If a “typical” background exists for leading a health plan, Anirban Gangopadhyay certainly does not have it: The co-founder and CTO of AI-forward Angle Health comes from tech powerhouse Palantir.
“I would say Palantir operates in a very unique way relative to other big tech companies,” Mr. Gangopadhyay told Becker’s. During his tenure there, only a few employees would lead each billion-dollar project, with the company leaning into “that entrepreneurial spirit” and focusing on outcomes.
During his time at the software company, Mr. Gangopadhyay said he learned that it is “very difficult to be a vendor and make real change,” prompting him and co-founder Tylon Wang “to build that health plan from the ground up.”
Angle Health, which Mr. Gangopadhyay views as a “tech company,” recently secured $134 million in series B funding. Mr. Gangopadhyay sees these funds as a means to build off the insurer’s unified data platform. Right now, the insurer is investing in care navigation and AI for member identification.
Another takeaway from Mr. Gangopadhyay’s engineering work is the importance of centralizing data.
“If you have data silos, then even simple joins to understand basic things about your population become very, very difficult,” he said. “If you don’t have strong data, you can’t really do things like machine learning, AI, effectively.”
Mr. Gangopadhyay emphasized that keeping humans involved in processes is also a focus at Angle Health. While handling 100,000 claims per month, Angle Health still keeps humans in the loop.
“We never process anything that’s flagged without a human reviewing it,” he said.
Along with leveraging AI to identify and engage members with care navigation, striking a balance between denials and involving too many humans is one of health insurance’s biggest issues right now, Mr. Gangopadhyay said.
“It’s threading that needle, and that’s really the intractable problem that no one has really solved, and that’s our vision,” he said.
