Vinta verifies insurance at intake with Stedi
Vinta is a software development shop for healthcare providers and health tech teams. Their work ranges from patient-facing apps and telehealth tools to custom EHRs and EMRs that doctors and hospitals rely on every day.
Their clients are diverse too. Vinta has built for everyone from digital health startups to the United Nations. Much of that work involves interoperability: getting systems to exchange data using shared standards.
Challenge
Across the products Vinta builds, a handful of workflows show up over and over. Patient intake is one of them.
When someone sees a new provider, they often have to fill out forms first: contact details, medical history, insurance, and consent. That's patient intake. Many practices have digitized their intake forms, but the operational burden behind them hasn't changed. The patient still keys in the same details by hand. A staff member then reconciles them against the system.
For the patient, intake is a chore. They've given the same history and insurance to every provider before this one. The data doesn't follow them from one to the next. Each copy is a chance for the patient or staff to enter something wrong: a transposed digit in a member ID, a misspelled medication, a box left unchecked. The mistakes only surface in a failed eligibility check or – worse – weeks later, in a denied claim.
"Bad intake data follows you. If the collected data is wrong and you don't check eligibility, that turns into a denied claim once you reach billing – and that's a problem no one wants to deal with," says Lais Varejão, Vinta's CPO.
Solution
To solve the problem, Vinta built a paperless intake flow that could be reused across their products and clients. The flow starts with the patient importing their records through a SMART Health Link – a secure, shareable package of their health history, accessed by link or QR code. They review and correct it as they go. Because the data is imported rather than re-typed, the transcription errors go away.
The data is captured and flows to the provider's existing systems using FHIR APIs, the standard for exchanging clinical health data. For their example implementation, Vinta used Medplum, an open-source EHR.
The patient then selects their payer and plan, which triggers an eligibility check through Stedi's Real-Time Eligibility API. The API returns active coverage and benefits in ~1-3 seconds. That lets providers confirm coverage and avoid denied claims and billing delays later.
"We're not just collecting insurance data. We're confirming coverage during intake, before care begins. That removes a whole category of billing delays and denials right at the start," says Flávio Juvenal, Vinta's CTO.
At the end, the patient leaves with their own SMART Health Link, which follows them to the next provider.
Results
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