Healthcare providers across the country are stumbled into the red as they struggle to cope with ongoing financial pressures, including narrowing reimbursement rates and climbing supply costs.
This week, a startup that provides a technology platform could help providers better manage their financial situation, raising millions of dollars to help resolve the crisis. The New York City-based company, known as Translucent AI, raised $7 million in a seed round that includes investors NEA, Virtue, FPV Ventures and Redesign Sealth.
Translucent CEO Jack O'Hara said the startup was founded last year and his name stems from its founder's belief that healthcare's financial business should be clear and actionable.
“Most healthcare financing teams are buried at the level of complexity and manual work, which is hardly visible to see true driving performance. Translucency is about cutting fog. Our AI is more than surface data, which makes people have clear meaning for once hidden decisions that once were hidden behind dissemination, dashboards, dashboards and disconnected systems,” he said.
He added that most healthcare financing teams are overwhelmed and spend most of their time trying to find and clean up the data instead of analyzing the data or using it to make better decisions.
The translucent financial analytics platform not only uses AI to track the financial status of the provider’s various service lines, but also allows hospital leaders to ask questions – almost like Chatgpt on provider finance.
For example, the platform could answer such as “What is the biggest driver of orthopedic spending this month?” or, “How does our portfolio of payers affect our profit lines?” O’Hara explains.
“Transparent is like having a dedicated 24/7 financial analyst who immediately understands the unique data and structure of your healthcare organization.Transparent translates this bland problem into smart data queries, and our AI pulls from multiple systems like your general ledger, revenue cycle, EHR and payer contracts to find the right answer,” he announced.
He also stressed that the platform remembers specific terms, logic and past conversations from each organization, so it becomes smarter over time.
As for translucent competitors, O'Hara admits there are many companies out there that are expected to improve financial management of providers. He said some offer old financial planning tools that did not consider healthcare design, while others offer enterprise resource planning systems that are not intended to take advantage of AI.
“Most of these platforms are targeted at financial power users or people who are fluent in spreadsheets and financial modeling, but not the wider team. Translucency is different because it is built for health care and is built for non-teenage users,” O'Hara said.
Whether translucency can help the troubled provider trend remains to be seen, but its supporters bet that clearer financial insights could mean deeper into the difference between red and finding a path to sustainable development.
