AI in Healthcare: Speed Up Patient Check-In Without Losing Control
By Blakely Roth | September 4, 2025
A fast check-in process is more than a simple convenience it sets the tone for the visit. When patients are asked for the same details again and again, or when they wait too long in a crowded lobby, experience suffers.
Clearwave’s AI-enhanced registration workflows help move patients from arrival to exams with less staff input and fewer roadblocks. Practices report a 90% drop-in wait times and 96% average co-pay collection rates at check-in—helping providers stay on schedule and increase profits. See how it’s possible with AI-enhanced patient check-in workflows!
Common Self-Registration Setbacks and How to Fix Them for Good
Traditional check-in methods, like clipboards and paper, require heavy staff involvement. From transferring data into a practice management system, to scanning documents and collecting patient payments, this heavily manual approach can lead to data errors and long wait times. With the introduction of digital registration, some practices have streamlined patient check-in slightly, digitalizing patient tasks while keeping staff heavily involved in managing devices, payments and even data transfers.
In today’s healthcare environment, practices need more than just another digital tool—they need a solution that’s patient-powered and performance-focused. Clearwave’s Patient-Led Self-Service Platform does exactly that, allowing specialty practices to optimize staffing, accelerate revenue and deliver exceptional patient experiences.
Offering AI-driven registration logic helps practices put automation to work to further speed up patient check-in while improving data capture, collections and patient experiences.
How Does AI-Driven Logic Improve the Registration Experience for All?
Clearwave’s automated and patient-led registration tools ensure practices can capture accurate patient data, without burdening staff or slowing down check-in times. Clearwave’s rules-based AI for patient registration operates using decision trees and if/then logic, meaning when a patient checks in, the check-in system knows whether they’re new or returning, what information is required based on visit type and which follow-up questions or payments should trigger next.
The rules-based AI workflows are designed to support specialty practices of all sizes and specialties and can dynamically adjust to patient demographics and appointment types, ensuring that every step aligns with practice needs. From there, practices can tailor the AI-enhanced workflows to collect critical data, improve accuracy and streamline staff operations specific to their unique needs.
500+ Practices trust Clearwave’s AI-driven patient registration system to:
- Differentiate between new and returning patients
- Accept walk-ins while still maintaining structured intake
- Support all appointment types with configurable paths
- Alert staff to complete tasks based on patient responses
- Automatically ask for the correct co-pay by specialty
- Collect past-due balances, self-pay amounts and even estimations
- Remove redundant questions for subsequent visits where possible
- Prompt for required answers, ensuring patients cannot skip past certain registration screeners or questions
- Allow practices to add custom questions to promote premium services (e.g., BOTOX, Implantable Collamer Lenses)
How AI-Driven Patient Registration Works Behind the Scenes
With Clearwave, rules-based AI simplifies what once required multiple front desk staff touchpoints. Here’s how:
- Pre-Registration and Clinical Intake: Patients complete demographic and clinical intake forms ahead of their visit, all of which flows directly into their electronic health record and PM systems via discrete data or PDF. The system prompts only the right questions, so staff aren’t chasing missing info later.
- Real-Time Eligibility and Payments: Patients can view financial responsibility at the point-of-service, and Clearwave presents the correct co-pay or balance based on visit type and insurance status.
- Smart Arrival Flow: Returning patients breeze through check-in, only answering necessary questions, while new patients complete structured onboarding moving quickly from one screen to the next. No skipped fields and no duplicated work where possible.
- Payment Collection at Check-In: With built-in workflows, patients can pay co-pays, past-due balances or self-pay amounts right at the point of check-in. Practices can even offer advanced payment capabilities for quicker payments, including tap-to-pay, card-on-file, Google/ApplyPay options and mroe depending on your merchant processor.
Smart Patient-Led Registration in Action
Nearly 11K+ physicians and 170M+ patients nationwide have adopted Clearwave’s digital tools. See what they’re saying and how you could achieve similar results at your practice…
Rachelle Tonga, Director of Administrative Services at Utah Cancer Specialists, emphasizes the importance of staff being alerted when patients make insurance changes during registration, “If there’s an insurance change, we know about it and we can act on it. It’s been a huge relief for our billing and claims processes. Now, during pre-check or at the kiosk, patients have to answer the questions to go to the next screen. If their insurance is expired, the system will prompt patients to update their information and it will notify our staff. It’s astounding how accurate our data is now.”
For practices with high visit frequency like physical therapy or oncology, Sonali Parry, Therapy Director at CAO Division 28 says, “As a provider, it drove me nuts that patients would have to repeat a lot of their paperwork before seeing us, especially because most of our patients come in multiple times a week. It was a huge patient complaint, and now, with Clearwave, it’s one we no longer get.”
Put AI to Work at Your Front Desk
Ready to see how you can make Clearwave’s patient-led registration approach work for your practice? Let’s increase profits and patient satisfaction together. Try a demo now!