Connecting the Patient Access Ecosystem   

In the previous Flora Health Insider Perspectives article, Jeff Brokaw described how Flora Health is building a partner ecosystem to bring more connected capabilities into healthcare workflows. That ecosystem matters because patient access does not depend on only one organization, one platform, or one step in the process. It requires coordination across the healthcare ecosystem. 

In my role at Flora Health, I focus on how those connections translate into execution, helping life sciences companies improve access, reimbursement, and patient support within provider workflows. Each participant plays an important role, yet they often have limited visibility into where a patient is in the access journey, what barrier remains unresolved, and what action needs to happen next. 

At Flora Health, we connect capabilities across point of care engagement, health system workflows, patient access, commercial intelligence and partner solutions. Through deep relationships with hospitals, health systems and electronic health record (EHR) environments, we help pharmaceutical and life sciences brands connect targeted EHR messaging, patient access support, and data intelligence directly into workflows.  

Together with our partners, we are supporting AI-enabled prior authorization, affordability and ongoing therapy access throughout health systems nationwide to reduce administrative burden, improve prior authorization performance and help providers work more efficiently. 

What the Data Shows 

In a case study focused on a large U.S. health system, we saw how much manual effort can be reduced when prior authorization (PA) workflows are supported within the provider’s health system process. 90% of AI-supported PA responses were accepted by healthcare professionals doing the final PA review, 85% of PA questions were answered with AI support, and the workflow showed a jump in PA approval rates to ~77%. There was also a dramatic drop in average PA submission time to only 4 minutes and 10 seconds, which means patients get treatment faster. 

In a more traditional process, the time to fill out and submit a prior authorization could take many hours, up to days, due to the complexity of the questions and finding all the source data inside of the EHR to transpose onto the PA form.   

The Human Cost of Administrative Work 

Greater workflow visibility can help stakeholders understand patient status, unresolved access barriers, responsible parties, and the next required action. It can also help reduce duplicated work, incomplete submissions, and avoidable delays between prescribing and therapy initiation. 

Our capability is designed to automate work that technology can appropriately support while preserving the clinical judgment, human oversight and communication required for more complex patient and provider needs. The opportunity is to reduce the administrative burden that keeps skilled teams from spending more time on the work only people can do, while providing easy to use tools for HCOs and streamlining how patients enroll into patient support programs (PSP) – all directly inside the EHR. 

A traditional hub case typically takes over 300 staff minutes to travel through the various steps, including intake, BI, PA, appeal, and triage, not including time between each step. If we look at a case coming from an EHR-supported program, that journey is significantly reduced due to the streamlined tools being provided by our partners inside the healthcare systems. In my prior roles with large pharmaceutical brands, I would have been excited to have these patients coming to my hub team, so I could focus my team on patient care, empathy, and more complex situations that require human intervention.