Transcript
Eric Ly: That's why we're so passionate about what we're doing. There's a very interesting graph that I saw recently. If you look over the last 50 years or so, the number of healthcare providers in the industry has remained relatively constant. There's been a constant supply of doctors, a constant supply of nurses. But if you look at that same graph and you layer on the number of administrators that are in the healthcare industry, it has gone up like there's no tomorrow. So if you're providing the same amount of care, but your administrative burden is increasing all the time, this is a symptom of runaway costs in the healthcare industry. We're hopefully part of the solution that bends that curve on administrative costs inside of healthcare. And by the way, credentialing is a key process because it's the path to revenue. It's the path to reimbursement. That's how healthcare and health systems get paid for the care that they provide. So if you can have a doctor that can get credentialed that much faster, from six months down to one month, or nurses on a similar level of improvement, that's going to mean more revenue and better care inside of healthcare. The regulations have gotten even more complicated, but the solutions to address the regulations and deal with compliance have not. We want to solve that. Healthcare is a very complicated industry in terms of compliance, but there are other compliance-heavy industries that have the same issues that we could make more efficient. There's a lot of sexy AI in the front office, interviewing candidates when we talk about talent or HR, doing matching, that sort of thing. But I frankly think there's a ton of opportunity that very few people are focused on in terms of applying AI in the back office. When you can take a big chunk off of the administrative costs and processes in the back office, you're going to win as an organization, delivering care and having more revenue, higher margins. Those are the problems that KarmaCheck is attacking.
Matthew Mottola: Let me play that back. Healthcare costs have gone up, we all know that. Looking at the actual providers, the doctors, that's stayed the same. What's boomed is the administrative side. Why? Is this because there are problems and rather than actually solving it, they're just applying more administrators? And I don't think it's going to get better. When I look at AI in recruiting, all the people looking for a job are using AI, all the recruiters are using AI, and we're creating a massive standstill. I think we're only going to see longer times in traditional talent channels. But let me double click on the increased administrators and how that ties to the back office.
Eric Ly: There's a whole bunch of things going on, and I don't claim that I know all the answers. One aspect of healthcare in this country is the fact that a lot of these health systems are nonprofit. The mission of these health systems is good, in that they're really all about delivering care and ensuring that patients heal and recover. But it's not necessarily run with a business mindset around budgets. I do think the health systems in this country have gotten a little bit sloppy and inefficient in terms of letting the administrative burden escalate. There are some other structural things as well. This country has a robust regulatory framework around compliance for healthcare providers, which I think is very good. It's really good. But it has had a consequence of increasing the cost to provide healthcare. Plus the litigious society that we live in doesn't make healthcare cheap either. There's probably a whole bunch of factors. I don't claim to know the single root cause that, if you solve for it, will make everything else better. But in the midst of this, the reality we have to deal with is there's a heavy administrative burden, a lot of reporting that needs to be done. So how do we deal with this? Hopefully we can start untangling one of the threads, one of the key components of how healthcare works in terms of credentialing and revenue cycle management, and pull on that thread and see how far we get. There may be other areas where we could apply AI to continue to bring down the administrative burden and overall make the system more efficient. There are probably more companies that are going to take a piece out of the administrative burden. Hopefully over time we can both work on the efficiency side through technology and work on the regulatory structural side to bring down the cost as well. But it's kind of out of control right now. As a founder and as an owner of a small business, the healthcare premiums continue to go up year over year with less and less coverage. That seems like a very unsustainable model.
