I Built PA-Trace: An On-Device MedGemma Workflow for Prior Authorization
I believe AI can improve humanity . But in healthcare, that future may start with something less glamorous: removing administrative friction . That was the idea behind PA-Trace , my submission to Google Research's MedGemma Impact Challenge on Kaggle , which ran from January 13, 2026 to February 24, 2026 . An estimated $35 billion of annual US healthcare administrative spending is tied to prior-authorization administration, according to a 2024 Health Affairs Scholar paper . In the public PA-Trace Kaggle writeup , I framed one narrow slice of that problem: imaging orders that require staff to dig through unstructured clinic notes, cross-check payer criteria, and assemble a packet that can survive first-pass review. Earlier this year I built Checkstand , a local Gemma 3n submission focused on offline receipt intelligence. PA-Trace came from the same instinct: keep the model close to the data, keep privacy boundaries simple, and solve one w...