SAN FRANCISCO—Abridge is partnering with real-time health information network Availity to fire up AI-powered prior authorization, expanding the reach of real-time coverage approval to more providers.
The two companies announced a partnership, timed to the annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, to scale up real-time prior authorization. The integration of the two companies’ technologies could significantly speed up prior auth, from months to minutes. The use of Abridge’s ambient AI and Availity’s data exchange tech can compress a weekslong process that occurs post-visit to one that happens in real-time during the patient exam.
Rather than create disparate AI systems, Abridge and Availity decided to team up to share information between providers and health plans at the point of care, making the process of medical necessity review more efficient, the companies said in a press release.
Through the partnership, Abridge is embedding Availity’s FHIR-native application programming interfaces (APIs) into its ambient AI solution to connect payer information. Abridge says its contextual reasoning engine technology can give clinicians more visibility into relevant information during the patient-doctor conversation to support documentation aligned with prior authorization requirements.
Abridge is a major player in the ambient AI medical scribe space and it now works with more than 200 health systems. The company said it is projected to support over 80 million patient-clinician conversations in 2026.
The collaboration brings together Abridge’s enterprise-grade AI platform with Availity’s FHIR-native intelligent utilization management solution, which helps payers and providers digitize and operationalize coverage requirements within administrative workflows.
Availity’s technology enables the exchange of clinical, administrative and financial information, and the company has connections to over 95% of payers, more than 3.4 million providers and over 2,000 trading partners.
Abridge has set its sights on expanding its AI capabilities beyond clinical documentation to tackle other admin tasks like prior auth. In August, the company announced a partnership with Highmark Health to codesign an AI-powered prior authorization solution at the point of care. Highmark Health operates a multistate insurance services division, called Highmark Inc., and Allegheny Health Network (AHN), a 14-hospital care provider.
The partnership between Abridge and Availity enables AI-powered prior authorization to scale to more organizations.
“At Availity, we’ve invested in building AI-powered, FHIR-native APIs designed to bring clinical policy logic directly into provider workflows,” said Russ Thomas, CEO of Availity, in a statement. “By embedding our technology at the point of conversation, we’re enabling faster, more transparent utilization management decisions rooted in clinical context. We’re excited to collaborate with Abridge and to demonstrate what’s possible when payer intelligence meets real-time provider workflows.”
Real-time prior authorization is just a first step as the two companies have broader ambitions to tackle revenue cycle workflows. Through the partnership, Abridge and Availity will align utilization management and order submission within the patient-doctor conversation, with the goal of enabling payer determination during the visit. By aligning workflows, the companies aim to highlight documentation gaps during the conversation—not after—to support compliant and clinically accurate documentation, executives said.
The goal, the companies said, is to help both payers and providers reduce manual workflows, administrative delays and other time- and resource-intensive needs, such as peer-to-peer consults.
“Abridge and Availity are each bringing national scale, deep trust, and a track record of solving important challenges across the care and claims experience to this partnership,” Shiv Rao, M.D., CEO and co-founder of Abridge, said. “We’re building real-time bridges between patients, providers, and payers, unlocking shared understanding, focused at the point of conversation.”