Every week physicians spend 13 hours on average digging through patients' medical records, answering questions and preparing documentation to prove an expensive drug or treatment is necessary to insurance providers — a gnarly, time consuming process called prior authorization. That can lead to delays in providing critical medication to patients.

Sriram Somasundaram, the 28-year-old co-CEO and cofounder of clinical AI startup Latent Health calls it a “human compute problem,” where humans on both ends (insurance payers and providers) spend hours reviewing the same documents. “It's a genuine insanity, and this is what happens for essentially every sick patient today,” he says.

Now AI can do much of the data scanning and question answering needed for prior authorization accurately, Somasundaram says. Latent Health is building what it calls a “clinical reasoning engine,” an AI system that ingests data like doctor’s notes, lab results and imaging reports and can answer complex questions about a patient’s medical history. Its AI agents can also compile evidence based on the insurer’s criteria and submit requests after a human reviews them. To avoid having humans wait on hold for hours at end, Latent’s AI can even call insurers on the providers’ behalf to check in on the status of a request.

“Providers love taking care of patients. They're just so overburdened and there is really only one way out.” Somasundaram says. “We must adopt........

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