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June 30, 2020 at 02:35 AM
Zipari Inc. tries to reduce health insurers’, and other health care system players’, need to think about their computers.
The Brooklyn, New York-based company has its computers pull data and rules from a corporate customer’s computers, or from other computers, then shampoos the information, combs it, conditions it, puts a bow on it, and uses automatic recommendation tools to push it out onto the right computer or mobile device screen, at just the right time.
Mark Nathan, the founder and chief executive officer of the Brooklyn, New York-based insurtech company would rather not talk about how much data his company has on its computers, or what kind of artificial intelligence algorithms it’s using to inhale and channel information, but about how well the system dashboards look and work.
A typical health insurer, for example, might have a customer service representative who has to log on to 20 to 30 different computers to help the customers.
“There’s a lot of things that are going on,” Nathan said last week in interview. “We get all of the data from all of the other processes.”
Zipari has other systems that aim to perform similar acts of data taming for health care providers, provider search directories, employers, health plan direct-to-consumer selling systems, and health plan broker portals.
Nathan himself earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Colorado Boulder.
He started out working as a robotics engineer at NASA, from 1989 to 1993. He later moved out into private-sector technology jobs, with stints as director of professional services at Apple Computer Inc.; a technology executive at The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America; and chief technology officer at Freelancers Insurance Company.
In 2014, Nathan started Zipari, to improve health insurers’ data portals.
The company has raised about $40 million from investors through four rounds of financing, according to forms filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
(Related: Buoy Health, RecoveryOne and Zipari Attract Funding: Health Tech Deals)
The last round of funding included investments from the investment arms of CareFirst and Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey,
1. Most health insurers are still getting used to the idea of working directly with consumers.
For years, big health insurers sold coverage mainly to employer groups.
“They really didn’t have a reason to communicate with the consumers,” Nathan said.
