Bivicare

Columbia Business School

Industry: Healthcare x Fintech

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Andrew Yeager

Brief Description of Solution: Bivicare helps self-insured businesses to pay healthcare providers through direct cash discounts, by de-risking those transactions with an AI-powered claim adjudication engine. These pay-now cash discounts can save employers hundreds of thousands of dollars and save providers months of fighting to get paid.

Funding Dollars: $34,000

 What led you to launch this venture? I started my career in medical billing and saw firsthand how much time and effort providers spend fighting to get paid by insurance companies. That strain often leads to cash-discounted prices that are cheaper than insurance rates when patients pay upfront, and this model is used by the members of CrowdHealth, the crowdfunding startup where I interned pre-MBA. After my time there I realized the same opportunity could be given to the health plans of self-insured employers, whose members reflect over 60% of covered workers in the U.S.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? The biggest accomplishment my co-founder and I have had so far is the build of our claim adjudication MVP, which has been tailored towards diagnostic imaging care thanks to the support of our radiology RCM design partner.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? A big challenge has been narrowing down the ideal profile for early adopters amongst providers, a process that required not only many conversations but also experimentation to find the most effective way to reach them. Cold outreach over email and LinkedIn led nowhere with leaders of smaller outpatient imaging centers, but we eventually found success through the more personal approaches of phone campaigns and even attending a medical imaging conference in Vegas.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? Columbia Business School was incredibly helpful in launching our business. We made the most of every opportunity it offered – including classes on how to avoid the legal pitfalls that founders commonly face, early-stage capital invested by the Lang Fund, industry connections through the Healthcare & Pharmaceutical Management Program, and especially the tight-knit community of student-founders supporting each other in the Greenhouse and Summer Startup Track programs.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? Launch Your Startup, taught by Ross Goldenberg, has been instrumental in our development. One approach it imparted was using a lightweight business model canvas to identify the biggest assumptions we’re making at any given moment, so that we can prioritize our experiments to tackle the biggest risks first. The search for product-market fit is full of ambiguity, but this lesson has helped us to structure and give direction to it.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? I’m grateful to have also had Ross Goldenberg as the advisor for my independent study, where I spent my final semester working on Bivicare. Having already successfully scaled and exited his own venture, Ross was able to empathize with my struggles while still asking the tough questions that needed to be asked, so that I could objectively figure out if I was on the right path.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? New York City combines a dense concentration of investors/accelerators, a thriving digital health ecosystem, and a culture that’s both entrepreneurial and immensely diverse – truly the perfect storm to develop a startup like ours. For example, we’ve been able to meet and co-work with other founders out of the Techstars NYC office through its Engineer Village program.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Bivicare is striving to realign the incentives in our healthcare system by changing the way payments are made, so that one day everyone will have to access quality care at a price they can afford.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture? I wish I had started out the gate with the balanced routine I have now – at first the amount of stuff we had to figure out felt totally daunting, and that caused me to prioritize more work over a consistent sleep schedule, training regimen (shout-out Columbia’s Jiu Jitsu Club), and even just time to hang out with friends and decompress. But so much of a startup’s success seems to come from just putting one foot in front of the other until you manufacture luck, and maintaining the right habits helps me to extend my own runway.

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