Independent Voices — Allied Physician & Toolmaker
Dr. Ibrar
Physician · International Medical Graduate · Healthcare-Finance Educator · @ibrarismd
Why He's Here
Dr. Ibrar is a physician who did the math most never finish. After a year in practice, he concluded that the thing standing between a doctor and the patient in front of them was not medicine — it was a prior-authorization apparatus that lets insurers practice medicine without a license. So he stopped practicing in order to fight it, and started building the tools he wished the system already had.
He listens to the patients and clinicians in this fight, and he gives the tools away free. AbilityForge features his work because it meets the standard we hold ourselves to: sourced, careful, and built for the public — not for a brand.
On This Page
Section I
The Choice — One Year In, He Walked Toward the Fight
By his own account, Dr. Ibrar trained as a physician outside the United States — an international medical graduate — and practiced for about a year before reaching a conclusion that reorganized his life: that the system, as built, bars doctors from actually practicing medicine. The clinical decision a physician is trained to make is routinely overruled by a reviewer who has never met the patient, in service of a denial. He decided that the highest-leverage thing he could do was not see one more patient inside that system, but build the technology to dismantle the barrier for all of them.
"I have left everything, even my medical practice, to pursue this. I just need traction so my voice is heard by enough people."
— Dr. Ibrar (@ibrarismd), in conversation
His stated aim is not modest: to relieve the suffering of the roughly 300 million Americans caught in the machinery of healthcare conglomerates — and, specifically, to build tools that let physicians stay financially independent of insurance companies, so that clinical judgment is no longer hostage to a payer's incentives.
Why His Fight and Ours Are the Same Fight
Physician independence is the human-scale version of the structural problem AbilityForge documents: when the entity that pays is vertically integrated with the entities that deliver, employ, and regulate care, the doctor in the room loses authority over the decision. Dr. Ibrar attacks it from the clinician's side; the Lewin and Playbook work attacks it from the regulatory-capture side.
Section II · The Centerpiece
The Tool — Prior Authorization Accountability
His flagship build, Prior Authorization Accountability, does something the policy debate has badly needed: it makes the cost of delay measurable, transparently, using nothing but published sources. It takes a health plan's own reported decision-and-appeal turnaround times — the figures insurers must now disclose under the federal interoperability rule (CMS-0057-F) — and maps them onto a peer-reviewed dose-response mortality curve to produce an estimated excess-mortality risk, shown with a 95% confidence interval.
~10%
Higher relative risk of death associated with each four-week delay in starting cancer treatment, across common treatment types.
Hanna et al., BMJ 2020 (meta-analysis, 34 studies, 1.2M patients)
29%
of physicians report prior authorization led to a serious adverse event — hospitalization, disability, or death — for a patient in their care.
AMA 2024 Prior Authorization Physician Survey
7%
of radiation oncologists say prior authorization has led to or contributed to a patient's death.
ASTRO 2024 Prior Authorization Survey
Why It's Built Right
The tool is disciplined where it counts: it estimates population-level relative risk from a plan's published delay data — it never claims a named company "killed" anyone or caused a specific death. Estimates are labeled as estimates, intervals that cross 1.0 are flagged as indistinguishable from zero, the full methodology is published, and every figure carries a citable source. It is, in its own words, "not medical or legal advice." That restraint is exactly why it is citable — and exactly the standard AbilityForge holds.
Explore the Tool
The Calculator
Enter a real delay length and indication; get an excess-mortality multiplier with a 95% CI.
Insurer Dashboard
Published plan delay figures side by side, each row carrying its source.
The Evidence
The underlying peer-reviewed findings, with sources.
Methodology & Limitations
How the estimate is built — and what it does not claim.
The Real-World Case Behind the Math
The model is not abstract for the people on this site. The founder of AbilityForge lost a leg to exactly this mechanism — years of denied and delayed care that the calculator's logic would have flagged as rising risk in real time.
Michael Kissling — Prior Knowledge Omission →Section III
Know Your Options — A Calm Front Door
His second project is patient-facing: a calm front door to the U.S. healthcare maze — pick your problem, get a short, ranked list of trusted tools and next steps. It's the consumer companion to the accountability model: one quantifies the harm, the other helps a person caught in it find their next move.
Heads up — in beta
This one is new and actively being rebuilt — Dr. Ibrar is migrating it off its first working domain to a more permanent home, so treat the current link as a preview that may move.
Know Your Options (beta) →Section IV
The Bigger Build — Physician Independence
The calculators are the visible edge of a larger thesis. Dr. Ibrar's longer-term work is a technology — currently in development — intended to let physicians stay financially independent of insurance companies, designed so that the system "cannot take it down even with influence." The aim is durability: a piece of infrastructure that doesn't depend on any single platform's goodwill or any company's permission to keep working.
That instinct — build it so it can't be quietly bought, throttled, or captured — is the same one that runs through this whole site. A protection that depends on the goodwill of the party it constrains isn't a protection.
"I want it all and everything fixed. I am sure this is solvable."
— Dr. Ibrar (@ibrarismd)
This project is pre-launch and not yet publicly available; we'll link it here once it's live and stable.
Section V
Follow the Work
Instagram · @ibrarismd
"Dr Ibrar MD | Healthcare Finance" — short, sharp explainers on prior auth, EOBs, private equity in medicine, and the denial economy.
X · @ibrarhere
His feed on X — the same fight, in real time.
Prior Authorization Accountability
The sourced excess-mortality model — calculator, insurer dashboard, evidence, and methodology.
Know Your Options · beta
A calm front door to the healthcare maze — pick your problem, get a short ranked list of trusted tools and steps. (Being rebranded.)
A Note on This Feature
Dr. Ibrar's projects are independently created and run by him; AbilityForge features them as allied public resources and neither controls nor hosts them. Biographical details here reflect his own public account. His prior-authorization model presents estimates — clearly labeled as estimates, with confidence intervals and sources — not assertions about any individual death. We link the work because the work is sound.