Flume Health, a health tech company focused on payer operations, has launched a new solution to automate vendor integrations.
Some of Flume’s clients spend up to seven figures annually per new integration, executives told Fierce Healthcare, burdening their IT and engineering teams. Integrations could be with vendors like provider networks, chronic disease platforms and pharmacy benefit managers. The new solution, Flume Relay, aims to systematize that and could reduce integration costs and time by about 80%, the company claims.
“We think that there's a lot of really interesting, exciting work happening on the clinical, provider side. And it can only go so far if coverage and health insurance isn't sort of modernizing alongside it,” Flume founder and CEO Cedric Kovacs-Johnson told Fierce Healthcare. “We actually say that health insurance is more powerful than your doctor.”
Flume Relay is an automation platform that acts as a universal translation layer for information exchange between payers and vendors. Its simplicity allows anyone to set up and manage data trades with solutions, Flume says. With it, payers could more easily meet the number of configurations self-insured customers demand.
Flume Relay was initially launched internally for Flume’s engineering team. Before, it spent months managing integrations for Flume clients. After rolling out Relay, it only took a few hours to do the same task.
Many large payers have trouble allowing even their in-house systems to talk to each other, Kovacs-Johnson noted, like their claims and member support systems. Over time, Relay might also help fill that gap, enabling a “unified view” of a member across first-party and third-party services.
“I think we need to go through a few steps before we get there, but I hope we can get there,” Kovacs-Johnson said.
The company was founded in 2018 with the goal of disrupting healthcare. It aims to solve the massive challenges that accompany third-party and health plan administration. It currently serves Firefly Health, Radion Health, Self Fund Health and others.
https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/payers/flume-health-launches-solution-automate-vendor-integrations-payers
