The Problem: Delays in Patient Access to Critical Medications

Three years ago, Yale New Haven Health System’s (YNHHS) specialty pharmacy was drowning in prior authorizations. Every PA was a manual burden—verifying insurance benefits, digging through patient charts, tracking prior authorization statuses. The work was painstaking, expertise-dependent, and nearly impossible to scale. 

For patients, this meant waiting. Sometimes days, sometimes weeks.

Pharmacy leadership knew this wasn't just an operational problem. It was a medication access crisis felt across the entire system: status calls flooding clinics, rework piling up for office staff, providers constantly interrupted, and treatment delays that sometimes led to patient escalation.

The Approach: Technology as Infrastructure, Not a Band-Aid

YNHHS’s pharmacy leaders in partnership with the YNHHS Center for Health Care Innovation made a critical decision: they'd treat this technology partnership like essential infrastructure, not just a point solution. They weren't looking for software to optimize a broken process—they wanted to rebuild the foundation.

That meant championing Latent across the organization, tightening integration between teams, expanding roles, and committing to scale access without adding headcount. This was an operating model shift, not just a tech implementation.

The Results: Medication Access in Hours, Not Weeks

With Latent, the change was immediate and measurable.

What used to take a pharmacy employee 10-20 minutes now takes 3.5 minutes. Script-to-approval time dropped to under one hour. Cases that historically took 21 days now close in 24-72 hours.

For patients, this means faster access to critical medications and far less uncertainty between their doctor's decision and receiving treatment. For the care team, it means fewer interruptions, less rework, more time focused on patient facing care, and the ability to help more people.

Solving the Workforce Problem

As throughput climbed, YNHHS faced the question every health system is asking: How do you expand access when talent is scarce and burnout is prevalent?

The answer wasn't hiring more people. Between October 2023 and October 2025, YNHHS achieved a 109% increase in prior authorizations per team member per month, without adding headcount.

Latent became the intelligence layer that made this possible. By standardizing evidence gathering and automating the grunt work, the team could spend their expertise where it mattered: complex cases and direct patient support.

It also changed how they hired. Before Latent, PA work demanded pre-existing authorization knowledge and on-the-job training. With standardized workflows, YNHHS expanded beyond pharmacy techs to authorization specialists, creating clearer career paths and reducing the expertise burden on new hires.