Mira Intake vs. Clearwave: An Orthopedic Practice Comparison

Mira Intake vs. Clearwave: Which Fits Your Orthopedic Practice?

Orthopedic practices carrying a mix of returning patients, workers’ comp caseloads, and third-party payer PDFs need intake software that does more than check patients in. Mira Intake is built specifically for that problem: AI prefill across visits, Passport carry-forward, real-time eligibility, and automated filling of external carrier forms. Clearwave combines patient check-in, eligibility, and payment collection, making it a strong option when the main bottleneck is the arrival experience. The main tradeoff: Mira is built for private practice and goes deep on reusing patient data and filling third-party PDFs; Clearwave is broader in check-in infrastructure and point-of-service payments.

Capability Comparison

Why Orthopedic Practices Choose Mira Intake

External Payer PDF Forms Are Filled, Not Re-typed

FMLA certifications, workers’ comp packets, short-term disability forms, and CMS paperwork arrive as someone else’s PDF — typically a scanned fax — and today a staffer fills them in by hand, one blank at a time. Mira flips that workflow. Staff upload any external PDF, even a crooked scanned fax, and Mira reads the layout, identifies every fillable blank, and maps in everything the patient has already provided: their intake answers, prior forms, chart notes, uploaded documents. The result comes back mostly filled — a staff member reviews, adds any judgment calls, drops in a saved signature, and sends the finished PDF.

The per-use pricing ($5 per completed form, billed only on use, no per-seat upsell) fits the reality of orthopedic workers’ comp volume: you pay for what you fill, not a fixed module license. Once your team adjusts a form layout, Mira remembers it for later uses. Familiar carrier paperwork can follow a repeatable review-and-send process.

Clearwave does not document equivalent external PDF auto-fill capability in any reviewed public sources. If filling third-party carrier paperwork is a meaningful part of your administrative burden, this is where the gap between the two platforms is sharpest.

Returning Patients Confirm Instead of Re-entering

Most orthopedic patients return — for follow-ups, post-op visits, physical therapy authorizations, imaging. Mira Passport keeps the information patients have already supplied — demographics, insurance, medications, and history — available for their next visit and across practices on Mira. Returning patients confirm or correct their information instead of starting from scratch. Your team still receives updated answers for the current appointment.

What makes this particularly useful in orthopedics is cross-form AI field mapping. When a returning patient opens a different form type — say, a post-op intake after a surgical intake — Mira maps their prior answers by meaning, even when the questions use different wording. “Best Phone Number” fills “Patient Phone” automatically. Only confident matches prefill; anything ambiguous is left blank for the patient to supply. Patients review their answers before submitting.

The practical result: returning patients spend most of their intake confirming what you already know rather than re-entering it. The longer your practice runs on Mira, the shorter intake gets.

Real-Time Eligibility Without a Staffer on Hold

Coverage problems can begin before the visit: a transposed member ID, an expired plan, a missed prior-auth requirement. Mira runs real-time eligibility and benefits automatically the moment a patient submits, days before the visit. Prior-auth flags and copay amounts surface while there is still time to act. Mira re-checks coverage before the appointment as well, so the desk confirms a number instead of starting a claim it will have to rework.

Patients photograph their insurance card during intake; Mira reads the carrier name, member ID, group number, and plan name and pre-populates the structured fields for review. The card image is stored on the record. This is both a data-capture and a denial-prevention step: accurate insurance data collected days out is cheaper to fix than a rejected claim found weeks later.

Clearwave also performs real-time eligibility — a core part of its patient engagement offering — and this is a genuine Clearwave strength. If real-time eligibility at the hardware kiosk is the specific workflow your practice needs, Clearwave’s integration is deep. Mira combines these checks with the information patients provide during intake. The reason to choose Mira is the complete workflow: capture the card, check coverage, carry information forward, and prepare the chart.

A Dynamic Form That Asks Only What This Visit Needs

A 90-field paper intake is designed for the worst case. Mira builds forms around the actual visit. Patients describe their problem in plain language and Mira asks only the clinically relevant follow-ups — following pathways your own providers author by specialty: Sports Medicine, Total Joint, Spine, Shoulder & Elbow, Workers’ Comp, Pediatric Ortho, and more. A right-knee instability presentation never sees the frozen-shoulder range-of-motion screen or the spine red-flag questionnaire.

Shorter forms get completed. Patients who start on a mobile device and can’t finish in one sitting pick up exactly where they left off from the same link. Patients who prefer to speak rather than type can say their answers, and responses land as structured fields — useful for post-op patients with a hand or arm in a sling.

Setting up does not require a migration project. Describe a form in a sentence and Mira builds it; photograph a paper form from your clipboard and Mira rebuilds it digitally, same sections, same flow. There is no form-builder to learn and no template library to manage.

Intake That Lands in Your Existing EHR

Mira integrates natively with Epic, athenahealth, ModMed, eClinicalWorks, NextGen, and DrChrono, the EHRs private practices use most, and builds new EHR integrations in one to four weeks. Completed intake reaches the patient record, and your team gets a clean PDF that matches the forms the practice already uses. You can improve the patient-facing intake experience while keeping the charting system your clinicians know.

For a practice using ModMed, that means the buying decision can focus on the work you want to remove: patients repeating their history, staff re-entering information, or someone rebuilding a carrier form from scratch. EHR compatibility is already part of Mira’s offering.

The format of the finished document matters, too. A carrier, referring office, or surgical facility may require its own form rather than a generic export. Mira’s practice-format PDFs preserve the layout and signatures your team needs. The value is continuity from the patient’s answers through to the document someone actually has to use.

Balanced Tradeoffs

Mira’s strengths:

• Reuse patient information across visits and different forms instead of collecting it repeatedly.
• Fill third-party disability, FMLA, and workers’ comp PDFs from existing information.
• Combine adaptive intake, eligibility checks, and direct EHR integration in a workflow built for orthopedic private practice.

What to plan for with Mira: Your team chooses the questions and clinical pathways it wants to use, and reviews completed forms before signing or sending them. Automating the paperwork does not replace clinical judgment about restrictions, treatment, or return-to-work decisions.

Where Clearwave fits well: Its dedicated kiosks, check-in tools, and point-of-service payment collection address practices whose immediate priority is managing arrivals and collecting copays or balances. These are useful capabilities, and a practice already getting good results from that workflow should weigh the disruption of switching.

Clearwave’s patient check-in system and orthopedic offering describe those capabilities. The table’s “Not documented” entries identify features not described in those sources, rather than asserting that Clearwave cannot offer them.

The Right Choice for Your Practice

Mira Intake is the right call for orthopedic private practices where the administrative burden sits in recurring paperwork: third-party payer PDFs, returning patients who re-enter the same information every visit, insurance details that need attention before the appointment, and completed forms that still need to reach the chart.

If your practice manages meaningful workers’ comp or disability form volume, compare the current staff effort on those forms with Mira’s per-use form-filling option. If returning patients represent a large share of your panel — typical in orthopedics — Passport carry-forward compounds over time.

If hardware-driven kiosk check-in and point-of-service payment collection are the primary ROI drivers, evaluate Clearwave alongside Mira.

Explore Mira Intake, then bring a real workflow to a demo. Show us a workers’ comp carrier packet, a returning-patient scenario, or your current intake questionnaire — Mira works best when evaluated against an actual problem from your practice.