San Diego-based startup Health Turquoise closed a $40 million project Series C funding round Tuesday, bringing the company’s overall fundraising total to $95 million.
The tour was led by Oak HC/FTwith the participation of Andreessen Horowitz, Adams Street Partners And Yosemite.
Turquoise, founded in 2020, initially built its business around collecting and analyzing price transparency data from information provided by hospitals and payers. Suppliers used this data primarily for benchmarking and contract negotiations, CEO Chris Severn said.
With its new funding, the startup plans to go beyond analyzing healthcare prices and facilitating the transactions themselves, he said. The goal is to ensure guaranteed upfront prices for patients while reducing administrative waste between payers and providers.
Severn described Turquoise’s mission as creating “health care transactions the way they should be.” For him, this means two big changes.
The first is that patients must know in advance the price of care – and this must be guaranteed and not an estimate. The other is that much of the administrative cost of paying for health care – including litigation, manual reconciliations and tedious paper-based processes – should disappear.
“We just don’t think it should exist. Really, it’s a new chapter of looking at the transaction itself rather than just taking prices at face value,” Severn said.
He highlighted that Turquoise’s contract management platform is a major part of this strategy.
The platform allows providers and payers to manage all of their negotiated agreements directly in one place. Because healthcare payment rules are coded into these contracts, introducing them to the platform facilitates standardization of language and simplifies how prices are calculated, Severn explained.
This, in turn, can make price transparency data clearer and help patients see more reliable upfront prices, he added. Turquoise said more than 40 clients are already using the contract platform, including UNC Health And Loma Linda University Health.
Severn argued that many revenue cycle tools focus on identifying problems after claims are processed, such as denials or underpayments. He believes Turquoise differentiates itself by tackling the core problem.
“Turquoise is unique because we focus on accounting for the waste attributed to a contract and actually work to improve the language – unlike many revenue cycle companies who simply take the contract at face value and say, ‘Hey, these are your rejections, these are zero wages, this is where the system’s calculator broke down.’ “They’ll help you collect those rejections, but they don’t look at the root and say, ‘We’ll help you fix this contract,'” Severn noted.
It remains to be seen whether Turquoise can completely eliminate the administrative problems it targets, but the startup is clearly betting on rethinking contracts as the way forward.
Investors seem to have confidence in this bet.
“We have been following Chris and the team since 2021 and are impressed with their ability to scale adoption across providers, payers, employers and life sciences simultaneously. Their platform doesn’t just provide data; it directly integrates transparency into the trading and payment workflows of the industry’s largest stakeholders,” said Vig Chandramouli, Partner at Oak HC/FT.
Photo: FJ Jiménez, Getty Images