specialty-medications
(2)
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.
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.'