HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I lead marketing and account services for Sift Healthcare. I formally was the VP of Sales and Marketing at Okanjo, an ad-tech and eCommerce startup. I also led marketing at REV Group, and led the white label program at GoDaddy.com. At Sift, I help translate our technology (powerful machine learning integrations) into achievable programs for our healthcare organization partners.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
My startup is Sift Healthcare. Sift provides healthcare organizations with a Payments Intelligence Platform that demystifies their payments by integrating machine learning into their revenue cycle workflows to optimize payment outcomes and drive revenue strategy.
What is the origin story?
Sift was founded in 2017 by our CEO, Justin Nicols. In the course of launching a healthcare payments app, he realized that the revenue cycle offered tons of data around payments and that healthcare providers were largely not leveraging this data to improve performance. Justin pivoted the payments app into a data and analytics platform -- specifically for healthcare payments.
Sift’s core data science and analytics team hails from LexisNexis and since its founding, Sift has raised $7M and grown the team to 30 employees.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
The Sift Team brings vast experience to healthcare payments. Our SVP of Analytics, Ken Cunningham, pioneered the use of predictive modeling in insurance risk. The talent level at Sift is sky high, but we’re located in the Midwest. For a Milwaukee, WI startup, we have world-class talent that is making real progress in transforming healthcare payments (20% of GDP).
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Success is measured in the current healthcare provider contracts/agreements, the volume of claims scored, and the volume of patient accounts scored.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Sift has pilots underway with seven multi-billion dollar US health systems. We are excited to be launching with some of the biggest and most innovative health networks in the country.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
We are most excited about the potential for using machine learning to optimize the complete revenue cycle. Specifically, we’re excited at the prospect of combining clinical data with payments data to help healthcare providers in their mission to provide price transparency and value-based care. We’re most worried about technology fatigue in the healthcare industry. Many healthcare providers have invested millions in solutions (like RPA) that have had little effect on their bottom line. We are challenged to educate our prospects on what AI really means on where/how it will be valuable for them.
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