San Francisco-based Alpha Health received $20 million in Series A funding, the company reported June 10.
The company provides Unified Automation, a single solution for revenue cycle management, to health systems across the U.S. Unified Automation is an artificial intelligence platform that uses proprietary machine-learning technologies, human judgment and subject matter experts to make revenue cycles more efficient and effective.
"We developed Unified Automation by deriving core principles from other industries where machine learning has successfully automated complex tasks, such as driverless cars," said Varun Ganapathi, PhD, chief technology officer and co-founder at Alpha Health, in a press release. "Unified Automation is a new category of solution which combines human oversight with machine learning. It continually improves and gains new skills as it encounters novel situations, which often occurs due to the complex and highly variable nature of revenue cycle management in healthcare."
The company uses HIPAA- and HITRUST-compliant web and cloud services and encrypts data in transit and at rest. It works with all EHR systems and can be deployed remotely. The company has now raised $25 million and has an eye on the future.
"Alpha Health is focused on expanding our footprint with health system customers in the U.S. and continuing our product development to fully automate activities across the revenue cycle function," Co-founder and CEO Malinka Walaliyadde told Becker's. "Unified Automation supports revenue cycle teams in a number of ways that are particularly important as organizations navigate the financial and operational impacts of the pandemic. In particular Unified Automation provides RCM teams with improved staffing flexibility to withstand volatility; business continuity to withstand operational shocks; cost restructuring via a shared savings model and transparent, upfront pricing; and, fully remote capabilities to deploy while social distancing."
During the pandemic, the volatile market led many healthcare organizations to experience understaffing or overstaffing; in the future, organizations could use automation to quickly scale staffing up or down depending on demand. It can also help with a future rapid transition to remote work, such as what occurred during the pandemic. Alpha Health's data showed that revenue cycle staff output fell by up to 40 percent during the transition to remote work.