DrFirst says AI now auto-populates 63% of prior authorizations

DrFirst has launched a new electronic prior authorization tool inside its e-prescribing platform that uses clinical-grade AI to prefill pharmacy and medical PA questions from data already in the chart. In a pilot, the system filled 63% of PBM question sets with no clinician edits and cut the median open-to-submit time to 49 seconds.

Why it matters: - Prior authorization is a major source of friction for prescribers, staff and patients. - DrFirst’s new workflow aims to reduce manual rework by using existing patient data instead of requiring separate document uploads. - The company’s approach is designed to speed medication access and help providers meet evolving regulatory requirements.

What happened: - DrFirst announced a new electronic prior authorization solution inside its e-prescribing platform. - The system uses clinical-grade AI to answer pharmacy benefit manager question sets from patient data already captured in the prescribing workflow. - In a pharmacy PA pilot, the solution populated answers to 63% of PBM question sets without clinician edits. - The fill rate rose to more than 90% when clinicians answered a qualitative question in cases where relevant patient data was missing from the chart. - User data showed a median time of 49 seconds from open to submit.

The details: - The platform unifies pharmacy and medical prior authorization in one workflow. - Prescribers and staff can manage medications, complex medical orders and procedures in the same system. - The AI reads the PBM question set, pre-fills answers using patient context and presents a form for review and submission. - The solution uses demographics, medication history, diagnosis and prescription details already in the prescribing record. - The one-month pilot ran in mid-2026 and auto-answered more than 2 million questions across 150,000 PAs. - Organizations using DrFirst’s Gadget prescription orchestration platform can draw on additional clinical context from the patient record to answer more PBM questions automatically. - The solution is available now within the DrFirst e-prescribing platform. - Rollout is continuing across a partner network of 270 EHR systems in the U.S. - Independent practices and solo providers can access the tool through the iPrescribe mobile app.

Between the lines: - DrFirst is positioning ePA as a workflow problem, not just a document-processing problem. - Embedding the tool inside existing prescribing and EHR workflows could matter as much to vendors as it does to clinicians, since it reduces the need for new integrations. - The company is also signaling that AI-assisted prior authorization is becoming part of the expected compliance baseline, not just a convenience feature.

What's next: - DrFirst will keep rolling out the new ePA tool across its EHR partner network. - More practices are likely to adopt the workflow as prior authorization rules and automation expectations keep increasing. - EHR vendors may use the embedded model to meet new requirements without major roadmap changes.

The bottom line: - DrFirst is betting that putting AI directly into the prescribing flow can turn prior authorization from a manual bottleneck into a faster, mostly automated step.