TruCare vs Availity: A Billing Team vs a Payer Portal

Availity is a multi-payer portal and clearinghouse that providers use to check eligibility, request authorizations, and submit claims. Its Essentials tier is free for providers. TruCare is a full revenue operating system with billers, so this comparison is a tool versus a team.

How they differ

• What you get: Availity gives your staff access to payers. TruCare does the payer work for you, from eligibility to appeals.
• Credentialing: Availity's credentialing tool serves health plans, not providers. TruCred handles your payer enrollment.
• Cost: Essentials is free, and Essentials Pro is quoted. TruCare publishes rates from 2.49% of collections.
• Reach: Availity reports more than 3M providers and about 13B transactions a year.

Where they overlap

Both help you get paid faster by reducing eligibility and authorization errors. Both connect to a wide range of payers, and both show claim status in one place instead of across many payer websites.

Choose TruCare if

Your staff spends hours in payer portals, denials are piling up, and you would rather hand the work to a team that does it every day.

Choose Availity if

You bill in house and want a free, widely accepted portal for eligibility, authorizations, and claim status. Many practices use Availity alongside a billing partner, so the two are not mutually exclusive.

Questions to ask on your demo

• Time: How many hours does our staff spend in payer portals each week?
• Enrollment: Who handles provider credentialing and payer enrollment?
• Follow-up: Who works the denials and claim status issues the portal shows us?

The bottom line

Availity is a tool your staff uses. TruCare is a team that does the payer work for you. If staff time is your bottleneck, a free portal will not solve it, but a billing partner can. Ask any partner how it handles portals for your largest payers.