Startup incubator Redesign Health and Mayo Clinic have hatched a new company called Corvus to ease the surgery referral process for patients while touting savings for hospital systems.
Surgeries are one of the most lucrative services that health systems provide, but the process of getting a patient to the operating room is administratively complex.
Medicare pays about $13,000 for a spinal fusion, or $2,100 for a traditional hip replacement, according to historical agency data. However, Corvus says that less than 50% of surgery referrals ultimately result in surgery.
Corvus hopes to streamline the administrative burden of deciding which patients are candidates for surgery by proactively collecting documentation before a consult. The company was launched out of stealth in late October.
Before surgery, surgeons need to review all relevant information about the patient and their condition, which requires a scourge of documentation, often from other institutions, and prior authorizations. Patients may also need additional imaging or lab tests to help a surgeon make a sound decision about the patient’s candidacy.
Corvus has programmed AI agents to collect this documentation by contacting other healthcare organizations. Corvus ensures that patients have completed the necessary processes before the consult visit to eliminate the need for an additional consultation and allow surgeons more time in the O.R.
“On its face, it sounds like a really small, niche problem and I love these really weird, small back-end administrative problems that no one's thought about, because it actually creates a tremendous bottleneck,” Ian Strug, founder and CEO of Corvus, told Fierce Healthcare.
The company is betting on surgeons being able to perform additional procedures, rather than spending time on consultations that don’t convert to surgeries. Therein lies its value proposition.
Corvus also provides a recommendation to the surgeon on whether the patient should undergo surgery, based on their medical information.
Based on the collected medical information, Corvus uses an algorithm to determine whether the patient is a good candidate for surgery. Corvus recommends which patients to prioritize for consultations, using a human-in-the-loop approach to review the decision.
The company eventually wants to undergo approval by the Food and Drug Administration as clinical decision support software so its customers can feel comfortable fully automating the surgery referral process.
“We see a world where it makes sense and where our customers are ready to fully automate some of these mid-cycle, back-office processes,” Strug said. “Now, a lot of what is happening in managing referral feels incredibly administrative, but it is actually deeply clinical, because those decisions are made based upon different qualities that a patient is exhibiting within their chart.”
Corvus was incubated through a partnership between healthcare startup accelerator Redesign Health and Mayo Clinic. Once the pair conceived the idea of Corvus, they tapped Strug to head up the company.
The startup's partnership with Mayo Clinic will enable it to do the peer-reviewed studies necessary to meet FDA standards.
Chair of Surgery Michael Kendrick, M.D., orthopedic surgeon Cody Wyles, M.D., and Mayo Clinic Florida neurosurgeon Ian Buchanan, M.D., were involved in the product design and clinical validation of the company’s platform.
“Dr. Kendrick has been a part of this since day one, of really scoping out what an initial product could look like, what it would do and how, and then doing all of the work that a good financial institution would do before making an investment, which is understanding… total addressable market, what would a customer logically [pay], what could a company like this grow to become, and how would it reach exit velocity,” Strug said.
Mayo Clinic is also a strategic investor, co-developer and initial pilot site for Corvus. The company does not yet have any data on its solution that is publicly shareable.