Accelerating Patient Access

Client Overview

Rula is a national behavioral health provider offering accessible therapy and psychiatric services, both in-person and online. With a network of over 18,000 licensed providers and next-day appointment availability, Rula matches patients to in-network care quickly — streamlining everything from insurance verification to provider matching and session tracking, so individuals, couples, and families can navigate their mental health journeys with confidence.

• Providers: 18,000+
• Patients covered: 140MM+

The Problem: Speed at Rula's Scale Was Bottlenecked by Manual Work

Rula was built to move fast — next-day appointments, an 18,000-provider network, and a promise to patients that care would be there when they needed it. But behind that promise, the intake process told a different story. Confirming whether a provider was in-network still meant logins to insurance portals or phone calls that could take hours. Coverage data was inconsistent from one entry point to the next. And every adjustment to how eligibility was checked ran through engineering, which meant the operations team couldn't move at the speed the rest of the business demanded.

At Rula's scale, this wasn't a minor inefficiency — it was the gap between the brand promise and what patients actually experienced in their first hours of trying to get care, particularly for patients navigating Medicare and Medicaid, where the stakes of getting it wrong were highest.

Sohar's Approach: Give Operations the Control Engineering Used to Own

Rula didn't need another integration bolted onto its intake flow. It needed the operational team itself to be able to move as fast as the rest of the company — without waiting on engineering every time a workflow needed to change.

Sohar's approach centered on embedding two capabilities, Verification and Network Status, directly into Rula's intake systems in a way that Rula's own FinOps and operations teams could configure and adjust themselves. That single design choice — configurable automation logic that didn't require engineering sign-off for every change — became the foundation for four real-time workflows:

• Real-Time Eligibility, surfacing insurance details instantly during registration, so patients were guided by accurate coverage information from the first form field.
• Portal-Based Verification of Benefits, triggering requests the moment insurance details were submitted, so data stayed consistent no matter which entry point a patient used.
• Monthly Insurance Change Detection, automatically re-checking coverage within 72 hours of an upcoming appointment to catch changes before they became billing problems.

The goal wasn't automation for its own sake — it was removing every point where a patient's path to care could stall on something that should have taken seconds.

The Outcome

Rula's automation rate rose 30% compared to its prior vendor, with 92% of eligibility requests now returning in under 30 seconds — turning what used to be a multi-hour manual process into something that happens before a patient notices the wait. The operations team reclaimed roughly 1,000 hours per week previously spent on manual verification, and benefits accuracy reached 95% across the highest-volume payers. Most importantly, the team that owns the patient experience could finally iterate on it directly, without engineering as a bottleneck.

Conclusion

By putting real control in the hands of the team closest to the patient experience, Rula set a new benchmark for what modern behavioral health intake should look like: fast, confident, and scalable — without engineering as a gatekeeper for every improvement. It's a model for how operational excellence and intelligent automation compound, so more patients reach care without friction.

How It Works, If You're Curious

Rula's results were powered by two products from Sohar's platform working in tandem — Verification, which confirms eligibility and benefit details, and Network Status, which instantly determines whether a provider is in-network. But as with any Sohar partnership, the products were in service of a specific outcome Rula needed: putting speed and control back in the hands of the team that owns the patient relationship.