The name PriorAuthNow is consigned to the past.
The fast-growing health IT startup has rebranded to reflect its broader mission of bringing about "intelligent collaboration" between healthcare providers and insurers, CEO Joe Anstine said.
"PriorAuthNow is a very functional name. It got us some deals early on," Anstine told Columbus Business First. "It was also very limiting.
"We’re already being asked to expand what our network is doing," he said. "We began questioning: Can we really call ourselves 'PriorAuthNow' when we’re eliminating prior authorization as everybody knows it?"
Now reincorporated as Rhyme Software Corp., the Columbus startup was founded in 2016 to automate the vexing pre-approval process for surgeries and other procedures.
Since then its software has evolved to facilitate care-planning dialog between doctor and insurer early in decision making. The goal is lower costs and healthier patients.
The value proposition is based on the network effect: The more hospital systems and insurers using the platform, the more each side benefits from the collective data analytics.
"We are creating a platform where both payers and providers create value and come together to solve a system that’s been plagued for decades," Anstine said.
As I reported in a recent cover story, the startup is one of three local health IT companies in the portfolio of a VC fund backed by the American Medical Association as part of an innovation initiative to tackle healthcare administrative waste and chronic disease prevalence.
As the software expands with AI-powered decision support, Anstine said, the name needed to reflect the "north star" of keeping harmony.
Rhyme's staff is expected to double from the current 70 over the next 18 months, especially in engineering and marketing.
"You're going to see significant investments," he said. "We are going to be screaming from the mountaintops why what we are doing is different."
Rhyme raised a $25 million round in February, bringing the cumulative total to $57 million.
The company's customers already understand the expanded vision, he said, so the new name helps reach out to parts of the industry it hasn't reached.
"We've been referred to as the greatest kept secret in healthcare," Anstine said.
To come up with the name, the company hired Lexicon, the naming consultant behind brands like Sonos, Swiffer, Impossible burger and Pentium.
The agency Focus Lab created the logo and design for the new website, getrhyme.com, which debuted Tuesday. (Rhyme.com is owned by Coursera Inc. for online training.)
The company owns two of just seven instances of the word "rhyme" by itself in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office online database. The others are for bicycle frames, sweatshirts and T-shirts, hair accessories, interior design consulting and a fungicide.
