Stedi helps Berry Street scale insurance verification
Healthcare
Berry Street is a software platform for dietitians and their patients. It helps dietitians grow their practices by making it easy to accept and process insurance. Berry Street handles all the hard parts – credentialing, insurance checks, and billing - so dietitians can focus on care. Patients can use Berry Street to find a dietitian who accepts their existing insurance. Most patients don’t pay anything out of pocket.
Berry Street focuses on enabling Registered Dietitians, but they support a range of business models. They help solo providers, group practices, and digital health companies. Behind the scenes, they power insurance workflows and care experiences for enterprise health and wellness companies that want to offer care directly to their customers.
Scale and automation are critical. Berry Street builds systems that have to work across thousands of patients, providers, and plans.
Challenge
It’s hard to know if insurance covers nutrition therapy, the kind of service dietitians provide. Most payers don’t clearly state whether a dietitian visit is covered.
Part of the problem is that the X12 270/271 eligibility standard doesn’t include a clear code for nutrition therapy. Payers can use general codes or unstructured text, but support varies and can’t be reliably parsed from responses.
Eligibility APIs from most clearinghouses don’t help. Checks often fail or return incomplete data. That made it hard for Berry Street to trust the results – and even harder to automate their workflows.
Berry Street started processing eligibility checks with legacy clearinghouses. When checks failed or lacked details, they couldn’t get help. “We’d wait days for a response. It was a bottleneck for our business,” says Nolan Chase, a Berry Street co-founder. “We had to send failed checks to a large call center to call the payer and perform manual checks.”
“We’d wait days for a response. It was a bottleneck for our business.”
Bad checks caused bigger problems. “When a bad check slips through, the patient gets a bill they weren’t expecting. That’s a bad experience for the provider and patient – and we’re on the hook if the patient doesn’t pay.”
It’s hard to know if insurance covers nutrition therapy, the kind of service dietitians provide. Most payers don’t clearly state whether a dietitian visit is covered.
Part of the problem is that the X12 270/271 eligibility standard doesn’t include a clear code for nutrition therapy. Payers can use general codes or unstructured text, but support varies and can’t be reliably parsed from responses.
Eligibility APIs from most clearinghouses don’t help. Checks often fail or return incomplete data. That made it hard for Berry Street to trust the results – and even harder to automate their workflows.
Berry Street started processing eligibility checks with legacy clearinghouses. When checks failed or lacked details, they couldn’t get help. “We’d wait days for a response. It was a bottleneck for our business,” says Nolan Chase, a Berry Street co-founder. “We had to send failed checks to a large call center to call the payer and perform manual checks.”
“We’d wait days for a response. It was a bottleneck for our business.”
Bad checks caused bigger problems. “When a bad check slips through, the patient gets a bill they weren’t expecting. That’s a bad experience for the provider and patient – and we’re on the hook if the patient doesn’t pay.”
Solution
Berry Street switched to Stedi’s Real-Time Eligibility Check API, replacing their legacy clearinghouse. The success rate for eligibility checks jumped from around 60% to over 80%. But it wasn’t just the API – it was fast, human support that made the difference.
“We might’ve gotten to 80% with our old clearinghouse,” says Nolan, “but no one was helping us get there. With Stedi, we had engineers in Slack helping us fix things in real time.”
With Stedi’s help, Berry Street was better able to troubleshoot failed checks and make sense of unclear ones. They used that insight to improve their rules engine – a system that predicts whether a plan will cover nutrition visits.
“It’s not just about making more accurate checks,” says Nolan. “It’s that we can now build patient experiences and provider tooling we couldn’t build before.”
“We can now build patient experiences and provider tooling we couldn’t build before.”
Berry Street switched to Stedi’s Real-Time Eligibility Check API, replacing their legacy clearinghouse. The success rate for eligibility checks jumped from around 60% to over 80%. But it wasn’t just the API – it was fast, human support that made the difference.
“We might’ve gotten to 80% with our old clearinghouse,” says Nolan, “but no one was helping us get there. With Stedi, we had engineers in Slack helping us fix things in real time.”
With Stedi’s help, Berry Street was better able to troubleshoot failed checks and make sense of unclear ones. They used that insight to improve their rules engine – a system that predicts whether a plan will cover nutrition visits.
“It’s not just about making more accurate checks,” says Nolan. “It’s that we can now build patient experiences and provider tooling we couldn’t build before.”
“We can now build patient experiences and provider tooling we couldn’t build before.”
Results
With Stedi, Berry Street sends fewer checks to humans. That saves time and money. It also helps them move faster, automate more of their workflows, and scale with less manual overhead.
Stedi also gives them new ways to handle failed checks. Features like Eligibility Manager help their team debug and troubleshoot issues without calling payers.
As Nolan puts it: “Stedi didn’t just give us better APIs. They gave us the support to scale, automate, and build a better product.”
“Stedi didn’t just give us better APIs. They gave us the support to scale, automate, and build a better product.”
With Stedi, Berry Street sends fewer checks to humans. That saves time and money. It also helps them move faster, automate more of their workflows, and scale with less manual overhead.
Stedi also gives them new ways to handle failed checks. Features like Eligibility Manager help their team debug and troubleshoot issues without calling payers.
As Nolan puts it: “Stedi didn’t just give us better APIs. They gave us the support to scale, automate, and build a better product.”
“Stedi didn’t just give us better APIs. They gave us the support to scale, automate, and build a better product.”
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Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.
Get updates on what’s new at Stedi
Backed by
Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.
Get updates on what’s new at Stedi
Backed by
Stedi is a registered trademark of Stedi, Inc. All names, logos, and brands of third parties listed on our site are trademarks of their respective owners (including “X12”, which is a trademark of X12 Incorporated). Stedi, Inc. and its products and services are not endorsed by, sponsored by, or affiliated with these third parties. Our use of these names, logos, and brands is for identification purposes only, and does not imply any such endorsement, sponsorship, or affiliation.