Prior Authorization by the Numbers: Inside the AMA's 2026 Physician Survey

The AMA's annual prior-authorization survey is the closest thing the industry has to a yearly check-up on how the process is actually affecting patient care, not just how it's supposed to work on paper. The 2026 edition, released May 13, doesn't show much improvement despite a widely publicized 2023 industry pledge from major payers to streamline the process.

The topline numbers

Physicians surveyed reported:

• 95% say prior authorization delays access to necessary care.
• 79% say patients discontinue treatment altogether because of authorization obstacles.
• 92% say prior authorization has a negative impact on clinical outcomes.
• 26% report a case where an authorization delay led to a serious adverse event — hospitalization, permanent injury, or death.
• 32% say prior-authorization requests are often or always denied.
• 88% say prior-authorization requirements drive higher overall resource use — i.e., the process meant to control costs is, in physicians' own assessment, sometimes adding cost elsewhere in the system.

The administrative load behind those numbers

The burden isn't abstract for billing and clinical staff: physicians and their teams handle an average of roughly 40 prior authorizations per week, consuming about 13 hours of physician and staff time. Two in five physicians (40%) have hired staff whose job is specifically to manage prior authorization.

What this means for how billing teams prioritize their time

The 32% "often or always denied" figure is worth sitting with. If roughly a third of physicians are describing denial as the norm rather than the exception for prior-auth requests, that reframes prior authorization less as a one-time gate and more as a negotiation that most claims are expected to go through at least once. Practically, that argues for:

• Building a standard documentation packet per major payer/procedure combination up front, rather than assembling it reactively after a denial — since the survey suggests denial is a common enough outcome to plan for, not an edge case.
• Tracking which payers and procedure types account for the largest share of your practice's denials, since the AMA data is national and your local mix with any given payer may be worse or better than average.
• Treating the 13-hours-a-week burden figure as a staffing input: if a solo or small practice is absorbing this without dedicated prior-auth staff, that time is coming out of either clinical time or billing follow-up on other claims.

The AMA survey doesn't name specific payers or grade individual companies — its value is as an industry-wide baseline. Combined with the payer-specific announcements RCM.today has covered separately (see our coverage of UnitedHealthcare's prior-authorization changes), it gives billing teams a way to check whether a given payer's public commitments are moving in the direction the physician-reported data says the industry needs.