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 Today in Health it, the story is circular. A new approach to Medicaid using the tech of a digital health startup. Unicorn, all of ai. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. And engaged Today Health Lyrics is my company.

I develop a quarterly state of the Health IT report that I can deliver to your team. These insights can help your leadership team, sales team, even your development team. Stay ahead of the emerging trends in Health it. For more information, check out health lyrics.com. All right. Today's story with 50 million Circular will tackle Medicaid insurance using Olive AI's Tech.

This is from Mobile Health News. It's from February 22nd. I'm going back a little bit because this really just made its way to my feeds, and I'm starting to read some stuff about it. So let give you a little context from the story. Circular is still very much in its early days. Its public presence so far is a sparse homepage that connects to a LinkedIn page and an email address.

For interested job seekers billing itself as the future of Medicaid, the company said, and in its funding announcement that it is looking to disrupt the Medicaid managed care space by bringing bold new approaches and internet scale technology to Medicaid 75 million members. It goes on. What's noteworthy about it is the startup is its connection to Olive, an artificial intelligence unicorn that automates tedious high volume administrative tasks for healthcare organizations.

Per the announcement, Circulos business will be built on the back of Olive AI's tech platform, providing the young InsureTech company. With automation intelligence, network tools, and AI coworker technologies, all of Circulos initial investors already hold positions in Olive. What's more Olive's? CEO. Sean Lane will also be holding the reins of the new tech driven push into the Medicaid space.

Sean has been a guest on this week in health it. We interviewed him at one of the conferences and he is an engaging. Individual Circulo is going to use Olive's unique platform to build the Medicaid insurance company of the future from scratch, right here in Columbus, Ohio. Alright, that's all from the article.

And they're right. There isn't a lot of stuff out there, which is interesting. You might wonder, why am I even talking about this at this point? 'cause I think there is a significant So what here? So let's start with this if you're not familiar with it. All of ai, we did the show, we interviewed Sean. It's a, it's an automation platform at scale, right?

So it started out build as an RPA platform and it automated these mundane tasks a lot around billing and, and those kinda things. But then it, it sort of grew into other areas. Within the healthcare ecosystem, and they're really integrated pretty tightly into the desktop around the healthcare delivery organizations that use them.

They're about somewhere between 600, 700 health systems around the country are using them, so they provide automation at scale. What they did recently was they were able to pull the information of the health systems to create even greater leverage. And it's not necessarily that the information gets shared and meshed together, but what they're doing is they have a working agreement amongst the organizations that are utilizing the platform to share intelligence.

All right? So as the tools get more sophisticated, they're able to find intelligence from the platform without sharing the data across . The various health systems, but they're able to share that intelligence across the health system. So that becomes very powerful. You're talking about petabytes of data, which is growing at a rate of about three terabytes a day.

So this thing is gonna get smarter and smarter. It's at scale. It's already in about 700 health systems across the country, and it's going all the way down to the desktop of the providers. All right, so you have that platform and then what you have is Olive is building itself as a platform that startups can use to build multi-billion dollar companies.

And so they have a not talked about much fund around that where they're gonna fund some startups, but they really need to prove out the concept. So they come up with this idea of circular, which is a new company raises $50 million right out of the gate. Same. Set of investors and what they're looking at is.

Can they change the way Medicaid is done from the ground up? And if the concept is to eliminate waste and to provide a high level automation, can you think of a better target than Medicaid to go after? They are going to be able to really change the way that claims are done, the way that the automation is done, the way that a clearinghouse is done, the way that the payers and providers interact around that transaction.

So this is a $50 million proof of concept, which is gonna be really fun. They're gonna prove that Olive can support companies and building out of companies on top of this significant amount of data at scale. With these technologies at scale, you'll be able to scale your company up very quickly because of their scale.

That's the power of a platform. I think this is interesting for me. Because we are always talking about developing breakthrough technologies on top of the EHR, and there's so many limitations and there's so many costs of doing it. And now what you're looking at is a non EMR centric way of doing this.

You know, it's agnostic, it's universal. It can bring in information from a lot of different sources, and it layers on that intelligence, the, the AI and the machine learning. The, the, uh, computer vision and all the things that all of AI brings to the table. And it's a really interesting way for innovators to look at this instead of having to, to weave their way through the maze that is the EMR, and getting all that information and even building up a lot of that tech that we're talking about.

The tech is gonna be there for you to build on and you can go out solving the problems that are facing healthcare and the insurance providers as well. And really start to fill those gaps that exist within healthcare with highly automated, highly sophisticated, highly intelligent solutions. I think the so what around this is, this has the potential for being a game changer.

Now we are, we're probably about two years out from naming them as a game changer, but this is definitely one to keep an eye on and definitely a different approach. To addressing the challenges of healthcare. I, I think if nothing else, it's really interesting to take a greenfield approach at the challenges that, that face Medicaid, the, the growing costs, the shrinking budgets for states across the board, the, uh, growing administrative burden, the denials and all the challenges.

In terms of the experience, it's interesting to take a greenfield approach at Medicaid. And see if we can't do something really exciting. All right, that's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

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