Aaron Narva (shown above) was employed at compliance software manufacturer Exiger, working with a large multinational bank customer, following a career as an incident investigator with risk management companies such as Kroll and FTI Consulting. He was in charge of keeping an eye on that client’s legal compliance after it had made news ten years prior due to a money-laundering scandal.
“We bought a few software companies when I was at Exiger, including an AI program that assisted in removing danger from unstructured public records. Additionally, we developed a solution to assist extremely large organizations in identifying corruption and sanctions risk in commercial connections,” Narva told TechCrunch.
He got the concept for Conflixis from that work. Similar to banks, hospitals and other large medical practices are vulnerable to corruption. Doctors are required to disclose conflicts of interest, such as consultancy payments, research grant sponsorship, and junkets, because drug corporations and device manufacturers are notoriously friendly with them.
Whether or whether those medications and equipment would benefit the patient, a lot of studies indicates that people who become overly chummy are more inclined to prescribe them. Because of the high risk, the government maintains a database called OpenPaymentsData.com that makes conflict-of-interest disclosures publicly available.
However, revealing such conflicts does not resolve the issue, putting hospitals at risk for legal action. Numerous regulations, like the Anti-Kickback Statute (AKS) and the Stark Law, forbid such conduct by physicians.
However, in order to assist doctors, who are the medical experts, in developing new medications and devices, commercial interests must collaborate with them. Therefore, not all interactions are prohibited.
For hospitals and large medical practices, Narva envisioned an AI-powered software as a service that would pinpoint the real circumstances that endanger the institution, if not the patient.
According to Narva, “a large health system may have 200,000 relationships between its physicians, suppliers, and vendors.” “Out of those 200,000 relationships, which one is affecting you due to any of the six risks?”
Risks include everything from breaking the law to having negative health effects. Hospital quality-of-care data is also published in a database that is provided by the federal government.
To find out what he thought of the idea, Narva called Joseph Bergen, the director of engineering at BuzzFeed at the time and a buddy he had known since the eighth grade. Bergen became a co-founder after quitting his job because he loved it so much.
Data from OpenPaymentsData.com, hospital procurement data, claims data, patient outcome records, conflict-of-interest forms, and other sources are all ingested by Conflixis. It examines every point of contention to determine which ones require further investigation by a hospital.
Narva gives the example, “Okay, we looked at all 5,000 or 10,000 relationships [and] here are the seven that you need to actually look at.” “Like, here are the seven after we boiled the ocean.”
Conflixis goes one step further and can forecast healthcare expenses and recommend strategies to cut them. For example, is the hospital purchasing a more costly piece of equipment rather than a less expensive one because a doctor who has a relationship with that vendor recommended it?
“Yes, we can make it so that hospitals are making better operational decisions about what they’re buying, but we can also make it so that they are lowering their regulatory risk significantly and increasing their trust and transparency with their patients,” he says.
According to Narva, the company was founded in 2023 and currently has a small clientele and generates less than $5 million in income. It just revealed a $4.2 million seed round that is co-led by Origin Ventures and Lerer Hippeau, the fund established by former BuzzFeed chairman Kenneth Lerer. Mark VC, Springtime Ventures, and pre-seed investor Cretiv Capital are also involved.
Although some firms, like Symplr and Compliatric, are more concerned with preserving patient data than with procurement and corruption, Conflixis enters a crowded field of health industry compliance software providers.
According to Narva, the way Conflixis has integrated its workers’ careers in investigative work with LLMs is what makes it unique. Because of “our backgrounds in transaction monitoring and corruption in big data investigations,” it adapted commercial techniques to search for trends in the data, he says.