COVID-19 has upended the way that business processes operate in all sectors of our economy. The Revenue Cycle Management ("RCM") industry, which processes medical coding and billing claims of providers (doctors/hospitals) for payment by payers (insurance cos.), has experienced an exceptionally large disruption due to the fact that most medical coding and billing is processed by human coders in the U.S. and offshore in the Philippines and India. As the pandemic spread and mandatory shutdowns / working from home took hold, many companies that relied on human coders to process the 10s of millions of medical claims that go through the RCM system everyday saw their businesses take a drastic hit as volumes of certain non-essential procedures dropped along with the inability of the human coder network to securely process such flows from the their home locations.
During this period, one of our portfolio companies (BUDDI AI) has reaped the benefits of the new business paradigm. BUDDI AI can AUTONOMOUSLY process 70% to 80% of RCM related medical claim flow across multiple specialities --> this is done by BUDDI's deep learning auto-coding platform called CODING.AI. This is revolutionary.
Many of BUDDI's customers have accelerated their transition to BUDDI's auto-coding system during this period. Some have reported tremendous savings from decreased labor costs, better medical coding accuracies, and lower denials of claims. Scalability of customers' business has also been impacted as a machine is happy to process more volume as long as there is an electrical outlet nearby.
ASA Capital is very excited about the success of BUDDI during this disruptive time.
