Spotlight: Matt Butlin @ Clear Dental Billing
A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Matt Butlin, founder and CEO of Clear Dental Billing.
What does Clear Dental Billing do?
We’re an outsourced dental billing company. Our team of experienced US-based billers handles insurance verification, claims, denials, patient statements, and old AR cleanup for dental practices. What makes us different is the software we build in-house. It connects to Stedi, the major practice management systems, and our clients’ banks, so a lot of the routine work happens automatically, like verifying insurance or matching ERAs to bank deposits. That frees our billers to focus on the problems that actually need a person.
How did you end up working in health tech?
It was a bit of a winding road! I started out as a Navy pilot, then built software for insurance contact centers, and then spent several years at Amazon building AI-based pricing systems. Along the way, my wife (she’s a dentist) and I opened a startup dental practice. Running that office showed me how much of the day goes to insurance work, and how much of it software could handle. That’s when I started building Clear Dental Billing.
How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?
It’s pretty much the whole job. I spend most of my time with our billers, figuring out where their hours go and building tools to take that work off their plate. In dental, verification eats the most time, so that’s where we started. Stedi’s eligibility APIs are a big part of how we automate it.
What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?
More and more of the work is going to move to agents. I think that part is pretty much a given. What’s less clear is the second-order effects as these workflows become agent-native. How fast do payers adopt agents of their own, and what does RCM look like when it’s mostly agents talking to agents? A lot of the work today is just connecting systems that don’t talk to each other. Over time, I can see scheduling, billing, patient communication, and the rest of practice management merging into one system. Whether that comes from the PMSs or from AI-native firms like us, I’m not sure. But it’ll be interesting to watch.