AI Medical Prior Authorization Agent

Eliminate 13 hours of prior auth per physician, every week.

Prior submits all your prior authorizations end-to-end. Our agentic stack handles intake, payer-specific medical-necessity reasoning, submission, peer-to-peer calls, and appeals — all under MD supervision and HIPAA BAA. You stop chasing payers. We do it.

$20B
Annual US PA tax on specialty medicine
93%
Of PAs delay patient care
5–7
Days from BAA to first PA submitted
CMS-0057
Operational since Jan 2026
At a glance

We submit your PAs. End-to-end.

No software to learn. No coordinator to hire. No payer portals to remember. Orders flow in, decisions flow out — under MD supervision, with full audit trail. We are agentic services, not software.

Slash first-pass denials

Every PA reasoned against the latest payer-specific medical-necessity policy. Targeting 75%+ first-pass approvals on top procedure codes.

Stop chasing payers

Peer-to-peer scheduling, follow-ups, status checks, appeals — handled by us. Your team stops dialing payer hold lines.

Free 13 hours per MD per week

Reclaim clinician time AMA 2024 says is lost to PA paperwork. Time that should be clinical, not administrative.

The problem

Specialty practices are bleeding clinician time on paperwork.

The 2024 AMA physician survey, replicated across 1,000 practices, paints the same picture every quarter. Small specialty practices are hit hardest — they have the volume of a hospital but the staffing of a clinic.

13h

per physician per week

Lost to prior authorization work — phone calls, portal logins, faxes, peer-to-peer scheduling. Time that should be clinical.

29%

cause serious adverse events

PA-induced delays don't just frustrate patients. AMA 2024 reports 29% of PA-delayed cases lead to clinically significant adverse events.

82%

lead to treatment abandonment

Patients give up on prescribed care because the PA process is unmanageable. The practice loses revenue and the patient loses outcome.

How it works

Four agents, one outcome — submitted PAs.

Prior is agentic services, not software. You don't log in and click "submit." Orders flow into our system from your EHR, fax, or email. Our four-layer stack handles them, with a Clinical Lead reviewing every escalation and an MD signing every appeal.

Step 1 · Intake

We capture your order

Fax, email, EHR push, or upload — however your practice already operates. We extract CPT, ICD-10, MD, and payer with 95%+ accuracy on top codes.

Step 2 · Reasoning

We match payer criteria

Every PA reasoned against payer-specific medical-necessity policy — UHC, Aetna, Cigna, BCBS, Humana, Kaiser, and 500+ more. Our payer runbook library updates with every submission.

Step 3 · QA

RN/LPN review + MD sign-off

Offshore RN/LPN reviewers check 10–15% of submissions and 100% of high-risk procedures. Onshore Clinical Lead handles escalations. MD signs every appeal.

Step 4 · Delivery

We submit and track

Availity FHIR, NaviNet, payer portal, or fax — whichever channel works for that payer. Peer-to-peer calls included. Status pushed back to your EHR in real time.

Outcomes we target

We sell results, not seats.

Service contracts are scored on what they deliver — not how many users log in. Here's what Prior is built to produce, and how we measure it.

75%+

First-pass approval rate

On the top 50 procedure codes per specialty. Industry baseline runs 50–60%. Every additional point compounds — fewer appeals, faster patient care, less revenue stuck in receivables.

5–7days

BAA to first submitted PA

Implementation contracts in healthcare typically run 6–12 months. We are designed for the 1–10 MD specialty practice — fax, email, EHR push, or upload. No IT calls.

$0.30

Marginal cost per PA at scale

Manual processing runs $14–$40 per PA across staff time and rework. Claude Sonnet 4.5 with prompt caching and batch API drives our marginal cost to $0.30 — the math finally works.

13hours

Returned to each MD, every week

What AMA 2024 measured as the average physician PA burden. That's 670 hours per year per MD — clinical time we hand back, not save in software.

Outcome-based reporting: every customer gets a monthly scorecard with first-pass rate by payer, average time-to-decision, denial reasons taxonomy, and appeal overturn rate. We hold ourselves to numbers, not feature releases.

Why Prior

Built for the practice, not the payer.

PA automation is crowded — but every well-funded player optimizes for someone else. Hospitals. Payers. Epic shops. We're the only stack purpose-built for the 1–10 MD specialty practice that doesn't have an IT team and can't wait on a 9-month enterprise rollout.

Prior vs. Cohere Health

We work for your practice. Cohere works for the payer.

Cohere ($5.5B valuation) is a payer-side automation tool. They sell to UnitedHealthcare and Humana to deny PAs faster. Their incentive is to reduce approval rates.

Prior is provider-side. Our incentive is your first-pass approval rate and your throughput. Every line of code is written to get your patient covered.

Prior vs. Tennr

We do prior auth end-to-end. Tennr stops at intake.

Tennr ($605M valuation) is a referral and intake orchestration platform. It can submit some PAs, but its core surface is referrals and patient routing — not PA reasoning, peer-to-peer, or appeals.

Prior owns the full PA lifecycle. Reasoning against payer policy, submission, peer-to-peer voice agent, denial appeals — under one MD-supervised SLA.

Prior vs. Humata Health

We serve small practices. Humata serves health systems.

Humata partners with Optum, Allegheny Health, and CMS. Their wins are 200,000-PA/year health systems. Implementation requires Epic, IT teams, and multi-quarter rollouts.

Prior fits the 1–10 MD practice that Humata doesn't sell to. Live in 5–7 days from BAA. Any EHR. No IT. Per-physician retainer, not enterprise contracts.

Prior vs. Waystar / Availity

We replace the work. They digitize the form.

Waystar and Availity are revenue-cycle platforms that route PA forms through clearinghouses. Your staff still fills them out, attaches the records, and chases the status.

Prior is agentic services, not software. Your staff doesn't log in. Orders come in, decisions go out. We absorb the work, not just the form.

Get started

One service. Three ways to engage.

Prior is a fully managed service, not a software subscription. Engagements scale by your PA volume, payer mix, and SLA — not by seats. Pricing is custom and discussed on the introductory call.

Solo

For 1–3 MD practices

Single specialty getting their first PA workflow handed off. 48-hour SLA, standard payer coverage.

  • Up to ~80 PAs / MD / month
  • Standard payer coverage
  • Email + dashboard reporting
  • HIPAA BAA + SOC 2 Type I
ASC

For ASCs & 10+ MD groups

Ambulatory surgery centers and large multi-specialty groups. 8-hour SLA, custom payer additions, dedicated CSM.

  • Unlimited PAs
  • Dedicated CSM
  • Custom payer additions
  • Priority engineering
  • Quarterly business review
Pricing is per-physician retainer.Replaces a $75–100K/year coordinator hire. Custom quoted on the introductory call — typically 2–6× lower than your current PA cost per submission.
Get started
Why now

Three forces converge in a 12-month window.

Prior authorization has been broken for years. What changed in 2026 is that the technology, the regulation, and the labor market all bent the same direction at the same time.

CMS-0057-F is operational

Effective January 2026: 72-hour expedited and 7-day standard PA decisions for MA, Medicaid, and ACA plans. Plus FHIR APIs by January 2027. Practices with no IT staff need a partner.

Frontier models hit unit economics

Claude Sonnet 4.5 with prompt caching and batch API drives marginal cost per PA to $0.30 at scale, vs. $14–$40 manually. The math finally works.

Clinical labor shortage

300K+ clinical-admin staff exited the profession 2019–2022. Practices can't staff PA coordinators at prevailing rates. They need a service, not a hiring drive.

Built for healthcare from day zero

Compliance is table stakes, not a milestone.

Every vendor has a signed BAA. Every PA has an audit log entry. Every appeal carries an MD signature. We treat HIPAA, SOC 2, and HITRUST as non-negotiable engineering surfaces — not paperwork.

HIPAA BAA
SOC 2 Type I — Month 3
SOC 2 Type II — Month 12
HITRUST e1 — Month 15
HITRUST i1 — Month 24
CMS-0057-F aligned
Frequently asked

Questions practices ask before they sign.

If yours isn't here, hit "Get started" — fastest way to a real answer.

How fast can my practice go live?
5–7 business days from BAA signature. Day 1: BAA + onboarding form. Day 2–3: payer credentialing and EHR ingestion setup. Day 4–5: first PAs flowing through Prior under shadow review. Day 6–7: full SLA active. We don't need IT calls or 9-month deployments — that's why we're built for 1–10 MD practices.
My EHR isn't on the popular list. Will Prior still work?
Yes. Prior ingests from any source: fax, secure email, HL7 FHIR webhook, EHR push (eClinicalWorks, Athena, NextGen, Kareo, DrChrono, Practice Fusion), CSV upload, or manual portal entry. If your workflow already produces a PA order, we can pick it up. Custom integrations available on Group and ASC engagements.
Who actually signs the medical decisions?
Your MD signs every appeal and any submission flagged as high-risk. Routine submissions are reviewed by RN/LPN and our Clinical Lead before delivery. Prior never makes a clinical determination on its own — the agentic stack drafts and reasons; humans sign. This is why we hold a HIPAA BAA, not just a click-through SaaS terms.
What happens if a PA is denied?
We file the appeal at no extra cost on Group and ASC engagements, with the same SLA. Our payer runbook library captures the denial reason, updates the relevant medical-necessity criteria, and re-reasons the case. Industry-average appeal overturn rates run 50–60% — we target 70%+ on the codes we cover end-to-end.
How is patient data protected?
PHI never leaves the BAA-covered perimeter. Zero training on customer data. All inference runs on Anthropic's HIPAA-eligible API endpoints. Audit logs cover every access, every model call, every human decision. SOC 2 Type I in Month 3, Type II in Month 12, HITRUST i1 by Month 24 — on a public roadmap.
Can I cancel? Is there a long contract?
No annual commitment. Month-to-month on all engagements. Cancel any time with 30 days notice — we'll hand off your in-flight PAs to your team and ship a clean export of all submissions, decisions, and audit logs. We've seen too many practices trapped in 3-year RCM contracts to sell that way.

Stop chasing payers.
Start treating patients.

Watch a live demo of Prior handling a real PA — your codes, your payers, your workflow. Ten minutes. No slides.

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