Valerie Health, which operates out of coworking space on the North Shore with approximately 12 employees, is rapidly expanding its Chattanooga hub and plans to create 100 jobs by the end of 2026.
The San Francisco-based company leverages artificial intelligence to eliminate time-consuming, repetitive tasks that slow down healthcare providers. The company aims to hire more than 200 people in Chattanooga within three years.
Lauren Coyle, the company's director of operations in Chattanooga, said in an interview that Valerie Health's mission is to help specialty care thrive.
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“There's a lot of friction in the medical field,” Coyle said. “The administrative burden is heavy. There are a lot of paperwork.”
Ultimately, she said, this friction affects not only front-office staff, but also health care providers who need to get information faster and patients who want faster care and more access.
Valerie Health aims to use AI to streamline referrals, faxing, pre-approvals, scheduling, and other functions that can place a significant burden on the front office. This will allow clinics to focus their energy on more strategic goals, such as reducing wait times and improving the patient experience, she said.
“Previously, we were manually entering information from PDFs into the local electronic health record, which we didn't have the time to do,” Coile said. “In a world of AI, you don't have to do mechanical work. You don't have to do really boring manual work. You can move the people who were doing that work into more engaging work.”
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The ratio of independent providers to administrative staff at clinics tends to be about 3 to 1, Coyle said. As medical institutions seek to increase patient numbers and increase revenue, administrative burdens are also increasing. That means the front office staff will need to double or triple, Coyle said.
As a result, healthcare providers are increasingly moving to hospital systems. Coyle said that's because in that environment they don't have to worry about the administrative side of the business.
“That's not very good for society,” Coyle said. “It's ultimately more costly to use the hospital system. It's not always proactive. It doesn't allow (unintentionally) as much time to spend on the care side. At the end of the day, healthcare providers They're not moving there because they want to, they're moving there out of necessity. Our goal is, 'How do we keep these specialty practices in place?'
According to Valerie Health's website, between 1988 and 2022, the percentage of physicians working in independent practices decreased from 79% to 47%. The company said the changes increased costs, worsened the patient experience, reduced physician satisfaction, and did not improve outcomes.
Chattanooga will be Valerie Health's first hub outside of San Francisco.
“It's a very connected city,” said Coyle, who moved to Chattanooga in 2018 and previously worked at Bellhop and One to One Health. “It's a very welcoming city. It's a really energetic city. I think all of those things bode very well for early-stage startups.”
Coyle, who worked for Chattanooga-based moving company Bellhop, also saw the strength of the city's entry-level talent pool, noting that companies could tap into schools such as Covenant College, Lee University, Southern Adventist University and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.
Entry-level positions at Valerie Health start at $20 per hour. The salary range for a Senior Operations Coordinator is $50,000 to $65,000. The company also plans to offer 99% employer-covered health insurance and equity to all full-time employees, according to a news release from the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce.
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Charles Wood, CEO of the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce, said the addition of new technology-based companies to the city's downtown is always exciting, especially as officials aim to increase the number of white-collar jobs in the city center.
“The fact that AI-focused companies are expanding their markets and creating jobs is also a very good thing,” he said on the call, noting that much of the national news attention on artificial intelligence tends to be negative.
He said it's also important for leaders to manage the local economy and ensure people of different educational levels are employed in multiple fields. Valerie Health is a good fit for recent graduates of local universities, he said.
“We’re really excited about this as a way to keep talent in Chattanooga,” Wood said.
Contact business reporter David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.
