4 Ways to Improve E&B Verification & Drop Staff Workloads

By Chloe From Clearwave | March 4, 2025

By taking a strategic approach to eligibility and benefits (E&B) verification, practices can achieve significant operational efficiencies while ensuring accurate insurance information for claims processing. The result is a win-win: reduced staff burden and improved financial performance.

With staff shortages affecting practices nationwide, finding ways to reduce the time spent on E&B verification while improving accuracy has become more critical than ever. Manual processes and outdated verification tools not only burden your staff but also lead to increased claim rejections and revenue leakage. Practices must take a smarter approach to E&B verification. 

Let’s explore four proven strategies to enhance your E&B verification process while significantly reducing staff workload!

1. Implement Real-Time, Multi-Factor Eligibility Verification

Traditional E&B verification often relies on single-point checks that quickly become outdated. By implementing real-time, multi-factor verification, practices can automatically verify patient insurance at multiple touchpoints throughout the patient journey. This approach ensures that your practice always has the most current insurance information without requiring staff intervention. See the difference between basic “automated” eligibility verification and multi-factor verification.

Real-time verification should occur at key moments, including:

• Initial appointment scheduling
• Pre-visit confirmation
• Day-of-service check-in

Modern E&B verification solutions can automatically run these checks without staff involvement, saving countless hours while improving accuracy. When verification occurs at multiple parts of the patient journey, your practice can catch insurance changes early and prevent costly claim rejections.

2. Streamline Pre-Appointment Verification Tasks

One of the biggest challenges in E&B verification is managing the complex workflow of checking patient insurance and remaining deductibles while also proactively solving any errors or determining co-pays. Not to mention, once the staff reviews one patient, they have to move on to the next one for the upcoming day of appointments. More often than not, there’s not enough time in your staff’s day to run through every patient’s insurance, which leads to missed collection opportunities at check-in and overworked staff. 

By streamlining these workflows through intelligent automation and an intuitive dashboard, practices can significantly reduce the administrative burden on staff. For example, Clearwave’s Appointment Manager gives your staff the power to stay on top of key tasks and manage overall patient preparedness for their visit without going patient by patient. With this tool, front desk and billing staff can quickly filter and sort appointments through interactive patient lists, helping them focus on the appointments that require their attention. Using Clearwave’s one-of-a-kind rules engine, you can also easily create customized alerts and statuses for staff, urging them to complete specific tasks before a patient’s appointment. See how the Appointment Manager helps staff save hours while ensuring you can collect patient responsibility at every check-in.

3. Automate Patient Estimations for Faster Collections

With patient collection taking more than a month for 74% of healthcare providers, providing estimations and capturing them at check-in is an easy way to speed up cash flow and drop staff workloads. However, for most practices, developing a way to provide financial transparency while managing staff shortages is becoming increasingly difficult. Reliance on manual estimation processes only leads to inefficiencies and hesitation in payment collections. Forward-thinking practice leaders are implementing an estimations process that does the job for you, all via smart automation and faster E&B insurance verification. 

By combining the power of real-time eligibility with automated estimations technology, practices can instantly determine patient co-pays, deductibles and self-pay responsibility for scheduled visits — with minimial-to-no staff intervention. This guide on Using Good Faith Estimates to Increase Revenue covers the exact steps you can take to build a similar, push-of-a-button estimations approach.  

Take advice from one practice whose estimations strategy is already leading to a 53% increase in self-pay payments and a significant drop in staff workloads. 

Concord Orthopedics’ CEO shares, “With the click-of-a-button, we get our patient’s eligibility confirmed, deductible balance and out-of-pocket responsibility. Technology has been more successful in estimating and collecting payments from patients than manual efforts. Patients are more inclined to pay when they understand their responsibility and are prompted to pay at check-in.” 

The key to this automated approach lies in its seamless workflow integration. For exmaple, for practices leveraging Clearwave, once a patient schedules their appointment, their information flows directly from the practice management system into Clearwave’s instant verification platform. The system then performs automated eligibility checks in real-time, determining deductibles and multi-layer insurance coverage. With Rivet’s integration with Clearwave, this information automatically generates accurate Good Faith Estimates that are sent to patients along with their appointment reminders, allowing them to review costs and prepare accordingly. Patients can then pay their estimated responsibility through a convenient pre-registration link or at check-in, all without requiring staff to manually process or track these interactions manually. Learn more here.

4. Get All Patient Insurance & Deductible Info in One Dashboard

The final key to improving E&B verification processes lies in centralizing all insurance information in a single, user-friendly dashboard. Modern E&B verification platforms should provide a comprehensive overview of upcoming patient appointments, where staff can easily narrow in on only the patients that require their attention. For example, Clearwave’s dashboard will flag patients with insurance errors and provide patient coverage details in just one click, which eliminates the need for staff to toggle between multiple payer portals or patient accounts. This transformative impact is clearly illustrated by Tiara Williams, Patient Registration Manager at Jordan-Young Institute, who shares:

“We didn’t realize how much Clearwave would help us catch the little details, ones that we wouldn’t have been able to catch before. Patients may be off by a number when writing down their information or could easily put in the wrong insurance card. The dashboard makes us aware of these issues so we can proactively solve them. We have a lot less errors, which shows that our previous claim rejection challenges could have been prevented with Clearwave.”

An effective centralized dashboard transforms how staff interact with insurance information by normalizing different payer responses and presenting only the information relevant to your specific specialty. This streamlined approach allows staff to quickly identify insurance discrepancies through an intuitive flagging system. 

Rather than having to review every patient’s insurance information in detail on a one-by-one basis, staff can focus their attention only on patients with insurance issues that require action. This can dramatically reduce the time spent on verification while ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.

Additionally, when staff need to update patient insurance information or resolve issues, they can quickly resubmit insurance verification and see updates with just one click. By giving staff the tools to work more efficiently with insurance information, practices can reallocate resources to other critical areas while maintaining high standards of revenue cycle management.

The Impact of Improved E&B Verification

When practices implement these four strategies, the results can be transformative. These improvements directly impact both the practice’s bottom line and staff satisfaction. By reducing the manual burden of E&B verification, practices can reallocate staff time to higher-value activities that improve patient care and satisfaction.

Moving Forward with E&B Verification Improvement

Implementing these changes doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start by assessing your current E&B verification processes and identifying areas where automation could have the biggest impact. Remember that the goal is not just to reduce staff workloads but to create a more efficient, accurate and sustainable verification process that benefits everyone — staff, patients and the practice as a whole.

Do you want to learn how Clearwave can help your practice reduce claim rejections, accelerate cash, and cut staff workload in half? Connect with our team for a brief solution overview and see the power of Multi-Factor Eligibility™ in action.