Parachute Health: Payers are sending signal about faxes 

NEW YORK – Parachute Health’s decision to embed prior authorization workflows into its platform is an example of how payers are increasingly driving the transition to e-prescribe, says David Gelbard. 

The company announced in June that it added the functionality through a partnership with Optum, which is owned by UnitedHealth Group, and Walgreens/CareCentrix. 

“There’s a favoring by payers to do business in a digital way vs. paper fax,” said Gelbard, CEO and founder of Parachute Health. “What will be important for DME providers is their continued progression to be digitized and to move toward e-prescribe, because it will be the baseline of competition going forward. No one wants the paper process to continue – definitely not payers.” 

Parachute Health’s news followed an announcement by Optum that it had launched DME Navigator, an end-to-end solution for benefits management that includes an EHR-integrated ordering platform, through a collaboration with Walgreens/CareCentrix. 

Gelbard says Optum reached out to Parachute Health to see if the company was willing and able to automate the prior authorization process in its e-prescribing platform. 

“As they were evaluating the DME benefit, it became obvious the way forward to drive efficiency and transparency was to leverage e-prescribe and embed and automate the authorization process,” he said. “That was the catalyst.” 

In what he calls a “win-win,” Gelbard says this new functionality also increases transparency and efficiency for providers. 

“The current process for managing authorizations is too burdensome,” he said. “It takes up too much administrative time; it results in delays in care.” 

Additionally, the new functionality gets ahead of a CMS rule that requires impacted payers to implement an Application Programming Interface (API) that enables electronic prior authorization requests by 2027. 

“That will be the next big altitude in e-prescribing and prior authorization,” he said.