Founders: Amber Nigam, Jie Sun
Founding: 2022
Mission: Enabling health plans and health systems to maximize their financial performance through making processes like prior authorization and utilization management data-driven
Employees: 10
Workplace: Flexible
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & <$3M
Key Customers: Mayo Clinic, Joslin Diabetes Center along with a major hospital in Boston
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Basys is “software for healthcare pre-authorization”. Started in 2022 by healthtech veterans Amber Nigam & Jie Sun, the duo met at Harvard’s data science program and incubated the company out of Harvard’s iLab. These entrepreneurs are on a mission to help drive scalable impact by stripping out some of the massive inefficiency in our healthcare system using artificial intelligence.
Basys is a “plug and play” software platform meant to help automate prior authorization for payers on behalf of providers. Don’t worry, I had to wrap my head around that too. Our great American healthcare system, representing almost 20% of GDP, is more or less a marketplace with payers (insurance companies) on one side and providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) on the other side. The doctors (providers) do the medical work on the patients and bill the insurance companies (payers). You with me?
Today there’s a lot of legacy software, people, and rule based processes that go into facilitating prior authorization for treatment between payers and providers. Basys is building a software company to help automate payer prior authorization using more intelligent prediction to help provide proper care today in order to help mitigate larger health problems (and costs) later.
There’s the simple use case of authorizing physical therapies, surgeries, and drug prescriptions with better rules based prediction methodologies. Basys is determined to train algorithms that can better predict (and even prevent) chronic disease, muscular & surgical needs, and overall cardiometabolic health – leading indicators of diabetes, for example – by authorizing and recommending specific treatments sooner, saving everyone involved time & money. Basys is also expanding its prior authorization platform to MSK and surgery. Treatment for diabetes alone costs healthcare companies $327B annually.
Payer authorization is a pathway for Basys to become a product for “utilization management” or a platform that can better determine which health services and procedures should be authorized for which patients based upon sophisticated deep learning models.
They already have some impressive traction just 15 months in. They’ve spun up partnerships with the Mayo Clinic (via the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate), Joslin Diabetes Center along with a major hospital in Boston. Basys estimates customers will see 5x ROI using Basys with differentiated IP on the way. Their advisors are James Roosevelt, former CEO of Tufts Health Plan and John Brooks III, Founder of Insulet and former CEO of Joslin Diabetes Center.
Operators to Know (Locally):
- Matthew Multari, Business Development
- Miles Moody, Strategy
- Xiyu Yang, Data Scientist
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Basys team I’m sure I missed some up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
- Chief Commercial Officer
- Data Science Lead
- Senior Data Scientist
- Careers page here
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
- What are the most important things to understand about the healthcare system that Basys can help solve?
- What are the key milestones you’re looking to achieve in the coming months?
- What are the critical hires you’ll be making in the coming months?
- How do you think about building products and solutions for payers vs. providers?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Basys you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more healthcare payers into the digital age. All policyholders applaud your efforts. See you around Cambridge!