The following interview is a conversation we had with Trey Sutten, CEO & Co-Founder of Siftwell Analytics, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $5 Million Raised to Transform Healthcare Analytics with AI-Powered Predictions
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode.
Brett
Hey everyone. And welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Trey Sutten, CEO and Co-Founder of Siftwell Analytics, a healthcare technology company that’s raised over 5 million in funding. Trey, how are you?
Trey Sutten
I’m good. Great to be with you.
Brett
Yeah, super excited to have you here. Let’s go ahead and jump right in. Talk to us about what you’re building.
Trey Sutten
Yeah. So essentially what we do is we help health plans tell the future. And the way that we do that is we collect claims information from those health plans and some other data sets. Combine that with data sets that we’ve built or bought over the last couple years. We use machine learning to make predictions and then we really dig into those predictions using a couple other types of artificial intelligence to explain why those individuals are being identified for those predictions. So, good example is we had a client that wanted to better understand how to connect more of their members to cancer screenings. We ran the analytics, identified the 12,000 that were unlikely to go, but we go deeper and we help them understand for different cohorts within that 12,000, for example, there might have been a group of 80% chance of non compliance.
Trey Sutten
And that was related to their issues with transportation, affordability, distance to the screening facility, et cetera. So the motivation really is to go from big lists that are rank ordered to bite sized chunks that people can understand, marshal resources around and really get results.
Brett
So let’s talk a little bit about your background. So, former Medicaid cfo, former health plan CEO, now obviously a Founder. What’s that transition been like for you? You know, moving from those different roles? I would have to imagine it’s very different.
Trey Sutten
It is, it is very different. You know, I mean, and I’m grateful that I had a lot of experience in the turnaround and restructuring space which, you know, afforded me the experience of operating in highly ambiguous and high pressure environments. And so that’s the one thing that did kind of transfer from some of my previous roles. You know, I think the biggest adjustment was moving from a big company to a smaller company. You know, it had been a lot of years since I was back into Excel and doing modeling. A lot of years since I had, you know, put together a PowerPoint presentation for a sales pitch or a fundraise or something like that. And so, you know, I said to my Co-Founder, at one point in this process, I thought moving up the ladder was pretty tough.
Trey Sutten
Moving back down the ladder is even tougher, you know, relearning some of those skills.
Brett
So, yeah, I can imagine that makes perfect sense now. So you have this idea, you know, what did the first six months look like for you?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, I mean, you know, as were merging the previous health plan, which was a Medicaid plan, and you mentioned being with the Department of Medicaid, North Carolina and a finance role when we knew were going to merge the previous plan. Yeah, I started to collect the C level executives and say, hey, you know, now that we’re figuring out what our next thing is, since we’re not all going to this combined organization, what is it that the market needs? Where is their holes? And how do we take our collective passions first, but expertise to solve tough problems in the managed care space? And the answer was, we got to figure out how to do a better job of lining up resources with the right individuals at the right time, at the right level, so on and so forth.
Trey Sutten
So it’s this notion that you can match people with their needs at exactly the right time and the right level. And so that was the genesis of it. From there, we started to figure out the tactical steps. Well, first we had to prove out that the technology is different and better than what’s currently in the space. So we got a sample data set with a few million lives in it. We got some data scientists together, did a bake off, saw some good results, and then convinced an actual health plan to give us real, live data that we could run through.
Trey Sutten
Now, that was pro bono, and we’ve since converted them to a paying client, but those early days were really about like, you know, is the advancements that are being made in machine learning and artificial intelligence, can they truly be applied in the context of healthcare? And the answer resoundingly came back yes. And from there it was founders putting in more money, beginning to broaden that circle as we became more and more confident in the technology and our ability to solve something unique and just kept building from there. So it’s been an awesome ride.
Brett
If we just zoom out a little bit, you know, how would you describe the state of AI in Healthcare and maybe put on your other hats from your previous roles. Like, what are the C suites of these organizations think about AI? Like, what’s their general sentiment right now?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, I mean, you know, with all industries, I think there’s a lot of hyperbole out there. And, you know, that’s not lost on the sea levels that I’m talking to at health plans. They know that there is a lot of buzz around some of these technologies. And even, you know, you’ve got a lot of companies that have been operating in the space for a while and they’ve kind of slapped that AI on the back of their name or whatever. So I think there’s a little bit of maybe fatigue from some of the marketing and branding. When I do talk to healthcare executives that have embraced it. You know, there’s usually three levels that people are working with this stuff on.
Trey Sutten
The first one is kind of ad hoc, so they’ve got a marketing team or an HR team that’s using a large language model to spin up content or job descriptions, things like that. Then you get up to the next level and what we’re seeing in that space is usually things that could be considered industry agnostic. So these are your middle and back office things. Financial management, you know, specific to the healthcare industry, but still in that middle office revenue cycle management, adjudication, fraud detection, things like that you’re seeing elsewhere. And so, you know, those things have definitely started to take hold in the incumbents that offer those software platforms have been doing a good job, I think, of beginning to integrate some of these newer technologies into their existing platforms.
Trey Sutten
And then the third area where people, you know, have been really trigger shy is more in the patient to provider setting, the real medical setting. How do you start to make decisions about care? And when we’ve seen folks do that, you know, in the last couple years, what we found is that there have been some mistakes made, you know, and I’m not going to mention any specific names, but the deployment of artificial intelligence in the area of utilization management, which is the function that decides what services a person gets or doesn’t get, you know, some folks have gotten in trouble and I think there’s a bit of a snapback or trigger shyness that is manifest from some of those experiences. That’s what I’m seeing.
Brett
Interesting. That makes a lot of sense and I think that’s probably happening in a lot of other industries as well.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. So what does the marketing strategy look like today?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, for us it’s a highly referential market, you know, so it’s getting out there, it’s relying on long standing relationships that you had, it’s being face to face. And so, you know, I spent a lot of my time on the road interacting with our existing customers, making connections with new customers, panels, speaking opportunities, or just, you know, direct meetings with individuals or teams. You know, there’s a lot of misconceptions around some obstacles that people think that they’ve got. And so, you know, I’ve used some of my job responsibilities. Getting out there, educating people on this isn’t really big and scary tech, but rather you can get started today and in fact you need to. And some of the obstacles that they may have been thinking about just aren’t as big as maybe they originally thought.
Brett
What about the market category in terms of positioning or maybe like in terms of the line item that your customers are buying? What is that line item? What is that category?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, I would say, you know, we broadly fall under the category of predictive analytics, but we’re an entirely different animal. Brett. You know, I think that, and this is why in the past analytics solutions haven’t always worked. You know, I think a lot of people, a lot of technologists have entered the healthcare industry and thought that, you know, it was a better model, a better mousetrap that was going to do it. They wanted to talk about accuracy measures like area under the curve or something. What I can say, being a former operator, is, yeah, I want you to do that as best as you can. But what way more important to me is getting the results that I’m trying to get.
Trey Sutten
This isn’t about how accurate your model is, it’s about your model telling me that an individual needs an intervention and so that their use of an emergency department or their readmission rates go down. That’s what I’m fundamentally about in my former operating roles and that’s what Siftwell is selling us. We’re taking really deep and battle tested managed care experience, combining it with these advanced Technologies to not only point out who they should really focus on, but why they should focus on and even what they should do in order to better engage them. So we don’t neatly fall into a category, but this is often showing up in either a chief medical officers or maybe a CFO’s budget.
Brett
And does that work for you to capture demand from some of those existing categories? So if you look at predictive analytics, you know, I would guess that there is demand for that category. There’s, you know, companies that are out there trying to find a solution for that. Are you capturing that demand to say no, no. Like what you’re actually looking FOR Is this 100%?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, 100%. In fact, what gets us into the door oftentimes is the fact that we are, you know, a number of the members on the team are former managed care operators, and we speak the language, we know the problems and the know, quote, unquote use cases. But we know folks are struggling with. And what we’re doing is we’re immediately bringing in this union of really powerful analytics with the ability to speak the language and empathize and solve the problems that these people are having. So it’s cool.
Brett
We’re somehow already almost through 2024. We have 10 days, 11 days left. What do you have planned for 2025? What are some of the top objectives and top priorities that you have?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, I mean, as I look at 2025, in fact, you know, I’ve talked to a couple reporters recently about, you know, what the new administration is going to mean, like Medicaid, Medicare and Marketplace. You know, I think for us, the big plans is, you know, continue building out the product. The team, you know, right now the team feels like they’re a bit underwater, to be honest, because of the demand. So we’ve got to catch up there. So big investments in kind of building out that team customer success, we really lean into that product a bit. And then continuing to invest in would traditionally be referred to as business development. But we like to think about them as partnerships. A little bit of team investment for 2025.
Trey Sutten
You know, with regard to Medicaid, Medicare and Marketplace, I think people are going to have to get a lot sharper on how they’re spending their dollars. I don’t think that there’s going to be more money going into the next administration. And so health plans need to figure out how they do more with what they’ve got. And really being able to target individual members with specific interventions or supports is going to be really important. To make sure that those dollars can go as far as they can to improving people’s health.
Brett
Given the experience that you have in this space, what advice would you have for other health care technology builders and founders? As you know, they’re trying to bring their own technology to market. What should they know? How should they be thinking about it?
Trey Sutten
Learn the space or learn one space and really focus on it. You know, I was at Digital Health New York and was doing a panel discussion and a lot of founders in the room. And at one point in the conversation there was a comment about some of the acronyms that the panelists were using. And it was me and one of our client health plan CEOs and the acronyms that normally I would be accommodating to a request like that, but the acronyms were so fundamental to healthcare and so basic to healthcare that I was actually surprised that somebody was pausing us to get an explanation on our particular acronym. We weren’t dismissive, we explained it. But what it said to me was people are trying to enter the space without understanding the basic, like, features of it.
Trey Sutten
And if you can’t talk to a prospective client and you’re selling, you know, six digit, seven digit contract, you got to get a partner that understands the space, knows how to speak the language, knows the problems. I think the healthcare industry is plagued by technologists that have really cool mousetraps but don’t understand the complexity of some of the problems that healthcare, particularly managed care organizations, are facing. So my recommendation would first and foremost find a partner that knows the space or learn it yourself.
Brett
Let’s talk a little bit about money and fundraising. So what have you learned so far in your fundraising journey?
Trey Sutten
How important it is to do your due diligence as a Founder. And you know, for us, we do a lot of that. And then we got really lucky, to be honest. I mean, we’re, you know, Alicorp led our round ark and followed and then Tao kind of flushed it out with a few individuals after that. All of our investors have been really good. And I’m not saying that because this is going to be public. These are folks that know the space can really help us out. But I have often heard about founders getting funding. That was the exciting piece. But then there was a mismatch between what the company actually needed and who ended up on their board.
Trey Sutten
And so as we’re thinking about a potential next round, that’s something that we’re really double clicking on and making sure that there’s the experience match, there’s the industry expertise match, that there’s a cultural match, all the rest of it that we eventually are going to be working with, understand what we’re building, how we’re building it and why we’re building it. So that would be the thing I would advise founders on.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out. We can go as far out as you want. We can go three years into the future, five years into the future, or 10 years into the future. And what’s the big picture vision look like here?
Trey Sutten
Yeah, you know, we’re already doing some of that, which is really exciting, Brett. I mean, we’re getting into agentic AI and even agentic workflows to summarize and for the presentation layer for some of our clients, I mean, every week is like 10 years in the world of artificial intelligence. And we’re super fortunate to have a Co-Founder in Eben that can stay on top of this stuff and is actually fascinated by it, which so he’s constantly in the lab. I do think that agentic AI is going to be just a really powerful instrument for say the next three years, maybe five years. We’ll see what’s after that. But I imagine a future, Brett, and we’re building it where I can tell you who’s not going to get a cancer screening. I can contextualize them, including the level of rurality.
Trey Sutten
I can spin up care plan associated with that member, that individual member. And if they live in a rural area, I’m shipping automatically a cologuard box versus somebody that lives in a more urban area. And I’m automatically setting up the appointment and doing the calls both to the provider and the patient to broker that exchange. That’s the future that I want to build and that we’re already building.
Brett
I love the vision. I really love this conversation. We’re going to go ahead and wrap up here before we do for any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with you as you build and execute on this vision. Where should we send them? Where should they go?
Trey Sutten
I’m easy to get a hold of Treyftwell AI. I’m the only Sutten with an EN on LinkedIn in Healthcare. So either find me on LinkedIn S U T T E N or just Trey?
Brett
Amazing. Trey, thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Trey Sutten
Absolutely. Thank you, Brett.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you.
Trey Sutten
On the next episode.
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