The Battle of the Revenue Cycle Bots is already underway.
The current response from health systems and payers is to deploy AI on both sides — AI agents drafting prior authorization requests, AI agents evaluating them. Robots faxing robots.
“AI is exposing and exacerbating fundamental issues within the underlying prior authorization process … increasing billing intensity and inflating medical spending.”
— Peterson Center on Healthcare, Administrative AI: Current Use and Potential Impact
“The absence of a cohesive digital and data architecture is preventing the full realization of interoperability's benefits.”
— National Academy of Medicine, Toward a National Health Digital and Data Architecture
The answer isn’t less AI — it’s AI on shared rails, under recognized authority. AI can already reason about a prior authorization; what it lacks is a trusted way to act — recognized identity, authority, and standing to conduct the interaction on a party’s behalf. On a neutral network with verified identity and structured data, the same agents that today escalate the arms race become useful: drafting cleaner requests, answering them faster, with every network-routed exchange producing auditable evidence of who acted, under what authority. Fix the structure, and the machines work for everyone. Smart Health Network should make legitimate machine action easier than credential sharing, scraping, or impersonation.
The same holds for the consumer tools people already use: as personal AI assistants take on more of life’s administration, they will need an authorized, auditable way to act in healthcare on a person’s behalf — and a network built on recognized authority is where they plug in.