At one point, Gurrieri and a newly hired colleague figured out what the insurance giant Humana needed to hear about prior medications to release the money for Subsys. Gurry then asked them to retrieve all the Humana rejections from the file cabinet and try again. This time they had the magic words and hit paydirt. Gurrieri’s growing team of “prior-authorization specialists” began to keep track of the magic words for particular insurance plans on a shared computer file and on sheets of paper tacked up in their cubicles.
