Colorado tech companies aim to bring down surging health care costs
Acquisitions, litigation often stymie efforts to reduce hospital bills.
No matter where you fall in the raging debate over extending the Obamacare premium tax credits to bring down skyrocketing health insurance premiums, there’s widespread agreement on both sides of the aisle that health care costs in general are out of control in America these days.
One Denver tech company was well on its way to helping chip away at those costs five years ago, at least on the bloated administrative side, when one of its principals says it entered into an agreement with a larger company that resulted in “potential fraud, breach of contract, NDA violations, and trade secret misappropriation.” The subsequent lawsuit is now mired in court.
The deal between the Denver-based tech startup Single Path Solutions and Wisconsin-based DeliverHealth — a global health care technology and service company — ended abruptly in 2022 when DeliverHealth walked away from the deal, fired Single Path personnel and days later publicly announced the launch of a similar offering, prompting Single Path to take legal action.
According to Single Path co-founder Russ Curran, a Breckenridge resident, his start-up tech company’s business model was aimed at reducing “the enormous sum we pay in administrative costs,” which he estimates are 30% to 35% of every health care dollar spent. “It’s nuts.”
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“The idea was to unify all that functionality into a single (entity) integrated into your EHR (electronic health record) platform that’s multi-functional so you don’t have to share your data all over the place,” Curran said in a phone interview. “And we can drastically lower prices and make sure the doctors in the hospitals get paid, which brings us to a place we really want to be, and not paying all this administrative cost because of the chaos that is health care.”
Then came the DeliverHealth debacle. DeliverHealth was formed in 2021 as a spinoff of Nuance Communications’ Transcription and EHR Go-Live Services to Assured Healthcare Partners prior to Nuance being acquired by Microsoft, according to Curran.
“The problem is, this happens way too often where venture capital, private equity, or even big corporate America, really takes advantage of small companies, startups with new ideas,” said Curran, who comes from a finance background but has a track record in tech startups in the health care sector dating his founding and sale of AcuStream.
Due to the yearslong litigation (a federal judge late last year denied DeliverHealth’s motion to dismiss but a trial date hasn’t been set), Curran said very little headway has been made in lowering hospital’s administrative costs: “We’re all still paying (higher administrative costs). But for (DeliverHealth’s) actions, I would’ve been five years into the journey that we started in May of 2020 and well down the path.”
DeliverHealth did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but DeliverHealth CEO Michael Clark said in 2022, “We have been quietly building a platform to complement an already significant professional and managed services business.”
As Congress now rushes to do something about astronomically rising individual market health insurance premiums following the lapse of the Affordable Care Act’s extended premium tax credits, there seems to be little appetite (or time) to debate overall health care reform to bring down other costs. There’s plenty of blame to go around in that debate, from insurance companies to pharmacy benefit managers to health care providers and hospitals.
Without specifically addressing his case, health care consumer advocates say the corporatization and acquisitions Curran laments are a big part of the problem.
“We’ve testified in support of regulating mergers and acquisitions because we know that without any sort of oversight or enforcement or accountability to health care, even just health care facility transactions like the buying of small clinics by bigger health systems, there is no way to regulate a totally vertically integrated system,” Mannat Singh, executive director of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, said in a phone interview.
Besides testifying for better regulation of mergers, CHI has worked on trying to pass antitrust regulations specific to the health care space in Colorado.
“When you think about insurance companies that are part of big medical groups that also own pharmacies that also own health plans, there is no way it’s an anti-competitive market,” Singh added. “There’s no way to then force competition to give what the actual consumer or the patient wants.”
Asked what can be done to bring hospital costs down in areas like administration so those savings can be passed on to patients, Vail Health President and CEO Will Cook provided the following email response:
“Vail Health has and continues to work hard to provide the most cost-effective care possible in our region, in alignment with our key strategic pillars of affordability, accessibility, sustainability, and population health. Despite Vail Health’s total expenses increasing 4.5% in 2025, Vail Health’s reimbursement rate rose by less than 1%. This illustrates that reimbursement rates for Vail Health are not directly tied to the increases of health insurance premiums. Additionally, this gap reflects mounting financial pressure on health systems, as well as our efforts to curb price increases for patients. We will continue to make decisions that allow us to deliver on our mission of elevating health across our mountain communities for years to come.”
