AI Helps Improve Access to Specialty Medication
Northwestern Medicine Collaborates With Latent Health to Improve Pharmacy Workflows
With high volumes and highly manual processes, specialty pharmacy presents a big opportunity for leveraging AI to offload manual tasks and increase efficiency. One source of bottlenecks are prior authorization (PA) requests, which can be lengthy and resource intensive, and they can have a big impact on the timeliness of care.
At Northwestern Memorial Hospital, monthly specialty pharmacy volume includes:
1,600
23
15-30 minutes
To address this opportunity, Northwestern Medicine turned to the AI-powered tool from Latent Health. This program integrates with Epic, an electronic health record system, to extract relevant clinical data from the patient’s medical chart and synthesize the information needed to submit a PA. It searches through the patient’s chart across medications, notes and labs to return the most relevant clinical evidence to support PA requests.
Reducing Time With AI Means Serving More Patients
By leveraging Latent, the average time to complete a PA decreased from 67%, from 17 minutes to 5 minutes and 20 seconds (Figure 1). As a result, the specialty pharmacy was able to increase its volume of PAs by 22% to 25% in February and March 2025 compared to the same period in 2024, all without adding full-time employees.
Average Minutes To Complete Prior Auth
Figure 1: On average, the time to complete PAs decreased by 67% during the pilot period.
AI Reimagines Health Care at Northwestern Medicine
Northwestern Medicine will continue to use Latent in the specialty pharmacy and will expand to additional locations and use cases. The technology also helps identify low-income and uninsured patients who qualify for discounted medication prices through the 340B program, further boosting patient access to care.
Learn more about how Northwestern Medicine is using AI to reimagine health care, such as predicting advanced heart failure.
