The Two-Week Time Study: Is Your Staff Drowning in Hold Music? How to gauge efficiency in Eligibility & Benefit Checks

It’s 2026, and the fact that we still use fax machines in healthcare blows our mind. But what’s even more frustrating is the amount of time practice owners and their staff spend in "hold music purgatory" just to get a simple answer from a payer.

If you’ve been in private practice for any amount of time, you know that time is the one resource you can never get back . Eligibility and benefit (E&B) checks are a notorious "time suck"—especially when you have a high volume of patients and a team that is already rocking it but spread thin.

If you’re doing this in-house, you want to ensure your staff is working efficiently. If you’re outsourcing by the hour, you need to make sure those costs aren't spiraling out of control. To move from reactive to proactive, you need to stop guessing and start measuring. You do that with a time study.

How to Run the Two-Week Time Study

I recommend tracking this as a "periodic KPI"—meaning you don't have to do it every single day, but you should check in about twice a year for a set two-week period.

The process is simple. Have the staff members performing your E&B checks keep a manual log for fourteen days . They just need to track:

• The Date

• Their Name

• The Call Length

• The Insurance Company

What the Data is Telling You

Once that two-week window is up, you’ll have an average call length by insurance company. This is where you put on your "detective hat" and look for the big rocks where the problems are hiding.

If you see a payer with a very long average call time, it might be an indication of poor customer service or an inefficient portal . But here is the real kicker: you have to weigh that administrative cost against their reimbursement rate. If you are paying your staff for an hour of hold time just to get a benefit check for a payer with a low rate, you might not actually be profitable on those claims.

At that point, it’s time to make a strategic decision about that payer to protect your practice's bottom line.

Winning the Bigger Game: Eligibility & Benefits KPIs

While the Call Time Log is a massive eye-opener, it’s only one piece of the puzzle. To truly master your front-end revenue cycle, you need to track the other two critical E&B metrics:

• KPI #1: Time to Completion: This measures the average time it takes for your staff to complete a full check from the initial request to the end. It helps identify which payers or team members might be causing delays so that E&B doesn't become a limiting factor that pushes back a patient's first appointment.

• KPI #2: Accuracy Rating: This measures the percentage of checks that correctly match the actual payment and patient responsibility received after the claim is processed. This is your "Trust Metric"—high accuracy ensures patients aren't hit with billing surprises that cause them to lose faith in your practice.

Tracking all of this manually can feel like another full-time job. That’s why we developed the Eligibility and Benefit KPI Dashboard. It’s a comprehensive tool that aggregates all these metrics into one central spot, allowing you to quickly spot bottlenecks and make data-driven decisions.

This dashboard—along with a library of other RCM tools—is available through our learning hub, The Hourglass. Empower your team to manage this process independently and turn those claim denials into deposits.