The head of a Franklin-based health care IT firm Linnaeus Inc. has left the company to start a new venture focused on automation tools for the health care industry.
Sal Novin, who had been president and CEO of Linnaeus since 2006, left the company with partner Igor Kikena at the end of February to start HPA, which stands for Healthcare Productivity Automation.
Novin said the move allows him to focus exclusively on his Health Mason product, a tool that automates health care claims payments for insurers, and develop other technology solutions to automate manual workflows for payers and providers.
“With the savings a lot of these health plans are trying to achieve, the tool sort of had a resurgence,” Novin said. “So the entire goal of the new company is to figure out other ways to completely automate other parts of these processes.”
Essentially, Health Mason uses artificial intelligence to read a computer screen, enter data and decide the best way to process a claim. It can manage a greater volume of claims faster and with fewer errors than a human, Novin said, helping payers process and avoid claim backlogs.
Novin build Health Mason at his previous company, Novin HPA. The product, and its successful deployment with local Medicare plan provider HealthSpring, helped Novin win the “Innovator of the Year” award in the Nashville Technology Council’s 2009 technology awards [2]. For more on Health Mason, visit this link [3].
As for Linnaeus, the company’s future is unclear. Novin said the company still operates its core health care claims software system, called Thesys, but its website (formerly at linnaeusinc.com) appears inactive. A representative at its New York venture capital backer, Capitol Health, did not return a call seeking comment Thursday afternoon.
Novin said he plans to hire three or four employees in the coming months with hope of growing to 20 by the end of the year.