Evaluation of the Fast Prior Authorization Technology Highway

Prior authorization (PA) is a utilization management tool used by health plans and pharmacy benefit managers where the payer requires additional documentation from health care providers before authorization of payment for a medication or procedure. PA processes are hypothesized to be more efficient if electronic transmission is utilized instead of manual submission.

To evaluate the impact of electronic PA (ePA) on approval rate and time to decision and to assess health care provider perception of using ePA.

America's Health Insurance Plans selected 2 technology companies, Availity and Surescripts, and used an independent research organization (Research Triangle Institute [RTI]) to conduct a provider survey and analyze over 40,000 PA transactions from participating health plans. RTI examined processing time, provider experience, and other measures for PAs both before and after provider implementation of ePA.

Providers used these tools for roughly 62% of PAs in the 6 months after implementation. The median time from PA request to decision fell from 18.7 hours to 5.7 hours. Providers using ePA reported observing some benefits relative to the number of phone calls and faxes required after ePA implementation.

The primary benefit of ePA implementation was reduced time to decision. Additional benefits may occur with greater adoption since 38% of PAs were still manual after implementation of ePA.