A Tel Aviv-based autonomous medical coding technology provider has raised $16.5 million in Series A funding, it announced this week.

Nym Health, which was founded in 2018, enables “fully automated, efficient, and transparent revenue cycle management” for healthcare providers. The technology is currently deployed in 40 hospitals in Israel.

The Series A funding was led by GV (formerly Google Ventures), with the participation of Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop Capital, Lightspeed, Tiger Global, and angel investors including Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner from Flatiron Health.

According to a company statement, the funding will be used towards accelerating sales and marketing activities, as well as scaling product deployment and development.

"The process of translating medical notes into billing codes is a cumbersome and manual process, and a top pain point for many health systems in the U.S.," said Ben Robbins, Venture Partner at GV. "Nym offers a highly efficient solution to this problem, and we believe the company is well-positioned to meet the needs of health systems."

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Nym Health works on making the hospital billing process more efficient by automatically assigning the most accurate medical codes required for medical reimbursement. Its direct-to-billing, fully autonomous coding system – which uses its own Clinical Language Understanding technology – reduces operational costs, and health insurance rejections. From an administrative perspective, it maximises audit-readiness for healthcare providers.

The company explained that, while medical coding is “traditionally a manual process” – reportedly performed today by more than 250,000 medical coders – it has become problematic in recent years due to “the addition of tens of thousands of codes and guidelines, making it extremely challenging to code correctly.

“Coding related denials lead to over $15 billion in lost revenues to U.S. healthcare providers annually,” it added.

The Nym Health system integrates directly with a hospital’s Electronic Medical Record system, and is able to track patient visits and process patient charts.

“Once the full understanding of charts is achieved, relevant medical codes are assigned based on the physician documentation, and the coded charts are sent back to clients,” the company added. “This process takes less than five seconds, compared to five to nine days manually, and produces a more than 98 percent accuracy rate compared to a [less than] 80 percent industry average for human coders.”

ON THE RECORD

“Nym's biggest differentiator is that for every chart that is coded, our engine provides a full and transparent audit trail,” said Nym Health CEO, Amihai Neiderman. “This audit trail provides the full explanation of how each code is assigned and explains the automated decision-making process behind its selection. This allows our clients to understand and trust our coding results.”