Medline connects customer records in real time to improve contract pricing accuracy

Beyond RPA: robots, agents, and people working as one

Contract pricing and chargebacks depend on knowing exactly which customer is buying, but hospitals and healthcare providers do not share a single, consistent identifier. Medline manages 10 million customer contract connections each month using data from more than 1,000 vendors, each with its own formatting and conventions. 

Medline relied on fuzzy logic, manual review, and robotic process automation (RPA) updates to match customer records. Increasing volume and complexity drove the need for agentic automation. After eight years of building automation maturity, from its first UiPath robot for invoice posting in 2018 to an enterprise center of excellence, Medline expanded its approach with AI agents on the UiPath Platform™. 

UiPath Robots prepare and filter each vendor file for agent analysis. An agent built with Agent Builder in UiPath Studio then uses the Batch Transform tool to process vendor records in bulk, running web searches and rules-based analysis to find matches RPA can’t make, such as a hospital system listed under an abbreviated name or a legal entity listed under a different business name. The agent documents the evidence behind each recommendation, while people review uncertain cases and robots complete the final system updates. 

This combination allows Medline to automate straightforward matches while directing people’s attention to the exceptions that require judgment. 

We’re not looking at it as a headcount replacement strategy. We’re looking at it as an opportunity to give our team members the tools they need to get their jobs done and focus on the things that are more value-add.

Sarah Stokes · Director, Business Process Improvement, Supply Chain Solutions at Medline

Since going live in March 2026, the agents have resolved 79% of the records that RPA could not match, connecting those customers to their expected contract pricing in real time.

Getting there took months of close collaboration with UiPath to fine-tune the agent’s prompts and results. The volume of incoming data was another challenge. UiPath product engineering sped up the release of a new Batch Transform capability, which greatly improved the solution’s performance and made it possible to run the agent daily to keep up.

Building on that first success, Medline has identified six more agentic use cases, with production launches planned throughout 2027. The work earned Medline a Silver Award in the 2026 GeekWire AI Breakthrough Awards, presented at UiPath FUSION 2026.

UiPath matched our intensity to solve the biggest problems that are in front of us. That’s what we need—vendors who can match our intensity to drive us to be better tomorrow than we are today.

Billy Abrams · Executive Vice President, Supply Chain Solutions at Medline

Outcomes

• Real-time pricing: records the agents resolve now connect customers to expected pricing in real time instead of days 

• Audit-ready decisions: every match includes documented evidence and a source trail for resolving vendor disputes

• Room to scale: daily agent runs now keep pace with the volume of incoming vendor data

Additional resources

GeekWire recognizes this year’s boldest AI and automation breakthroughs by UiPath customers—see Medline among the 2026 Silver Award winners