Latent, an enterprise pharmacy intelligence platform headquartered in San Francisco, announced that it is now live in 60 health systems across the U.S., collectively serving approximately 70 million patients. New customers include Cleveland Clinic, AdventHealth, Cincinnati Children’s, Keck Medicine of USC, UNC Health, UnityPoint Health and WVU Medicine.

The company also unveiled autonomous clinical agents designed to help health systems accelerate patient access to high-demand, complex specialty therapies, including GLP-1 medications and treatments in immunology, rheumatology, and cardiology.

The agents analyze information from patient charts, claims, payer policies, and drug labels to automate administrative tasks such as eligibility reviews and prior authorizations within governed health system workflows, with oversight from clinical pharmacy teams.

Latent said it is on pace to process more than 5.8 million medication cases over the next 12 months. Healthcare Innovation spoke with Latent co-founder Sri Somasundaram and with Casey Yokum, director of Specialty Pharmacy & Home Infusion at WVU Medicine.

Sri Somasundaram told Healthcare Innovation that he started Latent with his best friend Rishabh Jain four years ago. With his mom as a physician, Somasundaram grew up with an appreciation for healthcare. He spent time working for an immunology lab at Stanford.

“We were just really passionate and beautifully naive about wanting to build a better world for patients, and what we could do in healthcare,” Somasundaram said about starting Latent. However, he admitted they didn’t really know how the system worked. “We definitely started as outsiders looking in.” The co-founders started talking with CMIOs, CFOs, and CIOs at the best health systems in the U.S. to understand the problems hospitals have as well as the patient and medication journey. “There's such a tremendous drop-off there, and the best experience is one that continues to be rendered at the health system.”

“Our mission is that we want to simplify the patient's journey from sickness back to health,” Somasundaram said. “Sometimes it's getting you to the right therapy that can actually manage that disease.”

Latent got their start in medication access. Since then, they've expanded the platform to include drug prioritization, appeals, and upstream model leveraging. Recently, the company deployed autonomous agents.

“In terms of the core technical competency,” Somasundaram explained, “what we're doing is very simple….We have an agent that sits in the EMR and is capable of answering questions about the patient data.” The agent can dig through notes, meds, labs, etc., and help answer what needs to be done regarding authorization. Health systems come to Latent to help grow programs and serve more patients.

As an example of success, Somasundaram talked about the Medicare Bridge program, when several million members became eligible overnight. In seven to 10 days, Latent deployed agents to autonomously evaluate eligibility for those programs and enable hospitals to meet a 20 to 30 percent increase in demand overnight.

Regarding the new partnerships, Somasundaram said that the “hope is that we become the trusted partner to these health system enterprises and their pharmacies to assist their patients along their medication journey.” Looking ahead, the company wants to go upstream and address diagnosis and treatment as well.

WVU Medicine, a provider of advanced heart, vascular, thoracic, cancer, pediatric, and neurological care in West Virginia, partnered with Latent because WVU is a growing health system, Casey Yokum, who has worked there since 2014, explained.  Yokum helped open up a retail pharmacy for the health system. In 2021, the health system started home infusion, and in 2026, it will build a new pharmacy.

As a growing health system, WVU Medicine wanted support for continued growth, help with timely authorization accuracy and approvals, and alleviation of the burden and workload for frontline staff in the clinics. Yokum mentioned the shortage of pharmacy technicians.

Yokum noted that it is challenging for staff to keep up with the rapid evolution of payer policy formularies. Latent, he said, has been able to do that work efficiently. It can identify information and free staff from researching the most up-to-date details.

What stood out to Yokum, in terms of outcomes, was the turnaround time. “We immediately started to see an improvement within the first month. Fast-forward to five months later, actually going on six months, and we are continuing to see increased throughput to the point where we know we can start to assign additional work to our staff just because of the throughput and the efficiency that Latent offers.”

“What I see is provider satisfaction,” Yokum continued, “I see patient satisfaction. This is not just the satisfaction of our staff using the tool.” If patients can get therapy faster, providers will be happy, and patients and caregivers will see the results. With many traditional models, he said, there was a lot of back and forth. “We might have seen triple or quadruple the amount of time spent getting a prior authorization.”

Looking ahead, Yokum said, “We are looking to not only enhance and continue working with Latent on the pharmacy benefit prior authorizations. We have a home infusion staff that is also using the medical benefit prior authorizations, and we look forward to working there to expand that for those medical benefits because home infusion is a growing area in every health system.”

“We feel that this technology is groundbreaking because otherwise you can't continue to hire in the workforce at the same rate that we may have in the past,” Yokum remarked. With the EMR, he said, the implementation was only a couple of months and was one of the smoothest transitions he experienced. “It's a tool that will not limit us. If anything, it'll help us expand at a tremendous rate.”

Pietje Kobus-McAllister has an international background and experience in content management and editing. She studied journalism in the Netherlands and Communications and Creative Nonfiction in the U.S. Pietje joined Healthcare Innovation in January 2024.