AI Helps Speed Up Patient Transfers Between Care Settings
Written by Milly Dawson, MS, MPH
Patients suffer when delays arise in the arrangement of a transfer from one care setting to another. The patient may need to move from the emergency department to an inpatient bed, or from an inpatient bed to another location such as a skilled nursing facility, a long-term care setting or even home. The delays often reflect snags in the hospital’s ability to get prior authorization for the move from the patient’s insurance company. But AI tools are now being deployed to help.
Andor Health is using them to speed up the process of obtaining prior authorizations, and the new technology is making a dramatic difference. “In some cases, we have been able to improve time to prior authorization by reducing it fifty percent or seventy or eighty percent," says the company’s CEO Raj Toleti. Toleti sees streamlining transfers as one aspect of the firm’s efforts to use AI to improve nearly every function performed by hospitals and healthcare systems.
Although discussions around AI and the labor force often center on machines replacing humans, for companies like Andor Health the goal is to use technology to support human expertise. In the case of improving patient transfers, agentic AI systems can handle many time-consuming administrative steps well, steps that used to fall on doctors. The AI agents leave the doctors freer to focus on patient care.
“This problem of delayed discharges has been happening for decades,” Toleti says. The process today involves a doctor caring for the patient speaking directly with another physician at the insurance company, having a “peer-to-peer call.”
“But the doctor at the hospital who has to complete that step often doesn’t have time available. Now I can connect agentic AI to the insurance company. It will provide all the clinical information needed and ask for the prior authorization,” Toleti said. Andor is working with Orlando Health, among other healthcare systems, to deploy these AI solutions.
Delayed transfers can hurt a hospital financially. Patients who have waited days, or sometimes longer than a week, for a prior authorization are likely to vent their frustrations when they rate their hospital experience. Those lower ratings can, in turn, reduce the payments that hospital receives from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services issued new regulations in 2025 which elevate the handling of patient transfers to a core compliance obligation. CMS’ made this change to improve patient safety and speed up patients’ access to appropriate care. CMS now demands that transfer processes be documented as a written policy, implemented organization-wide, and supported with regular training for staffers involved.
This week, Andor Health hosted a conference in Orlando called ThinkAI 2026. The meeting explored how AI-empowered services are changing both clinical and administrative operations, such as patient transfers.
“Delays in getting prior authorizations are a real problem, one that costs the healthcare systems billions. We want to solve this problem of bringing the patient to the right care center at the right time, smoothly. Using agentic AI to address the issue is going to become the new normal,” Toleti said.
