When a verification comes back, someone normally has to retype it — percentages, deductibles, maximums, frequencies — into the patient's insurance plan. Writeback does that part for you. Once a full verification finishes, Stratus writes the verified benefits straight into your practice management software, so the plan in your system matches what we confirmed with the payer.
What gets written, by system
OpenDental gets the full picture. EagleSoft is much more limited — it receives coverage percentages only.
What we write | OpenDental | EagleSoft |
Coverage percentages by category (preventive, basic, major, and so on) | Yes | Yes |
Deductibles — individual and family, general and per category | Yes | No |
Annual maximums | Yes | No |
Amounts used so far — insurance used and deductible met | Yes | No |
Coverage on individual procedure codes | Yes | No |
Frequencies and age limits | Yes | No |
Downgrades and substitutions | Yes | No |
Orthodontic benefits — lifetime maximum, percentage, age limit | Yes | No |
Insurance history dates — last prophy, bitewings, exam | Yes | No |
Plan details — group name and number, effective and termination dates, renewal month, coordination of benefits | Yes | No |
Plan note, appointment note, and the last-verified date on the plan | Yes | No |
Dentrix: we do not write back to Dentrix. Verifications still run normally — you just read the breakdown in Stratus and enter anything you need by hand.
What it never touches
Patient demographics, addresses, phone numbers.
Appointments, the schedule, or treatment plans.
Ledger, claims, payments, or adjustments other than the insurance-used and deductible-met figures.
Your coverage category setup itself. We fill in the percentages on the categories you already have — we don't add, rename, or remove categories.
Does it overwrite what I already entered?
Yes, on the benefits. This is the part to read carefully before you turn it on.
When a patient comes back active, Stratus clears the existing benefit entries on that insurance plan and replaces them with the verified ones. That clear-out is not selective — it removes benefit entries your team typed in by hand, not just ones Stratus added on an earlier run. And because benefits live on the plan rather than on the patient, this affects the plan record shared by every patient on it.
A few things behave differently, and in your favor:
If the patient comes back inactive or terminated, nothing is cleared. Benefits are left exactly as they are. Only the plan details and notes are updated.
Notes are merged, not replaced. Stratus writes into its own clearly marked section of the plan note and appointment note. Anything your team wrote stays put.
Insurance history is only ever added. We never delete history, and we skip dates that are already there.
Plan details are replaced field by field — only where we have a verified value, and only if it differs from what's there.
On EagleSoft, we replace the coverage percentage on each category we verified. Categories we don't have a verified value for are left alone.
There is no preview mode and no undo button. If you have plans where your team's hand-entered benefits are more trustworthy than a fresh verification, tell us before we switch writeback on and we'll talk through it with you.
How to turn it on
Ask us to enable writeback on your account — it isn't a switch you can flip yourself. For OpenDental, you'll also need to connect the API key:
In Stratus, go to Settings → Integration and find the Writeback Configuration card.
Copy the API key shown there.
Open OpenDental and go to Setup → Advanced Setup → API.
Paste the key into the API key field and save.
The key is generated on the Stratus side, and your office pastes it into OpenDental — not the other way around. Your team can view and copy it, but cannot edit it. If the field is filled in and greyed out, that's normal and means you're set up. If it's empty, or you need the key changed, email [email protected] and we'll do it for you.
On EagleSoft, there's no key to set up — writeback uses the same connection your practice already uses to sync with Stratus, so as long as that connection is healthy you're set.
How to tell it worked
Every completed breakdown shows a writeback badge, both in your breakdowns list and at the top of the breakdown itself. The badge is a small colored icon rather than a word — green for completed, amber for partial, red for failed, blue for still running. Hover over it and it tells you the status in words.
Click the badge to open the details. You'll see each area we wrote — patient information, policy information, the insurance plan, the appointment, benefits, and used amounts — and inside each area, every value we handled with its own outcome: Written, Already up to date, Skipped, Needs attention, Failed, or Not attempted. So you can see not just that something didn't write, but exactly which value it was. On OpenDental, the small View icon beside a row shows you where that value lands in your system.
EagleSoft is laid out a little differently: one coverage table, with a count of how many categories were written, were already up to date, were skipped, or failed.
You may see:
Completed — everything wrote successfully.
In Progress or Pending — still running. It starts on its own once the verification finishes; there's nothing to click.
Partial Success — some sections wrote, some didn't. Open the details to see which.
Failed — nothing wrote, or it stopped partway.
No Change — we ran, and everything in your system already matched the verified values.
You may also see a status telling you we're waiting on the connection to your practice's system. This usually clears on its own; we keep retrying.
If it didn't work
Open the breakdown, click the writeback badge, and read the message in the details panel. It usually names the problem directly — a missing API key, a plan that was deleted in your system, or a connection that was down.
Fix whatever it names. Most failures come down to the API key not being pasted into OpenDental, or the plan no longer existing.
Click Rerun Writeback in that same panel. The button appears on failed and partial writebacks. Rerunning is safe — it starts the whole write over from the verified data.
Still stuck? Email [email protected] with the patient name and date, and we'll take a look.