specialty-medications
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Lamar Health
Lamar Health is a San Francisco software company that automates the paperwork behind expensive specialty medications. Its AI-driven platform handles unified intake, insurance verification, clinical and payor requirement checks, and prior authorization submission and tracking for specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics, and home infusion pharmacies - the drugs that average around $70,000 per patient per year. Founded by Ph.D. geneticist Eesha Sharma and backed by Y Combinator (W21), Lamar aims to get patients on therapy in days instead of weeks without forcing providers to add headcount.
Eesha Sharma
Eesha Sharma is the founder and CEO of Lamar Health, a Y Combinator-backed (W21) startup that uses AI to automate the mountain of paperwork standing between patients and high-cost specialty drugs. A genetics PhD from the University of Toronto and former Stanford postdoc, she traded antisense-oligonucleotide research for the unglamorous fight against prior-authorization bureaucracy after watching a family member endure years of misdiagnosis. Lamar Health now serves specialty pharmacies, infusion clinics and hospitals, automating prior auths, document review and EHR connectivity for medications that average roughly $70,000 a year per patient.
SamaCare
SamaCare is a San Francisco-based healthcare technology company that runs the leading medical-benefit prior authorization platform for specialty medications. Its cloud-based, AI-assisted software replaces the fax-and-phone paperwork that delays patients from receiving life-changing biologics, automating submission, tracking, benefit verification, and enrollment across major US payers. The platform serves specialty practices in retina, oncology, neurology, and rheumatology, plus pharmaceutical manufacturers who use SamaCare's real-time data to improve patient access.
Syam Palakurthy
Syam Palakurthy is the co-founder and CEO of SamaCare, a San Francisco healthcare-technology company that rips paper and fax out of the specialty-drug prior authorization process. After a Dartmouth engineering-and-economics degree and a stint at Bain (where he once asked to be staffed on anything but healthcare), he built a cloud platform that now connects 15,000+ providers across retina, oncology, neurology, and rheumatology, and has raised roughly $35 million to make getting a patient on therapy 'as simple as a credit card swipe.'