A new digital health startup seeking to simplify the surgical referrals process emerged from stealth on Wednesday. The Chicago-based company, named Corvus, helps providers convert more referrals into surgeries through faster patient triage and automated paperwork.
It was initially funded by Redesign Health, a New York City-based company that creates healthcare startups, having spun out more than 60 startups since being founded in 2018. Mayo Clinic is also a strategic investor, as well as the first pilot site for the technology.
The startup aims to replace legacy referral management workflows. One of the biggest bottlenecks in healthcare happens between referral and surgery, pointed out Ian Strug, the Corvus’ founder and CEO.
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“Historically, surgery contributes the majority of a system’s contribution margin, yet less than half of surgical referrals convert to surgery,” he remarked.
Corvus’ platform automates the manual tasks that keep surgical referrals stuck in administrative limbo, such as prior authorization coordination, document retrieval and out-of-pocket cost estimation. The startup’s AI engine also determines patients’ surgical eligibility, Strug explained.
He said the startup’s name was chosen with purpose. Corvus is Latin for “raven,” as well as a constellation in the southern sky.
“In Roman mythology, Apollo punished a raven with this constellation for being too slow to fetch water. In our world, we seek to fetch, summarize, evaluate and present information for our end users as quickly as possible, in the most elegant possible way,” Strug stated.
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He said Corvus’ first target customers are integrated delivery networks and academic medical centers, closely followed by ambulatory surgical centers and surgeons in private practice.
When vying for contracts with these potential customers, Corvus will face competition from care coordination companies like Kyruus and Cohere Health, as well as from companies focused on operating room optimization, such as LeanTaas and Qventus, he noted.
“Overall, our differentiating factors include an approach first based on clinical depth and extreme focus on a singular issue, which holds outsized operational and patient outcomes, and financial ROI, for the system directly. Additionally, the pedigree of our collaboration with Mayo Clinic provides us with unique access to international scale and data rarely seen at this stage of company development,” Strug declared.
He said he is excited for Corvus’ initial pilot at Mayo Clinic to get started, as it will help inform the company how to retool its technology and refine its offerings. The health system will go live with the platform in four different high-volume specialties: orthopedics, spine, bariatrics and general surgery.
If its early pilots prove successful, Corvus could help redefine how hospitals manage one of their most profitable and complex clinical workflows.
Photo: German Adrasti, Getty Images