Picture a patient access coordinator five minutes before a call with a patient. She needs the insurance eligibility status, which lives in one Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. She needs the case history, which lives in another system entirely. She needs the payor’s specific documentation requirements, which are in yet another portal she has to log into separately. And she needs guidelines for this exact scenario, which is a PDF on a shared drive that half her team doesn’t even have access to.
But none of this is the actual work: it’s just the runway before the work. And it’s quietly consuming more of her day than almost anything else she does.
The tax nobody put on the org chart
We’ve all been there: logging into and combing through siloed systems before the real work even starts. It can feel like multitasking, but multitasking is a myth. Neuroscience tells us we can only truly pay attention to one thing at a time, and moving between tasks puts a tax not just on our schedules, but on our attention, sense of purpose, and time to serve patients.
Context-switching has a well-documented cost in knowledge work. Research from the American Psychological Association shows that chronic multitasking and task-switching can eat up to 40% of a person’s productive time. At the population level, that adds up: estimates extrapolated from Gloria Mark’s research at UC Irvine put the cost of context-switching to the US economy at roughly $450 billion a year, and Mark’s own studies show it takes over 23 minutes on average to fully refocus after a single interruption.
Now put that pattern inside a healthcare coordination workflow, where switching isn’t between Slack and email, it’s between systems that were never built to talk to each other, and each with its own login, data model, and gaps.
The prior authorization process is the clearest and most measured example of what this actually costs. The AMA’s most recent physician survey found that practices spend an average of 13 hours a week on prior authorization alone, which for a physician working a standard 50-hour clinical week, is more than a quarter of their available time. Forty percent of practices now employ staff whose entire job is prior auth. One orthopedic group of 22 clinicians reported logging 308 hours a week on it, filing requests with 85 different insurance plans, each with its own process and its own rules. That’s not an edge case. That’s what “juggling systems” looks like at scale.
Case managers and coordinators are living a version of this every day, just without a named survey to point to. The tax is the same: minutes lost to logging into a portal, hunting for the SOPs and guidelines, and re-confirming something that should have been visible from the start.
Time is the visible cost, but errors are the expensive ones
Interoperability gaps are directly linked to patient safety issues. One estimate puts the share of hospital data errors tied to interoperability failures at close to 27%, and roughly one in five patients may have some inaccuracy in their medical record as a result. Poor communication is a contributing factor in more than 60% of hospital adverse events. And when patient matching fails across systems, the downstream cost is real: one industry survey found that the large majority of respondents had witnessed a medical error tied to misidentification, with over a third of denied claims traced back to the same root cause.
None of this happens because case managers aren’t careful. It happens because the information they need to be careful with is scattered across systems that don’t connect with each other, and checking every source every time isn’t realistic with a full caseload.
The burnout nobody’s tracking… until it becomes a staffing problem
Burnout among non-clinical healthcare staff, including coordination and administrative roles, now runs close to 46%, which is nearly on par with clinicians. Front-office and coordination turnover has climbed as high as 40% annually in some practices. It’s not a culture problem – it’s what happens when case managers are required to perform administrative reassembly, over and over, when they actually took the role to help patients and providers.
Every coordinator who burns out and leaves takes their experience and workaround knowledge with them: the shortcuts, the “I know which portal actually has the current version” tribal knowledge that never made it into written guidelines in the first place. The next hire has to start from zero, in the same fragmented environment.
What pre-call context assembly actually fixes
AI flips the equation. Where humans can only truly focus on one task at a time, AI can genuinely work across multiple siloed systems at once, retrieving, summarizing, and analyzing information in parallel rather than switching between systems one at a time. It can also tailor that work to each patient’s specific context automatically, rather than requiring manual reconstruction every time.
That’s the problem Studio was built to solve. Not by adding another dashboard, but by removing the need to hunt across five of them to complete a task.
Before Studio, the workflow looks like this: a case manager opens the CRM to check eligibility, tabs over to the case management system for history, logs into the payor portal for that plan’s specific requirements, and digs up (what they hope is) the right version of the guidelines from a shared drive, crossing their fingers it’s the current one and that nothing’s changed since the last update. Each step has its own login, its own interface, and a whole new opportunity to miss something. By the time the call starts, five to ten minutes are already gone, and that’s on a good day when every system is easily accessible and up to date.
Studio assembles that same picture automatically before the call ever starts. It pulls insurance data, case history, and payor-specific requirements from wherever they live and surfaces the relevant guideline for that exact scenario, all in one view, ready for a case manager or the AI agent the moment the call connects. There’s no tab-switching, no guessing which portal has the current rule, and no relying on tribal knowledge about where the “real” version of a document lives.
So what does this mean for case managers?
Time back. The minutes that used to go to data reassembly now go back to the actual work: talking to patients, resolving cases, and moving them forward. Across a full caseload, it’s the difference between a manager who can close cases and one who’s perpetually behind.
Fewer errors at the source. Studio pulls from the system of record instead of a case manager’s best guess or last-known-good memory, so the requirement they’re working from is the current one. That closes the exact gap that drives duplicate tests, denied claims, and misidentification errors: not a lack of skill, but a lack of a single, current source of truth at the moment it’s needed.
A caseload that feels sustainable. When the job goes back to being coordination and problem-solving instead of an administrative scavenger hunt, the burnout goes with it. That’s what reduces turnover – actually removing the task that was making the job unsustainable in the first place.
For a use case like prior authorization, where a single request can involve checking a payor’s specific criteria, assembling clinical documentation, and confirming the right submission channel, this is the difference between a process that takes a coordinator 15 minutes of prep per case and one that takes 15 seconds. Multiply that across a caseload, and you’re not just saving time, you’re giving coordinators room to actually do the parts of the job that require judgment instead of the parts that require patience with five different logins.
So what does this mean for case managers?
Time back. The minutes that used to go to data reassembly now go back to the actual work: talking to patients, resolving cases, and moving them forward. Across a full caseload, it’s the difference between a manager who can close cases and one who’s perpetually behind.
Fewer errors at the source. Studio pulls from the system of record instead of a case manager’s best guess or last-known-good memory, so the requirement they’re working from is the current one. That closes the exact gap that drives duplicate tests, denied claims, and misidentification errors: not a lack of skill, but a lack of a single, current source of truth at the moment it’s needed.
A caseload that feels sustainable. When the job goes back to being coordination and problem-solving instead of an administrative scavenger hunt, the burnout goes with it. That’s what reduces turnover – actually removing the task that was making the job unsustainable in the first place.
For a use case like prior authorization, where a single request can involve checking a payor’s specific criteria, assembling clinical documentation, and confirming the right submission channel, this is the difference between a process that takes a coordinator 15 minutes of prep per case and one that takes 15 seconds. Multiply that across a caseload, and you’re not just saving time, you’re giving coordinators room to actually do the parts of the job that require judgment instead of the parts that require patience with five different logins.
If you’d like to see the platform in action, get in touch. The care exists. We’ll show you how Infinitus can help you make sure patients receive it.
