Company leader
Michael Lunzer
Founder and President
Itiliti Health
Michael Lunzer is founder and president of Itiliti Health, an Eden Prairie, Minnesota, company whose software tells a provider in real time whether a health plan needs a prior authorization for a service.
Two Earlier Startups
He co-founded the first technology-based vendor management system for the staffing industry, which PeopleClick acquired in 2002. In 2007 he co-founded Warm Health, a virtual care-manager platform that automated messages between health plans and their members. Altegra Health, now part of Change Healthcare, acquired Warm Health in 2012, and he stayed on to run its Smart Connect product.
Entrepreneur in Residence at Blue Cross
In 2018 he became entrepreneur in residence at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, where he looked for problems that slowed care and found prior authorization among them. He and Kurt Hulander co-founded Itiliti Health and incubated it inside the insurer. In 2020 it won the MedCity INVEST Digital Health Pitch Perfect contest. "Without our product, they typically have to look through PDF documents and spreadsheets on the health plan's website, and those can be rather cumbersome and difficult to navigate," he said of providers checking a plan's rules.