For a billing specialist at a mid-sized orthopedic group, Monday morning starts the same way every week: open a browser, log in to Availity, check a batch of claims, log out, open the UnitedHealthcare portal, re-enter patient information that was already in the PM system, verify eligibility for a surgical case, log out, open Humana's portal to chase a denial, wait for a two-factor authentication code, and start over with Aetna.

By 10 a.m., she may have touched six portals and accomplished what a single query should have handled.

This is not a technology problem in the way most people talk about technology problems. The portals exist. They mostly work. The issue is that practices must maintain fluency across a growing number of disconnected systems — each with its own login cadence, navigation logic, search behavior, and rules for what information is visible and what still requires a phone call.

Our March 31, 2026, MGMA Stat poll finds that 61% of medical practices report their staff access seven to 10 payer portals a week (35%) or 11 or more (26%). Another 10% reported their staff only access one to three portals a week, while 29% said it stood at four to six portals weekly. The poll had 252 applicable responses.

The portal sprawl problem is worth isolating because it sits underneath several pain points that MGMA members raise constantly — prior authorization delays, eligibility surprises, claim status uncertainty, appeal friction — without always getting named as a standalone burden.

What you told us

Across all respondents, open-ended responses were remarkably consistent, centering on a repetitive set of administrative pain points rather than distinct portal-specific tasks. Practice leaders most frequently cited eligibility checks and prior auths as the dominant drivers of portal use, closely followed by appeals and claim or payment status lookups. When a practice leader says, "we spend too much time on auths," part of what they mean, whether they frame it this way or not, is that staff are spending significant time just getting into position to do the actual work. Portal navigation is overhead disguised as workflow.

Just as prominent were complaints about the mechanics of portal access itself, including maintaining multiple logins, frequent re-entry due to timeouts, poor navigation, portals being down, and the ongoing burden of obtaining and managing user access. Many respondents described having to use portals only because transactions could not be completed through the EHR or standard eligibility files, forcing staff to switch systems or make unproductive phone calls. A recurring theme was frustration with payer-specific rules, inconsistent requirements, and the sheer volume of portals. These core issues are pervasive, overlapping, and largely independent of how many portals a practice accesses in a given week.

What the daily portal load looks like

The clearest way to understand the cost is to follow the task, not the tool. A single prior authorization request might require a staff member to confirm eligibility in one portal, submit the auth in another, check status in a third, and document the outcome in the EHR — which connects to none of them natively. Each transition involves a login, a search, a context switch, and often some form of data re-entry. Multiply that by dozens of cases per day across multiple payers, and the arithmetic gets heavy fast.

What makes it worse is that the portals do not behave consistently. Search fields differ. Status terminology varies. Some portals time out aggressively. Others require frequent credential resets. Staff who handle payer interactions end up building payer-specific muscle memory — not because the work itself is different, but because the interfaces demand it.

This is where the operational cost compounds. It is not just the minutes spent logging in. It is the cognitive load of switching between systems that present similar information in dissimilar ways. Research on task-switching suggests that even brief context shifts reduce accuracy and increase time on task, and payer portal work is essentially a string of forced context shifts with no integration layer underneath.

Why the problem persists

Payers have little incentive to standardize portal design, and no single payer's portal is the primary problem. The burden is cumulative. A practice contracting with six major payers may be managing six functionally unrelated systems to perform the same core tasks: verify coverage, submit requests, check claim status, and respond to denials.

Some practices have turned to clearinghouse platforms or middleware tools that consolidate portal access, and for certain tasks — especially eligibility and claims status — these can meaningfully reduce the number of direct portal logins. But consolidation is rarely complete. Prior auth submission, appeal workflows, and certain plan-specific documentation requirements still frequently route staff back to individual payer portals. The portal is the payer's turf, and the payer decides what can be handled elsewhere.

The 2024 Change Healthcare outage made the problem worse for some practices in a way that has quietly lingered. When clearinghouse access went down for weeks, many groups had no choice but to shift eligibility checks, claim submissions, and auth workflows back to individual payer portals — rebuilding manual processes on the fly under enormous pressure. Some practices have since re-engaged their clearinghouse or moved to a new one, but others never fully migrated back. The outage eroded trust in centralized routing, and for smaller or resource-constrained groups especially, the manual workarounds became the new default simply because there was no capacity to manage another transition. Those practices are now carrying a heavier portal workload than their payer mix alone would explain — not because they chose direct portal access, but because they got stuck there.

Meanwhile, payer consolidation at the corporate level has not meant portal consolidation at the operational level. A large national payer may operate different portals or portal experiences for different plan types, regions, or legacy systems absorbed through acquisition. The practice-facing result is more fragmentation, not less.

What practice leaders can do

The most common and most practical response is better portal workflow management at the team level. That means assigning portal-specific responsibilities so that individual staff members develop deep fluency with fewer portals rather than shallow fluency with many, tracking which tasks truly require portal access versus which can be handled through a clearinghouse or automated eligibility tool, and auditing how much staff time goes to portal navigation versus substantive payer interaction.

Some practices have also found value in documenting portal-specific quirks — timeout behavior, search syntax, denial appeal pathways — in shared reference guides that reduce the ramp-up time when staff shift between portals or when new hires come on board. It is an unglamorous investment, but in a high-turnover environment, institutional portal knowledge walks out the door regularly.

At a strategic level, practice leaders evaluating new clearinghouse or RCM technology should specifically ask how many direct portal logins the tool eliminates and for which tasks. A product that handles eligibility but still requires manual portal access for auths and appeals solves only part of the problem — and may not reduce enough labor to justify the cost.

The leadership question underneath the workflow

Portal sprawl is ultimately a resource allocation problem. Every hour a billing or auth specialist spends navigating payer systems is an hour not spent on follow-up, denial resolution, patient communication, or process improvement. When practices report that they cannot keep up with prior auth volume or that denials are taking too long to work, part of the diagnosis should include how much staff capacity is consumed simply by the mechanical overhead of portal access.

The question for practice leaders is not whether portals are frustrating — everyone already knows that. The question is whether the portal workload is visible enough in staffing models and productivity expectations to be managed deliberately, or whether it remains buried inside broader task categories where its true cost never gets measured.

Join the conversation

• MGMA Stat polls are conducted weekly to give medical practice leaders a pulse on the latest trends in healthcare management. To participate, sign up for MGMA Stat at mgma.com/mgma-stat.
• Have you found success in dealing with this issue and want to share? Comment in the MGMA Member Community or email us at connection@mgma.com.