Starting at just $10/hour, Portiva’s insurance verification specialists help medical practices verify patient eligibility, benefits, and coverage while reducing claim denials and administrative workload.
Join the countless satisfied physicians who trust our proven solutions, backed by an extensive arsenal of happy clients enhancing their practices.
Jennifer: Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Ask the Doc. I’m your host, Jennifer Filsen, and today I have with me Sanju Zachariah of Portiva. Welcome, Sanju.
Sanju: Thank you, Jennifer. It’s a pleasure.
Jennifer: I’m so glad you’re here. So tell us all about Portiva and what you guys do.
Sanju: Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having me. A little background about Portiva: my name is Sanju Zachariah, and I’m the owner and CEO of Portiva. We’re a medical staffing company headquartered in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, in the greater Philadelphia area. We started back in 2009, and we had a different focus back then. We were engaged in back-office operations for doctors. We serve healthcare practitioners in general, so we have some dentists, some veterinarians, and so on. Back in 2009, we were focused on back-office operations, doing a lot of medical transcription. That was the main bread and butter of the company.
That continued until the pandemic hit. That’s when things shifted a bit because we started getting calls from our clients asking for more help, especially with front-office operations. We had a situation where people couldn’t come into the office anymore, like the medical assistants, because of restrictions. Doctors were strapped, managing everything themselves. So that’s when we started getting calls from doctors asking, “Do you have people who can help us with phone calls, scheduling, billing, and so forth?” That’s when we started our virtual medical assistant service. We added that to Portiva’s portfolio. That’s how it all began.
Jennifer: That is amazing, and you’re absolutely right. We’re already seeing that doctors are busy doing what they do, practicing and seeing patients. But to also be the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker within your own practice, running the back end, running the front desk, doing all the paperwork, and making sure everything’s sterilized, that’s a lot for one person to handle. So it’s great that you guys are providing a service that gives them the help they need. I’d imagine that with the labor shortage we’re currently seeing, you really are a blessing to a lot of these doctors and practices because it’s hard to find help these days. So are you doing temporary staffing specifically for this, placements that end once they’re no longer needed, or is it more of a headhunting model where you’re placing people permanently in these roles?
Sanju: It’s a permanent placement model. Basically what we do, and I don’t want to call it “disruption,” maybe that’s too harsh or extreme, but we’re looking to disrupt the traditional medical staffing industry. In the old-school way, doctors typically reach out to a medical staffing firm and say, “We need a medical assistant or certified medical assistant,” and they’d have to wait weeks, these days even months, because it’s hard to find people who want to work in an office. A lot of people have retooled because of the pandemic. They’re not going back into offices. Every industry is going through this, restaurants, hospitality, travel. People are having a hard time finding good people willing to work on-site. They’d rather work online.
So basically what we do, Jennifer, is maintain a roster of pre-vetted candidates with medical backgrounds. A lot of them are former nurses, and everything can be done remotely using voice-over-IP and conferencing technologies. A medical staff member gets interviewed and, depending on the doctor’s needs, whether it’s billing, medical scribing, patient scheduling, or other specialties, we already have candidates ready. They go through a process we call “Portiva University,” where they receive rigorous training and testing. Once they’re ready to be placed, they go into a queue. When a doctor reaches out to us, we provide a list of candidates, typically two or three, and ask the doctor to choose the one who resonates best with their practice.
Once that happens, they come on board, and we’ve had a wonderful experience so far. Doctors really like them. They’re logged in when the doctor comes into the office and typically log out when the doctor leaves, though sometimes they’re doing follow-up work even after the doctor leaves, like documentation and catching up. The great thing is that we become an extension of the doctor’s office, and it saves the doctor a lot of time. We have doctors who love their virtual assistants because they’re not taking up physical space in the office. We handle all the benefits, including health insurance, retirement plans, and everything else. The doctor just pays a flat hourly rate.
In the worst case, if the doctor doesn’t feel it’s the right fit after a month or so, which does happen sometimes, we can immediately provide another set of candidates. Compared to the traditional model, where a doctor has to wait weeks, go through interviews, and then start all over again if it’s not the right fit, with Portiva we already have candidates lined up and ready to go. We can typically place a doctor with a trained candidate within hours. We also have doctors’ offices that need more than one virtual assistant, or VA. Those are some of the benefits of the service we provide.
Jennifer: Amazing. Oh my gosh, I love your business model. You’re doing some great work, Sanju, truly. Now, we’re running out of time, but I tell you what, well have to have you come back in the future and tell us a little more about your origin story. In fact, let’s do a quick 30 seconds right now. How did you get into this?
Sanju: Yeah, no, it’s a good question. Portiva started back in 2009, and I’m an engineer by trade, but I have family members and friends in the medical field, some of them doctors. The idea came about because of a bad experience I had at a doctor’s office before 2009. I waited about 45 minutes to be checked in because my primary care office was so inundated, with the staff juggling so many different things. That’s when the idea originated. I felt like doctors need help managing their practice. As good as they are, and they truly are medical professionals, their time should be focused on the patient, not on administrative tasks. That’s how it all started, and that’s how the idea originated.
Jennifer: I love it. You didn’t just complain, you found a solution, and now you have a very happy business because of it. I love that. Well, we’ve run out of time, but truly, thank you, Sanju, for being here. And everyone, thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed hearing about the good work Portiva is doing. If you want to find out more, please go to BuzzTV.iab-buzz.com. Thank you so much for watching, and we’ll see you next time. Bye.
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Insurance verification services confirm whether a patient’s health plan is active and determine the benefits that may apply to an upcoming service. The process can include checking coverage dates, deductibles, copays, coinsurance, benefit limitations, referral requirements, and authorization requirements before the appointment.
Portiva provides trained remote specialists who perform these checks through payer portals, approved electronic systems, and payer communication channels. Your practice receives organized verification information that can support scheduling, patient communication, billing preparation, and revenue-cycle workflows.
Your Portiva specialist can support the recurring insurance checks that often occupy front-office and billing staff.
Insurance information can change between appointments. A patient may have a new plan, changed benefits, an inactive policy, a different deductible balance, or new payer requirements. Verifying coverage before the visit helps your team identify issues while there is still time to address them. It can also give patients clearer information about their expected financial responsibility and help the billing team prepare cleaner account information.
Eligibility verification should not be presented as a guarantee that a claim will be paid. CMS states that an eligibility response is not a guarantee of payment because final payment remains subject to plan conditions, exclusions, limits, and eligibility at the time the service is rendered
before the patient is in the chair
name, DOB, or member ID mismatches
so the visit isn't booked on a false start
a number than a guess at checkout
fewer resubmissions, fewer write-offs
clean data in, clean claim out
while there's still a phone call left to make
Portiva provides top-tier virtual medical assistant services designed to enhance healthcare efficiency.
| Comparison area | Portiva insurance verification specialist | Additional in-house employee | General administrative freelancer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Healthcare workflow focus | Selected for insurance verification and healthcare administration | Depends on recruitment and previous experience | May not have healthcare-specific experience |
| Starting cost | Starting at $10/hour | Salary plus applicable overhead and employment costs | Rate varies by provider |
| Work location | Remote | On-site or hybrid | Remote |
| Training approach | Role-specific preparation and workflow onboarding | Managed internally by the practice | Managed internally by the practice |
| Eligibility and benefits tasks | Core service responsibility | Depends on assigned role | May require extensive training |
| Best suited for | Practices seeking dedicated healthcare administrative support | Practices needing a physical office presence | Occasional general administrative tasks |
Hi, I’m Dr. Victoria Netting, a licensed physician practicing family medicine, and I’m here at my family farm. I took the week off to enjoy some time with my family for a family reunion. But as most clinical physicians know, just because we take some time off doesn’t mean our patients or our practice do. That’s why I’m very thankful for Portiva, who I know is looking after my practice while I’m gone.
The virtual assistants can manage prescription refills, documents, triage patients, and answer administrative questions. They handle a lot on their own. They’re also very good about contacting me if there’s an emergency or anything I need to attend to.
Portiva can help almost any provider, almost anywhere, and it really allows for good work-life balance, as I’m getting to experience right now at my family farm. So I’m very thankful for Portiva, and I’m very happy to use their services.
Portiva learns how the practice currently schedules patients, receives insurance information, assigns verification work, documents results, and escalates exceptions.
Which payers, appointments, specialties, systems, reports, and communication tasks fall within the role is established together with the practice.
Portiva evaluates relevant healthcare administrative experience, communication ability, system familiarity, and role-specific skills.
The specialist learns the practice’s approved procedures, payer priorities, documentation standards, escalation rules, and practice-management systems.
The specialist reviews scheduled patients, completes assigned eligibility checks, documents findings, and flags unresolved cases.
Turnaround time, completion volume, documentation quality, unresolved cases, and adherence to the agreed workflow can be monitored by the practice.
Insurance verification remains one of healthcare's largest administrative opportunities
The CAQH Index identifies eligibility and benefits verification as one of the healthcare administrative workflows with the greatest opportunity to reduce manual effort through more efficient processes and electronic transactions. Strengthening insurance verification workflows helps practices spend less time on repetitive administrative tasks and more time supporting patient care.
Portiva specialists can work with the commercial, Medicare, Medicaid, managed-care, and other payer workflows included in your service agreement, subject to system access and payer availability.
Because payer requirements vary by plan, state, specialty, and service, your onboarding process should identify:
Eligibility and benefit information is based on the data available from the payer at the time of verification. Verification does not guarantee coverage, authorization, reimbursement, medical necessity, or claim payment.
Portiva provides remote healthcare administrative support to medical practices in the United States. Because the work is performed remotely, practices can receive insurance verification support without limiting recruitment to candidates located near their physical office.
The service may support:
Individual practices
Multisite medical groups
Remote and telehealth organizations
Growing outpatient clinics
Specialty practices
Centralized billing and scheduling teams
Insurance verification is not just an administrative task it is revenue protection. With structured insurance benefits verification services, complete patient benefit confirmation, and proactive healthcare insurance verification, your practice operates with fewer surprises and stronger financial stability.
Portiva delivers accurate insurance verification services that reduce denials, improve accuracy, and support better patient communication so you can focus on delivering care. Call us at (800) 991-6922 or visit us at portiva.com to learn more.
Sanju Zachariah is the Founder and CEO of Portiva, a healthcare staffing company he established in 2009 to help medical practices reduce administrative burdens and operate more efficiently. Before founding Portiva, Sanju worked as a management consultant at Accenture and PwC, where he gained extensive experience in process improvement and operational strategy.
Inspired by firsthand frustrations with inefficiencies in healthcare administration, he built Portiva to provide scalable virtual support that allows healthcare professionals and business leaders to focus on higher-value work.
Delivers HIPAA-compliant solutions that streamline operations and elevate the patient care experience for modern healthcare practices.
Calvin Elado
“We were overwhelmed with calls while our staff focused on in-clinic patients. Portiva came highly recommended, and since bringing on Jennifer as our Virtual Front Desk Receptionist, things have run much more smoothly.”
Stephen Sisselman
“I am currently employing and managing 3 virtual medical assistants in various roles including billing, population health and back office. These exemplary individuals are smart, self-starters who can be trained to perform new tasks.”
Aly Gonzalez
“Prior to Portiva, I used another virtual staffing agency and I was not happy with the candidates or the service. Portiva does an excellent job pre-screening qualified candidates that meet the requirements of the job.”
Brianna Gunther
“It has been a pleasure working with Portiva and their VMAs. Before working with them, we faced challenges managing the increasing workload that came with our growth, especially with limited on-site space.”
Find answers to your queries about Portiva’s insurance verification services.
Portiva’s outsourced insurance verification services start at $10 per hour. Final staffing costs may depend on the assigned role, schedule, service requirements, and practice workflow.
