Congratulations to @AssistIQ, winner of the Health Care Operations category in Newsweek's inaugural AI Impact Health Awards.

But Forge goes beyond operations. It carries one encounter from the first phone call to the operating room, so the schedule, the authorization and the care never drift apart.

A patient sits at the kitchen table a week before surgery, typing authorization details from an insurer's letter into their phone.

The next morning those details are waiting at the practice, beside the appointment they belong to. A staff member starts comparing. On the patient's phone, the status reads awaiting verification.

Do the details match what the insurer actually approved? Nobody has checked yet.

It sounds like paperwork. For the patient, it decides whether surgery happens on the day they've arranged their life around.

Federal rules now treat that timing as a care issue. On January 17, 2024, CMS released its Interoperability and Prior Authorization Final Rule, CMS-0057-F. Starting January 1, 2026, impacted payers must return decisions within 72 hours for urgent requests and seven calendar days for standard ones.

Faster answers help patients only if the practice is organized to catch them. When scheduling, authorization and clinical documentation live in different systems, every handoff is a place where information can stall. A decision arrives, but the person who needs to act on it is looking somewhere else, and the patient finds out at the front desk.

Forge is built to remove those handoffs. Registration, scheduling, preauthorization tied to the schedule, check-in and routing to the right specialty all happen on one encounter. If the visit becomes surgery, ASC and Continuum carry that same encounter into the operating room. The details the patient typed at the kitchen table sit on it too, where a person verifies them and the patient sees the result in Companion.

There's a quieter point here for anyone thinking about where lasting value sits in operations technology. In most practices, the schedule, the authorization, the clinical record and the claim are kept in separate places and reconciled after the fact. Here they are one encounter from start to finish. The authorization that cleared the surgery, the documentation of what was done and the claim that follows all describe the same event, so they stay in agreement without anyone stitching them together. That consistency is what makes an operation dependable at scale, whether a practice has one location or twenty.

Operations rarely sounds like patient care, but it decides whether care happens on time.

So when you look at any operations technology, ask one question. When an answer arrives from a payer, does it reach the patient before the patient reaches the front desk?