AI Medical Practice Prior Auth 2026: Cohere Health & Latent Profits
AI prior authorization is 2026's biggest healthcare arbitrage: how Cohere Health and automation attack the $35B prior auth bottleneck — and where the...
Chapter 1: The $35 Billion Bottleneck: Why Prior Auth Is 2026's Best Arbitrage Every industry has a tax nobody voted for. In American healthcare, that tax is prior authorization — the process where a physician who already decided what a patient needs has to convince a payer's utilization management department to agree. The clinical decision takes four minutes. The paperwork takes four days. And somewhere in that gap sits one of the largest, dumbest, most automatable cost pools in the American economy. Industry estimates put the administrative cost of prior authorization and related utilization management in the neighborhood of $35...