Cascade Health, an intelligent platform for healthcare transparency, announced it has raised $1.7 million in venture funding led by AlleyCorp with participation from other strategic angel investors. The company also announced the launch of its first two products: a generative AI assistant to personalize the consumer experience with full visibility around cost and quality of care, as well as APIs that allow companies in the healthcare industry to access data on demand and use it to build their own internal and external products.

As healthcare costs have continued to rise in the US, the system has also grown more complex and increasingly opaque. In an effort to counter this, the US government has recently mandated that hospitals and insurance companies publicly disclose pricing data for procedures across the country. Both parties have done so, but in massive files that can't be opened or used without substantial computing power.

Cascade Health leverages cloud and AI to aggregate these datasets, along with other public and private healthcare data, to help employers, consumers, government agencies, hospitals, insurance companies and other healthcare-related businesses better understand pricing and coverage. It is the only company that can transform these datasets along with client-specific data and use large language models to interact with the combined data to optimize decision-making in real-time to personalize the experience for anyone seeking or giving care.

"We want Cascade Health to become the infrastructure for healthcare transparency – an objective, neutral source for healthcare pricing and coverage," said Ana-Maria Constantin, Cascade Health's CEO and co-founder. "Our intelligent platform provides a window into all this that allows anyone on any side of the healthcare system to make data-driven decisions about the care they receive or deliver."

The core of Cascade Health's intelligent platform is a proprietary massive-scale cloud computing infrastructure which works alongside machine learning models and AI to help find, sort and transform massive amounts of healthcare data needed to provide transparency into healthcare pricing and coverage.

Cascade Health's generative AI assistant lets consumers ask about coverage options, pricing for different procedures and regions, and more, then uses Cascade Health's platform to deliver data-driven answers to those questions in plain English. The company also provides data management and warehousing infrastructure so customers can benefit from using it without having to worry about storing data.

Before founding Cascade Health, Constantin and co-founder Pulak Goyal spent six years at Microsoft building large-scale cloud systems that used machine learning to make intelligent, data-driven decisions for efficient resource utilization.

"Complexity and opacity are both endemic in the American healthcare system. It's nearly impossible for stakeholders to make truly informed decisions, whether it's about individual or group coverage, or how to most efficiently deliver and pay for care," said Jane Suh, Principal at AlleyCorp. "We invested in Cascade Health because the team's background and knowledge base perfectly aligns with their mission to bring clarity and access to an essential part of healthcare decision-making."