OpenEvidence, the AI medical search engine now embedded in clinic workflows, just acquired Tandem — a startup that automates insurance prior authorizations. No price disclosed.
Prior authorization is where clinical care goes to die. Every doctor knows it. Every health tech investor has been funding solutions for three years. OpenEvidence just stopped building a point solution and started building the whole stack.
Doctors already use OpenEvidence to look up clinical evidence mid-visit. Tandem adds the transactional layer — once a doc decides on a treatment, the platform routes it through the insurance gauntlet automatically. Search to prescription to authorization, one product. That’s the “clinic OS” thesis. It sounds like a pitch deck until someone actually ships it.
The “what if” question is who’s next. Cohere Health, Rhyme, and Infinitus are all competing in the PA automation space with standalone products. If OpenEvidence can bundle PA into a tool doctors already use for clinical search, the standalone vendors have a real problem. Payers, meanwhile, now have to negotiate with a platform that sits between their utilization management systems and the physicians making prescribing decisions.
The combined company’s next move to watch: payer integration deals. If they land one major insurer as a direct API partner, the model stops being a workaround and becomes infrastructure.
Diana Kowalski