Company leader
Syam Palakurthy
CEO and Founder
SamaCare
Syam Palakurthy is founder and chief executive of SamaCare, a San Francisco, California, company whose software helps medical practices get insurer approval, known as prior authorization, for expensive specialty drugs such as infusion therapies. He founded it in 2018 after a career in management consulting and two earlier healthcare startups. He comes from a family of doctors and once planned to stay out of healthcare altogether.
A Family of Doctors
Both of his parents are doctors, as are his brother, many uncles, aunts, and cousins, and some of his grandparents. His father, a mild-mannered man, got angry about very few things, and prior authorization was one of them.
He studied engineering and economics at Dartmouth College.
Starting at Bain & Company
After Dartmouth he joined the consulting firm Bain & Company and asked its staffing manager to put him on anything except healthcare. He left to work at small companies but kept meeting startups he did not care about. A close friend then introduced him to the friend's father, who was starting a healthcare technology company, and he took the meeting only as a courtesy. He came away wanting to work in healthcare and joined ClearCost Health, a company bringing price transparency to healthcare services, and then started a company in chronic care management. That job put him inside clinics for the first time, where he saw prior authorization delay patients' treatment and disrupt the work of their care teams.
Founding SamaCare
SamaCare began with specialty medications because that was where prior authorization caused the most harm. Those drugs are costly and carry the heaviest insurer paperwork.
In many practices, staff find each insurer's form online, fill it out by hand, and fax it in. SamaCare gives a practice one place to submit authorizations for every insurer and every drug, sends each request in the format that insurer expects, and captures the response, so requests are less likely to be lost or keyed in wrong. It connects with software such as WeInfuse, which infusion centers use to run their operations. On the Osmosis Raise the Line podcast in 2022 he put the aim this way: "Our end goal, the end state we're pushing towards, is a prior authorization as easy as a credit card swipe."
The problem became personal when a cousin who had fought cancer for almost a decade needed approval for a last experimental therapy. His cousin's wife had to work through prior authorization in the final weeks of his life for a drug the insurer was always going to approve.
Married Life
He is married. His wife jokes that SamaCare is the least glamorous startup in Silicon Valley, the tech hub around the San Francisco Bay in California.