Allergy Partners is one of the nation’s largest allergy and asthma practice, with approximately 140 locations serving communities across the country. At the center of its clinical work is a centralized biologics program serving patients with severe asthma, eczema, Crohn’s disease, and other complex allergic and immunological conditions — thousands of patients who depend on that program for consistent, timely access to high-cost therapies.
For the team responsible for running that program, the administrative workload had grown beyond what the existing process could handle. Verifying patient benefits, managing high case volumes, and getting patients onto therapy without delays required something the practice’s manual approach couldn’t deliver. The need for a better solution had become urgent.
Allergy Partners’ biologics program is centralized, with one team managing benefit investigations and patient onboarding across all of its locations. With more than 7,000 buy-and-bill patients depending on ongoing therapy, the volume of benefit verifications that team is responsible for is substantial — and until recently, the process for completing them was entirely manual.
Lacey Varnon, Director, Biologic Program at Allergy Partners, knows the weight of that workload firsthand. The team’s process required calling insurance companies one by one, navigating hold times, and piecing together benefit information that was often incomplete. “When you have a team that’s trying to call on every single benefit verification, it gets backed up,” she says. “You really can only do so many a day. On a great day, maybe only getting 10 completed at a time — and that was just really too overwhelming.”
The consequences reached every part of the program. “It was taking us a month to be able to verify benefits for some of our patients, just given the time it took to do them,” Varnon says. Patients experienced delays starting therapy. Staff hours were consumed by phone calls. And as the program continued to grow, the gap between what the team could realistically accomplish and what was needed kept widening.
The problem was most acute heading into benefit reverification season — Blizzard Season — each January, when payer updates, plan renewals, and formulary changes converge all at once. For a practice with thousands of patients on ongoing high-cost therapies, a missed coverage change means a delayed treatment or a denied claim. Getting through the full patient population in a single month had never been possible. Leadership knew that without a better solution, the situation would only worsen.
Allergy Partners was referred to CareTria Provider Connect (formerly eBlu Solutions) by a pharmaceutical representative in mid-2024. After an initial evaluation, the practice committed to moving forward — with one immediate challenge. Annual benefit reverification season was only weeks away.
Onboarding thousands of patients onto a new platform before January 1 required a fast, well-coordinated effort. The CareTria Provider Connect team took the lead. Allergy Partners provided its provider list and NPIs, and CareTria loaded them into the system. The practice then supplied patient schedules with upcoming appointments, and the two teams worked in parallel — including on New Year’s Eve, when CareTria and Allergy Partners staff worked together to manually assign diagnoses and complete the final patient imports before the calendar turned. Varnon had anticipated a heavy lift on her end. That’s not what happened.
“CareTria loaded them for us, so that was a big thing taken off our plate,” she says. “We didn’t have to go in there and manually load everyone. The biggest lift was done by CareTria and not really by us.”
With patients in the system and initial verifications complete, Allergy Partners entered January prepared. As new-year coverage changes took effect, CareTria Provider Connect automatically ran reverifications in batches tied to each patient’s appointment date — the platform’s annual benefit reverification season workflow. The team monitored a single dashboard and handled flagged exceptions as they arose, rather than working through payer phone lines from scratch.
The platform also gave Allergy Partners something it hadn’t had before: quarterly analytics reporting. Data on top payers by volume, the providers generating the most requests, leading diagnoses, and the drugs running most frequently through the platform — details that Varnon says would have been difficult to pull independently. “That’s really great for oversight and strategic planning,” she says. “We can see if an office seems to have slowed down, and that allows us to keep in communication with our providers on how things are going.”
The first benefit reverification season made the value of the platform clear. Allergy Partners processed more than 6,400 benefit investigations through CareTria Provider Connect in January alone — a volume its previous manual process could not have approached.
“The first Blizzard season was the first time we were ever able to get through all of our patient loads within the same month,” Varnon says. For a program that had previously taken weeks just to work through a fraction of its patient population, that was a turning point.
By the following January, volume had grown to more than 7,300 benefit investigations reflecting a larger patient population and a team running the platform as a core part of daily operations. But the more revealing measure of what CareTria Provider Connect made possible is the trajectory in between — steady, consistent growth that simply wasn’t achievable before.
“We’ve been able to grow our entire program much quicker,” Varnon says. “We’re now typically seeing about 20% growth quarter over quarter. Before, we may have wanted to grow at that kind of speed, but we couldn’t — given the man hours that it took to do the work.”
Today, three benefits specialists manage daily verifications for the program’s full patient population — without the phone queues, the delays, or the backlog that once defined the process. “They’re able to keep up with the workload on a daily basis without screaming,” Varnon says.
Accuracy turned out to be as significant a result as speed. “We were very pleasantly surprised — not only how well it went, but that the information was accurate. That was the big one for us,” Varnon says. “You can still say we’re still very surprised at how well it works.”
The platform has also begun identifying alternative funding programs that the previous process wasn’t catching — details that can now be addressed on the front end, before they affect patient access or practice revenue.
Unbelieveable Results:
6,400 benefit investigations Completed during RV Season
20% growth quarter over quarter
3 benefits specialists manage daily verifications for the program’s full patient population
For a high-volume specialty practice like Allergy Partners, benefit verification at scale doesn’t have to mean months-long backlogs, staff tied to phone queues, or patients waiting longer than necessary to start therapy. CareTria Provider Connect demonstrates that with the right technology and the right partner, even the most demanding administrative workflows can be managed efficiently — with results that compound well beyond reverification season.
For practices still weighing whether the change is worth making, Varnon’s advice is direct. “Just try it for a month and then see what the difference is in your workflow,” she says. “If it doesn’t help you, there’s no loss to you since there’s no cost to use CareTria. This is just something that’s there truly to benefit the office and the office staff. I don’t know anyone who would say it doesn’t help.”
Allergy Partners came in with thousands of patients, a manual process, and Blizzard Season fast approaching. CareTria Provider Connect handled the onboarding, automated the verifications, and helped the team achieve 20% quarter-over-quarter growth — all at no cost to the practice. If your team is spending more time on hold than on patients, it’s time to see what’s possible.
