Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger, co-founder and CEO of Grounded Health, joins Sunny Ray for a conversation about the money employers spend on healthcare and never audit. She spent fifteen years at the applied edge of machine learning: product owner for Watson Visual Recognition at IBM, VP of Product at Figure Eight, then VP of AI and Data at Appen after the acquisition, followed by five years in senior AI and product leadership at Blue Shield of California. She co-wrote Real World AI with Appen CTO Wilson Pang, a book arguing that machine learning is powerful but brittle, that it degrades quietly, and that most of the work lives in the data rather than the model. Grounded Health applies that thesis to the American health system, where roughly a trillion dollars a year is wasted. Most large employers are self insured, which means the employer pays the claims directly while nobody independently checks them. The company incorporated as a public benefit corporation and charges flat fees rather than a percentage of what it recovers, deliberately designing itself out of the incentive that pays everyone else in the chain more when spending goes up.
The health plan is the second biggest expense most employers carry, and the only one nobody independently checks.
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