In this Q&A, Founder & CEO Doug Williams talks about why he built Rialtic, the key challenges it’s solving in the healthcare industry, and what’s next for the company.
The healthcare industry is going through a critical time, and we started Rialtic to equip the industry with the transformational technology needed to reduce costs and increase efficiency. I had the great fortune of serving customers for a long time at iHealth Technologies (now Cotiviti) and spent the last few years learning from the industry and seeing how we could serve customers in a new way.
While healthcare represents nearly 20% of GDP (and growing), the system is very complex and the technologies deployed are not modern. This leads to expensive, slow and cumbersome solutions that are difficult to update and adapt to customer needs.
We believe the healthcare system deserves improvement. We are on a mission to build the team and the software to become the platform of choice in healthcare for payers and providers to run their most critical business processes. That’s a big mission, but that’s the impact we want to have.
The industry is made up of a significant number of niche point solutions that exist to solve one or two very narrow problems. Over time, there have been larger consolidators who have combined a lot of niche solutions into a set of solutions. The problem with this approach is that the data is in separate silos, the technology isn’t extensible, and you’re left with one vendor, but disparate underlying solutions.
The feedback we heard from the market is that people have fatigue from costs and the complex landscape of service providers. Vendors have no real incentive to reduce costs, so costs across the industry continue to escalate.
We are an enterprise software platform purpose-built from the ground up. Applying our learnings from our years of experience serving customers in the space, we are bringing a level of transparency and efficiency to the market that has never been seen before. Rialtic was designed with best-in-class architecture and built to be extremely scalable and extensible. We seek to be the platform to empower payers and providers to run their most critical business functions. Our vision is to enable and equip our customers to execute their intention with precision, and experience it in a user friendly, customer value centric way.
One key differentiator is our pricing. We’ve heard from the market that they are tired of static products with high license or contingency fees and feel a lack of alignment. We are taking a different approach to pricing by combining a fixed platform fee with a variable usage fee to drive incremental value as our customers use the product more. Our platform fee provides complete access to our content, capabilities and services with tiers based on our customers’ needs. As we add additional products and features to the platform, the platform fee provides increased value. Our usage fee scales down as our customers add more volume to the platform which gives them more predictability, visibility and transparency.
Our initial focus is on the payment accuracy market — an area of the market we know well from our decades of experience with customers, and one that is desperate for new approaches. However, payment accuracy represents just one piece of the large pie that we are going after. Armed with extensible software, a forward-thinking approach, and a trove of data, we will be well-equipped to become the platform of choice to address many adjacent areas in the surrounding ecosystem, including eligibility and verification, prior authorization, pricing and plan optimization, network solutions, and so much more.
We started the company a year ago with large ambitions and capital from one of the leading investors in healthcare, Oak HC/FT. We now have a team of 50+ across medical policy, engineering, product, design, sales, operations, and talent. We have aggressive product and hiring roadmaps focused on building a world-class product and team to deliver value to our customers. We are also strongly committed to building a diverse and inclusive organization.
The market reception has been very encouraging — we have two launch customers (representing two attractive market segments) and are looking forward to partnering with other forward-thinking organizations as we bring efficiency and intelligence to the market.
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If you want to learn more about what we’re building and how we can deliver value, feel free to reach out! We are attending HLTH this year and would love to set up some time to connect.
PS — we are growing quickly! Check out our job listings here.