Share your story.
If a prior-authorization delay shaped your care — or your patient's care — your first-hand account helps document a pattern the aggregate numbers cannot show on their own.
Why stories matter for accountability
This project estimates the excess mortality risk associated with prior-authorization delays using insurers' own published metrics and peer-reviewed dose–response data. Those estimates describe populations. They do not capture the lived experience of waiting for an authorization while a treatable condition advances.
Documented, first-hand accounts do something statistics cannot: they show regulators, journalists, and the public what a delay looks like from inside it. Surveys already point to real harm — in the American Medical Association's 2024 physician survey, 29% of physicians reported that prior authorization had led to a serious adverse event for a patient in their care, and 8% reported a patient death or permanent disability.1 Your account adds specificity to those signals.
Story collection is opening soon
We're finishing the secure intake for first-hand accounts. The submission form is temporarily turned off while we set that up — please check back shortly. In the meantime, you can reach the project directly from the Take Action page.
The form is not accepting entries yet, so nothing you type would be sent anywhere. We expect to open story intake soon.
What we do with your story
- Voluntary. Sharing is entirely your choice. You can submit, decline, or stop at any point with no consequence.
- Anonymized by default. Unless you explicitly opt in to attribution, your story is treated as anonymous. Before any publication we remove or generalize direct and indirect identifiers — names, exact dates, locations, employer, and unique details — so you are not readily identifiable.
- May be published. Submissions may be published on this site, quoted, or summarized in anonymized form, and may be used in aggregate to illustrate patterns in prior-authorization delay. We will not sell your information.
- Right to withdraw. You may request removal or correction at any time by contacting us at the address on our Take Action page. We will remove published copies we control within a reasonable time.
- Not verified, not advice. Submissions are personal accounts, not independently verified claims of fact. Nothing you submit and nothing we publish is medical, legal, or insurance advice.
Submissions are reviewed before any use. We may decline or edit accounts that include unverifiable factual allegations against a named individual, identifying details about third parties, protected health information, or content that could expose someone to harm. We do not, and will not, frame any submission to assert that a named company or person “caused” a specific death — accounts are published as the submitter's own description of events.
This intake is not a clinical or emergency service. If you need urgent help, contact your physician or call 911.
What a submission can look like
The accounts below are not real submissions. They are written examples to show the kind of detail that is useful — specific, first-hand, and free of third-party identifiers.
Caregiver · colon cancer · chemotherapy
“My father's oncologist recommended adjuvant chemotherapy after his colectomy. The plan required prior authorization and it took about three weeks of back-and-forth before treatment could start. The waiting was the hardest part — we kept calling, and no one could tell us when it would clear.”
Clinician · head & neck cancer · radiotherapy
“I ordered radical radiotherapy for a patient with a head and neck cancer. The authorization and appeal process added roughly four weeks before the first fraction. I documented the timeline in the chart because I was concerned about the effect of the delay on the treatment window.”
These examples are composed to demonstrate format only. They are not attributed to any real person, plan, or event.