Eliana Berger, CEO and co-founder of Joyful Health, joins Kevin and Martin following the company's recent $17M Series A. Eliana walks through what she observed spending two years inside provider practices as a fractional CFO, the data fragmentation that sits underneath revenue cycle, and how she thinks about the distinction between AI services and AI agents in denials work.

Topics discussed:

• What Eliana found working inside practices as a fractional CFO, and why finance kept surfacing as the hair-on-fire problem
• Addressing revenue cycle's root problem: the lack of a financial source of truth across EHRs, billing systems, clearinghouses, payer portals, and bank accounts
• Why Joyful shifted from selling software to owning the outcome end-to-end
• The distinction between AI services and AI agents, and where rules-based automation works versus where expertise is required
• The mechanics of working a denial, including ERAs, vague denial codes like CO-16, and the cross-system "detective work" involved
• The payer-provider dynamic and how AI is showing up on both sides
• Joyful's system-agnostic go-to-market and four-to-eight week implementation timeline
• The longer-term vision of integrating from payer contracts through to the bank account

For more from Health Tech Nerds, subscribe to our weekly newsletters: https://www.healthtechnerds.com/subscribe