“My mom was passionate and happy for the first 35 years of her career,” says Silna Health’s co-founder & CEO Jeffrey Morelli, the son of a nurse who delivered care in numerous specialty areas and healthcare facilities over the course of 40 years – including on staff at a ski hill, in the newborn ICU and as a Diabetes Care Coordinator. “For the remaining five years, she was frustrated with the increasingly complex system that left care providers to tackle mountains of paperwork after hours, or fight an uphill battle for pay and patient advocacy.”

Jeff’s mom is far from alone. Millions of Americans consider healthcare broken – and, in Silna’s view, a persistent lack of trust is the fundamental challenge facing providers (doctors, nurses, clinical specialists, medical researchers, staff), as well as patients and insurance companies.

Doctors are drowning in paperwork to prove to insurance companies that the treatments they’re trained to recommend are necessary. The American Hospital Association cites administrative costs as more than 40% of total hospital expenses incurred in delivering care to patients, who feel the downstream effects as they navigate medical visit logistics, forms, delays in care and surprise bills. They lack trust that insurers have their best interests in mind and share many doctors’ feelings that the healthcare system is stacked against them. Prior authorization delays have reached crisis levels, with the American Medical Association reporting that 93% of physicians say insurance barriers have led to patient harm.

At the same time, insurers must strike a high-stakes balance in determining what medical care is necessary amid rising prices. Federal laws cap health insurance profits, and sustaining losses means raising premiums to cover costs and making insurance more expensive for everyone.

Across the board, trust is at a premium in an industry where people’s lives hang in the balance. Silna launched with one goal: To become the only viable, trustworthy AI solution for healthcare customers navigating data verification, regulations and opaque insurance claim processes in order to even begin providing patient care.

“If you actually want to solve a fundamental problem, it's important to be nuanced about why it's happening,” says Jeff. “In healthcare specifically, there's no long-term answer in demonizing any party. Silna wants to be a productive and sustainable solution built around earning trust and helping people approve, deliver and receive care without complexity.”

Meet the Founders: Jeff, Pavel and Sagar are Builders Applying Product Expertise to Shipping Healthcare Innovation with a Human Touch

Silna’s Team Combines AI and Data to Automate Paperwork Hurdles

Doctors have been burned before by products that overpromise and underdeliver. In contrast, Silna Health is starting by taking the single, particularly difficult problem of prior authorizations and delivering a solution that early doctor users describe as “simple, efficient and, frankly, long overdue.” Jeff, along with co-founders Pavel Asparouhov and Sagar Jajoo, are not only shipping a sophisticated AI-driven platform, we believe they’re building a high-trust team centered around customer relationships and personal connection to the shortcomings of a healthcare system.

Silna’s name itself is a tribute to healthcare workers. It comes from Pavel’s native language, Bulgarian, and means “strong.” The team knows they, too, will need fortitude to deliver meaningful impact to the behemoth healthcare industry.

Prior to Silna, Pavel, Jeff and Sagar have each been instrumental in bringing reliable, industry-informed products to market across finance, customer verification and billing.

Pavel was a neighborhood friend of Jeff’s during their teen years in Utah. He was passionate enough about building products to drop out of Berkeley two years in, working in fintech and getting promoted quickly while building AI upgrades into Ramp’s popular expense management product. Not surprisingly, Pavel was named a Thiel Fellow last year.

Sagar previously worked with Jeff at Truework, an income and employment verification platform, where he was the first PM and built the product organization. Previously, Sagar managed Blend’s suite of financial tech services and gained an understanding of how to apply tech-enabled products to solving real-world problems.

Jeff, Sagar and Pavel believe that building for a complex and challenging industry like healthcare requires a company like Silna to facilitate open communication and a culture of trust. An energetic and empathetic founder, Jeff makes it a point to ask everyone – literally could be a neighbor, relative, job candidate or the barista at Starbucks – for ideas on how to improve the company. And, most importantly, he acts on productive ideas quickly.

At the end of every new hire’s first week, Jeff holds a one-on-one meeting with them and asks for one thing that should be changed to better the company. A new PM once suggested that he should sit next to the engineering team instead of across the office so that they could collaborate more closely and in real-time. Jeff agreed and rearranged the desks then and there himself.

Leading data partnerships at Truework, Jeff spent every day working with multiple organizations to support the management, collection and analyses of sensitive data tied to finances. The job’s requirements led Jeff to realize that the answers to decades-long unanswered questions across industries from finance to healthcare could be found in existing data – and in teaching AI to understand complex, often overlapping processes. When Jeff and Sagar were at Truework, their mandate was verifying every piece of employee information. Together with Pavel, they’re applying those same principles – and AI – to provider admin workflows.

All three Silna founders believe you need open and honest communication internally as much as you do externally with customers and partners. It’s how you improve while earning, then keeping stakeholder trust.

Pre-Authorization Opens the Door to Improving the Entire System

Over the past decade, health insurance has evolved to requiring approvals before care is delivered. Silna is pioneering “front-end” revenue cycle management (RCM) to the benefit of doctors, patients and insurers.

The startup is also working with an impressive list of customers including a senior living facility with locations in 48 states, one of the largest pelvic therapy providers in the country and some of the fastest growing healthcare technology companies in the space. Notably, 25% of new customers come from provider referrals – doctors, nurses and medical staff who want to be the first to share the productivity gains they’ve achieved with Silna.

Setting up a legacy platform for RCM previously took months for busy healthcare organizations, whereas setting up Silna takes minutes. If a patient’s prior authorization request gets denied, Silna quickly corrects and re-submits the claim if denial is due to administrative issues, or it escalates to providers for medical necessity concerns that require peer-to-peer reviews or appeals.

Jeff and the team at Silna have already succeeded in automating insurance approvals that typically require 4-5 staff members per medical practice – helping healthcare providers redirect resources from paperwork to patient care. Since launch, the platform has reduced the time required for pre-visit processes like insurance verification from 30 minutes to 30 seconds. For patients with conditions requiring ongoing therapy, this can mean the difference between starting treatment immediately or facing dangerous delays.

Silna relies on AI to ensure that things move quickly and accurately, with a human touch to navigate the most complex scenarios – and more fully shoulder the administrative burden on behalf of providers. This human touch is critical to many functions that Silna plans to scale to automate for healthcare customers in the months and years to come.

“If I can work with Pavel and Sagar to create a platform that becomes a healthcare CFO’s most useful and trusted solution through dedicated customer relationship building and white glove technical support – starting with revenue cycle management – we’ll be on our way to building trust needed to tackle more macro problems facing the entire industry, from billing to administrative costs, on an organization-wide scale.”

Establishing this baseline of trust internally helps Jeff and his team swiftly develop a strong reputation among doctors who then recommend Silna to peers. In addition to successfully reducing admin costs and facilitating more efficient RCM for customers, Silna’s team is already being asked to take on other elements of the patient and doctor experience, such as improving billing and adapting intake to ensure accurate information is captured while excess paperwork is avoided.

Looking ahead, we believe Jeff, Pavel, Sagar and their growing team have what it takes to scale functionality to more complex, paperwork-intensive processes for patients, doctors and insurers. Along the way, they are building up to something improbable that could be even more extraordinary – getting patients, doctors and insurers to trust each other and work towards a common goal of better health outcomes for all.