Electronic Health Reporter

Availity, the nation’s largest healthcare network connecting payers, providers, and technology partners, today unveiled Availity Extend, a new way to build automation and AI on the Availity network. Availity Extend lets organizations securely empower automated workflows by leveraging Availity’s existing connectivity, payer integrations, and trusted security framework, coordinating execution with live network data and logic, rather than relying on copied or externalized data.

With AI and automation already widely deployed across healthcare operations, the real constraint is not intelligence, but whether those systems can execute across governed, real?world workflows. Fragmentation—critical information and decision logic spread across organizations and systems that must remain tightly aligned—continues to limit scale, speed, and reliability. Automation only works at scale when it operates with full context and within trusted frameworks.

With Availity Extend, automation operates within existing identity, security, and compliance frameworks, with full auditability by design.

“AI in healthcare can’t stay confined to individual systems—it needs to operate across the workflows that directly connect payers, providers, and partners,” said Russ Thomas, Chief Executive Officer of Availity. “Availity Extend is designed to make that possible in a way that reflects how healthcare actually works: across organizations, within trusted frameworks, and at national scale.”

Making the Network Buildable

For more than 25 years, Availity has provided the neutral trust layer connecting payers and providers across core operational workflows, powering more than half of all U.S. healthcare activity each year. Today, the Availity network directly connects more than 4,000 payers and 3.5 million providers, with direct connectivity into payer systems,  providing deeper access to payer logic, earlier in the workflow, where decisions can be made more accurately and efficiently.

Availity Extend builds on that foundation by providing a governed, network-connected way to develop and orchestrate automation across the Availity network. Through a standardized activation layer, payers and technology partners can coordinate end?to?end automation and agent?driven workflows in alignment with existing network logic, connectivity, and controls.

“Organizations across healthcare are investing heavily in automation and AI,” said Sean Barrett, Chief Product Officer of Availity. “Availity Extend allows those investments to focus on real operational outcomes—without recreating foundational connectivity or governance.”

What Differentiates Availity Extend

• Coordinated workflows, not point?to?point APIs. Availity Extend enables end?to?end execution that maintains context across payer and provider workflows—producing completed outcomes rather than disconnected data exchanges.
• Live network context, not replicated data. Because Availity Extend coordinates with live network data and logic, workflows stay aligned with real?time requirements and controls already enforced across the Availity network. Organizations can coordinate eligibility, authorization, clinical data, claims, and payment steps within a single automated workflow—without expanding access or introducing new data permissions.
• Intelligence that compounds over time. Organizations that build on Availity Extend benefit from network?level insights that accumulate with use—informing automated and AI?driven workflows across real healthcare interactions.
• Security and governance by design. All automation runs within Availity’s existing security, identity, and governance framework—the same framework that governs more than half of U.S. healthcare administrative transactions each year.

Looking Ahead

Availity Extend marks a shift from connecting healthcare systems to enabling real action by making the Availity network buildable, allowing automation and AI, including agent?driven workflows, to move from isolated use cases to coordinated, system?level execution, where governance, context and trust are enforced by design. Availity Extend is how that future becomes real.

Availity Extend is being rolled out with an initial set of content and customers in the first half of 2026, with broader availability planned later in the year.