Humana and DrFirst win KLAS award for cutting fax friction in prescribing

Humana and DrFirst received a 2026 KLAS Points of Light Award for NewRx Insights, a workflow tool that moves payer-to-provider medication recommendations into e-prescribing systems. The program has eliminated more than 70,000 faxes and lifted clinician response rates as the companies push to close care gaps faster.

Why it matters: - Humana and DrFirst are trying to make medication outreach faster and easier for clinicians. - The NewRx Insights program moves payer recommendations into the prescribing workflow instead of sending faxed requests. - That shift has already cut administrative friction and helped close care gaps more quickly.

What happened: - Humana Inc. and DrFirst received a 2026 KLAS Points of Light Award for their interoperability collaboration. - The award recognizes technology-driven efforts that improve communication between payers, providers and IT vendors. - The companies co-developed NewRx Insights to replace fax-based prescription requests with medication communications inside provider workflows. - The announcement was dated June 16, 2026, from Arlington, Virginia.

The details: - NewRx Insights enables bidirectional payer-to-provider communication at the point of prescribing. - The platform delivers prescription recommendations and medication-related care gap alerts. - The workflow operates within Gadget, DrFirst’s prescription orchestration platform. - The system aligns with NCPDP SCRIPT standards. - The design preserves the patient’s preferred pharmacy. - Clinicians can accept, modify or decline recommendations and record their reasoning in structured data that returns to the payer in real time. - Humana and DrFirst first used the program to focus on people with chronic health conditions. - The initial goal was to increase statin use among eligible patients with diabetes. - The platform reached about 160,000 clinicians across 270 connected electronic health record systems. - Early results showed a nearly 20% clinician response rate to recommendations. - Fax-based outreach had produced a 7% to 9% response rate. - The program eliminated more than 70,000 redundant faxes. - The system also gave visibility into why clinicians declined recommendations. - That feedback can improve quality-measure accuracy, reporting and future intervention design. - Early adopters reported higher-than-expected response rates from healthcare organizations and provided usability feedback to refine the integration. - Bethanie Stein, Pharm.D., president of pharmacy at Humana, said the collaboration simplifies care coordination and may improve medication adherence and patient time. - Laizer Kornwasser, CEO of DrFirst, said the program lets payers and providers collaborate in real time without adding friction for providers.

Between the lines: - The core change is operational, not just technical. - By moving interventions into the prescribing moment, Humana and DrFirst reduce the chance that recommendations get lost in fax queues or acted on too late. - The structured feedback loop also gives payers better data on why recommendations are rejected, which can improve future targeting. - The award signals that interoperability is being measured by practical workflow impact, not only by connectivity.

What's next: - Humana and DrFirst appear positioned to expand the workflow model beyond the initial diabetes and statin use case. - Early usability feedback from healthcare organizations should help refine the integration. - The companies’ prior work suggests more prescription-related workflow tools could follow. - In 2015, the two companies launched the first real-time prescription benefit tool, which showed patient-specific coverage, cost and prior authorization details at the point of prescribing.

The bottom line: - Humana and DrFirst are proving that embedding payer outreach inside prescribing workflows can replace fax-heavy processes with faster, measurable care-gap interventions.