The CareMetx team spent last week at Informa Connect Access USA 2026, connecting with peers across the patient services landscape. As we sat in on sessions and spoke with other teams, one theme came up repeatedly: patient access remains fragmented, and it is becoming the industry’s next major challenge to solve.
Lack of Orchestration Is Undermining Progress in Patient Access
Over the past several years, this industry has seen a wave of innovation, and the conference floor reflected that momentum. New technologies, more specialized partners, and increasingly focused solutions are improving how specific parts of the access process perform. Benefit verification is faster, prior authorization workflows are more efficient, intake is more streamlined. But despite that progress, across panels and conversations the consensus seemed to be that the broader patient experience has not yet stabilized. Manufacturers are still working to manage journeys that feel inconsistent and delayed.
With that, there is a growing understanding that patient services cannot continue to function as a series of isolated steps.
It used to be enough to point to speed within individual parts of the process: the ability to complete a benefit investigation instantly or return a prior authorization decision in an hour rather than a day was a meaningful differentiator. While those capabilities still matter, leaders are beginning to realize that strong performance within a single step does not carry forward on its own. If progress breaks down immediately after, the value of that earlier efficiency quickly disappears. Patients are not measuring how well each step performs, and in most cases, they are not even aware those steps exist. They experience something much simpler: whether they are able to start therapy or not, and how long it takes to get there.
As a result, expectations for what success looks like in patient services are starting to shift. It is less about how well any one step is executed, and more about how reliably the entire process holds together from end to end. What organizations seem to be looking for is consistency, predictability, and true orchestration across the patient journey, where each step connects seamlessly to the next, and momentum is maintained through to therapy.
You Can’t Ignore the Conversation About AI
Unsurprisingly, AI was present in nearly every conversation. Across panels and discussions, the message was consistent: use AI to improve intake, accelerate benefit verification, streamline prior authorization, enhance outreach. Nearly every step in the process now has an AI-driven solution.
Those applications matter; making individual steps faster and more efficient is real progress.
What our team kept coming back to, though, is how this fits into the broader challenge. The industry is struggling with a fragmentation problem, while at the same time being presented with a growing number of ways to apply AI across individual steps. Applying AI here or there may improve performance at those points, but it will not resolve the disconnect between them.
In our view, the opportunity is not just to make each step faster, but to use AI to support a more connected, coordinated model- one where information carries forward, decisions are made with full context, and actions remain aligned from one step to the next.
At CareMetx, we describe this approach as Collective Intelligence℠.
At its core, it changes how information is used across the access journey. Signals generated at each step- coverage determinations, payer requests, authorization outcomes, dispensing activity- are no longer treated as updates that stay within a single workflow. They are captured, connected, and carried forward so that the next action is informed by what has already occurred.
Over time, those connected signals begin to do more than just inform individual cases. Patterns emerge around where delays occur, how different payers behave, and which interventions are most effective. That insight can be applied proactively, helping teams anticipate friction, route cases more precisely, and focus their efforts where they have the greatest impact.
One thing became clear to us last week: the industry is aligned around the same challenge. Fragmentation across the patient journey remains the core issue, even as new capabilities continue to emerge. The opportunity now is to meet this moment with AI in a more deliberate way, applying it not just to improve individual steps, but to address that underlying fragmentation head-on—connecting the journey, carrying information forward, and enabling more coordinated, reliable patient access at scale.
If you are evaluating how your patient services infrastructure can better support coordination, visibility, and more consistent program performance, we welcome the conversation. Book time with us here.