How a Leading Health Plan Accelerated Access to Care Through Real-Time Benefit Verification

- June 8, 2026

Case Study

Autonomize AI

Overview

Healthcare organizations often face delays in benefit eligibility and coverage verification due to fragmented data sources and manual review workflows. Determining whether a member is eligible for a service and understanding specific coverage limits can require clinicians and administrative staff to navigate multiple systems, interpret inconsistent data, and reconcile conflicting responses. This slows down case decisions and adds unnecessary operational burden, not to mention member frustration.

Challenge

Verifying member benefit eligibility and coverage limits is a manual, time-intensive process that spans multiple disparate data sources.

Staff must often:

  • Query multiple eligibility and claims systems
  • Interpret varying formats of benefit responses
  • Validate coverage limits and constraints manually
  • Reconcile inconsistent or incomplete data

This fragmented workflow creates operational inefficiencies and delays critical case decisions. For reviewers and care teams, the process increases administrative burden and introduces variability in turnaround times. For members, these delays can translate into uncertainty about coverage, prolonged authorization decisions, postponed treatment starts, and a less transparent healthcare experience. Providers also face challenges obtaining timely benefit information, resulting in additional follow-up, rework, and friction across the care delivery process.

Solution

An AI-powered benefit verification capability was introduced to automate and orchestrate eligibility checks across multiple data sources in real time. The system:

  • Connects to multiple eligibility and coverage data sources simultaneously
  • Normalizes and reconciles responses into a unified structure
  • Applies rules to validate coverage eligibility and benefit limits
  • Returns a structured, reviewer-ready result in under 45 seconds

Embedded directly into existing utilization management and authorization workflows, the solution eliminates the need for manual system navigation, data gathering, and interpretation. Reviewers receive a comprehensive, structured view of member benefits and coverage constraints without leaving their workflow, enabling faster and more consistent decision-making.

The impact extends beyond operational efficiency. By accelerating eligibility verification, the solution helps reduce delays in authorization and care decisions, allowing providers to obtain answers more quickly and helping members gain greater clarity into their coverage. The result is a more responsive experience for all stakeholders, improving administrative productivity while supporting faster access to care and services.

“For years, healthcare organizations accepted benefit verification delays as an unavoidable part of the authorization process. We challenged that assumption.

Our vision was to create a real-time intelligence layer that could instantly understand a member’s eligibility and coverage across multiple systems and deliver actionable answers directly within the workflow.

By eliminating the administrative lag between a request and a determination, we’re not just improving operational performance; we’re helping providers deliver care faster and giving members quicker access to the services they need.”

– Chief Digital Officer

Business Impact

The solution demonstrated strong performance at both peak and steady-state volumes:

275,900
Requests processed
January 2026 — peak month
70–84K
Weekly requests
Feb–Apr 2026 steady state
>99.5%
Successful processing rate
Across all requests
<45s
SLA maintained
Every week, including peak

Clinical and Operational Impact

By automating one of the most time-consuming administrative steps in the authorization process, the solution significantly improved operational efficiency and decision velocity:

  • Reduced manual effort required for eligibility and coverage verification
  • Accelerated case turnaround times through near real-time benefit determinations
  • Improved consistency and reliability of benefit interpretation across reviewers
  • Minimized rework associated with incomplete, inconsistent, or fragmented coverage information
  • Enabled clinical staff to spend more time evaluating care needs and less time navigating administrative systems
  • Scaled seamlessly to support growing demand without degradation in performance

For clinicians and reviewers, access to a structured, comprehensive eligibility determination within seconds reduced workflow interruptions and cognitive burden. Rather than searching across multiple systems, teams could focus on clinical decision-making with greater confidence that benefit information was accurate and complete.

Provider and Member Experience Impact

The benefits extended beyond operational teams to the providers and members relying on timely coverage decisions.

For Providers
  • Reduced delays in authorization workflows
  • Minimized follow-up inquiries
  • Improved visibility into coverage requirements and benefit limitations
  • Streamlined coordination between payers, providers, and care teams
For Members
  • More transparent and responsive healthcare experience
  • Quicker case decisions and access to approved services and treatments
  • Reduced uncertainty about coverage eligibility
  • Fewer delays between requesting care and receiving a determination

Together, these improvements created a more efficient, scalable, and member-centric authorization process that balanced operational excellence with a better experience for both clinicians and the people they serve.

Conclusion

By automating benefit eligibility verification across fragmented systems, Autonomize helped to  transform a historically manual bottleneck into a high-speed, structured, and scalable workflow. The result is faster decisions, reduced administrative burden, and a more efficient path from request to resolution without compromising accuracy or compliance.

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