A little less than two years after raising its seed round, the Israeli-based Nym Health has added another $16.5 million to its cash haul so it can roll out its technology developing auditable machine learning tools for automating hospital billing.
The new financing came from investors including GV (the investment arm of Google previously known as Google Ventures) and will be used by the company to expand its technology development and sales and marketing efforts across the U.S.
Billing has been a huge problem for healthcare systems in the U.S., thanks to complicated coding that needs to be entered to ensure insurance providers pay for the services medical professionals give to patients.
Nym claims to have solved the problem by developing technologies that can convert medical charts and electronic medical records from physician’s consultations into proper billing codes automatically. The company uses natural language processing and taxonomies that were specifically developed to understand clinical language to determine the optimal charge for each procedure, examination and diagnostic conducted for a patient, according to Nym.
The company was founded in 2018 by two former members of Israel’s 8200 cybersecurity unit of the army. Adam Rimon and Amihai Neiderman both wanted to work on something together and Neiderman was set on doing something in the medical space involving natural language processing. Rimon had just finished a doctorate in computational linguistics so the move into charting and medical coding seemed natural.
“Because of our approach we can generate full audit trails,” said Neiderman. “We can explain how we understood everything in patient charts.”
Having automated processes that are also auditable is important for healthcare providers in case they need to provide justification to insurance companies for the services they performed.
Nym’s software can’t address fraud if physicians are padding their bills with services they didn’t offer, but it can provide an audit and justification for the services that a hospital coded for — and potentially wring more money for hospitals that lose out thanks to improperly coded bills. “On the medical decision-making we never intervene. We assume that the physician is trying to do their best and they’re sticking to the protocol,” said Neiderman.
Interest in developing better billing systems for healthcare is high among venture investors, considering that coding related denials of payment can cost hospitals $15 billion, according to Nym. It’s a service that brought attention not just from GV, but of Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop Capital, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, and angel investors including Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner from Flatiron Health.
“Inaccurate coding is bad for everybody,” says Ben Robbins, a venture partner at GV.
Nym charges between $1 and $4 per chart it analyzes, and is already working with around 40 medical providers in the U.S., according to the company.