Interview drill 05Interview-style design round
Prior-authorisation requests that are complete on first submission
- 45 minutes
- Elective · Healthcare
- No real companies
Hypothetical. No affiliation with or endorsement by the companies named. Public facts as of 6 October 2026; sources at the end of the brief.
The prompt
"You're the forward deployed engineer for an AI vendor. Your customer is a US health system: four hospitals and a large outpatient imaging and surgery business. Its prior-authorisation team sends thousands of requests a month to dozens of health plans. Too many come back pended for missing or mismatched documentation, and every round trip pushes care back by days. The chief revenue officer wants requests complete on the first submission. The chief medical officer has two conditions: the tool never decides whether a service is covered or medically necessary, and nothing goes to a plan without a named person approving it. Tell me how you'd find out why requests fail, what you'd build, how it fits the coordinators' and clinicians' day, and how you'd prove it worked."
The clock
- Clarify0–5 min
- Discovery plan5–15 min
- Design15–30 min
- Risks and evals30–40 min
- Rollout and the ask40–45 min
Lessons for this drill
Pro drill
The rest of this drill is in Pro.
What to know going in, the curveballs on the clock, a strong answer, the common mistakes and the rubric.
- Every stage and specialisation, in full
- Every lab and every role project
- Halden weeks 2–10, on your record
- Every drill, live in the playground
- All solutions, plus the server judge
- Lab Assistant and every Teach with AI