete data in every response. Many dental payers don’t.

To fill in those gaps, many teams turn to scraping payer portals. Scraping is quick to roll out and can surface data that checks can’t. But those scrapers require ongoing maintenance.

We’ve worked with dozens of teams building dental eligibility tools. The teams that scale best take a hybrid approach: They start with real-time checks and scrape only when it matters.

Why scraping alone doesn’t scale

In small doses, scraping is effective, but it comes with technical debt. That debt compounds faster than many teams expect. It shows up in a few ways:

1. It’s slow.
Real-time eligibility checks typically respond in 1-3 seconds. Scraping can take 10 times longer. The scraper must log in, navigate pages, and wait for load times. Multiply that by thousands or millions of requests.

Concurrency helps, but only to a point. Most portals rate-limit traffic. Some payers require monthly minimums for automated access. Those minimums often cost more than using their APIs.

2. It’s brittle.
Scrapers frequently break. Portals can make unannounced layout changes or require multi-factor authentication (MFA). When that happens, there are no structured errors. Just screenshots and HTML.

You can’t rely on retry logic. The failure modes are too varied and too unpredictable. That means near-constant patching.

3. It burns engineering time.
One CTO told us they had 60+ scrapers in production. Their best engineers weren’t building the product – they were fixing broken scrapers. Most of the data that those scrapers collected was available in eligibility checks with much lower cost and maintenance overhead.

Scraping isn’t just hard to maintain. For most teams, it’s rarely necessary.

The 85/15 rule

Teams that we’ve seen scale portal scraping follow a simple pattern:

• They use real-time eligibility checks alone for about 85% of verifications.

• For the remaining 15%, they combine checks with scraping or payer calls to fill in missing details.

Instead of scraping everything, they focus on high-impact payers: ones that don’t return key data in eligibility responses and that account for a large share of volume or revenue risk. They also use eligibility checks to verify scraper output and catch failures early.

What eligibility responses cover

To put the 85/15 rule to work, you need to know what data real-time eligibility checks reliably return.

We analyzed responses from major dental payers – including MetLife, Delta Dental, and UnitedHealthcare – to find out. Here’s what we saw:

Start with checks

Scraping is a valuable tool. It’s just not something you want to rely on for every verification.

If you’ve already built out scraping, keep it. But try running eligibility checks first. They may cover more than you expect, which can lower costs and reduce engineering effort.

Get started

Try Stedi’s real-time eligibility API for free in our sandbox. You’ll get instant access to run mock checks.

When you’re ready for production, request a free trial. Most teams are up and running in under a day.