AJ Loiacono of Judi Health, co-founder and chief executive officer, explains how Judi Health rebuilds the infrastructure beneath healthcare rather than adding more applications. Loiacono describes Judi Health's three business lines — Judi Rx, Judi Cloud and Judi Care — and outlines unified claims processing, data interoperability and the commercial and clinical implications of transparent pricing and integrated workflows. They emphasize that unified claims processing creates a single source of truth that improves patient safety reduces pricing opacity and supports predictable cost models for plan sponsors.
Host Gemma Allen and theCUBE Research team note that legacy systems and vendor lock-in remain primary integration bottlenecks. They further observe that Judi Health's cloud-based software as a service, SaaS, and vendor-agnostic model may open new total addressable market, TAM, opportunities and enable improved post-procedure care coordination and actionable analytics for payers providers and employers.
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AJ Loiacono, Judi Health
AJ Loiacono of Judi Health, co-founder and chief executive officer, explains how Judi Health rebuilds the infrastructure beneath healthcare rather than adding more applications. Loiacono describes Judi Health's three business lines — Judi Rx, Judi Cloud and Judi Care — and outlines unified claims processing, data interoperability and the commercial and clinical implications of transparent pricing and integrated workflows. They emphasize that unified claims processing creates a single source of truth that improves patient safety reduces pricing opacity and supports predictable cost models for plan sponsors.
Host Gemma Allen and theCUBE Research team note that legacy systems and vendor lock-in remain primary integration bottlenecks. They further observe that Judi Health's cloud-based software as a service, SaaS, and vendor-agnostic model may open new total addressable market, TAM, opportunities and enable improved post-procedure care coordination and actionable analytics for payers providers and employers.
>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm John Furrier, co-host here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Welcome to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, co-host of NYSE Wired's MedTech Unplugged. And today we are talking about how healthcare is full of middlemen, fragmented systems, and data that somehow still doesn't talk to itself. Judi Health is betting that the way to fix that isn't another healthcare app. It's rebuilding the infrastructure underneath it. The bigger question is who actually benefits, who pays, and does putting all the data together really change the economics of healthcare? Joining me now to unpack that is AJ Loiacono, co-founder and CEO of Judi Health. Welcome.
AJ Loiacono
>> Thank you for having me, Gemma.
Gemma Allen
>> So maybe just to begin, give me the 101 on Judi. Help me understand exactly what this company does. Sure. And the business model behind this.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yeah, let's start with the name. So Judi is short for adjudication, which I often say is a fancy way of saying claim processing, which is how we basically think about all the workflows that go into handling a patient that has a benefit plan. At Judi Health, we have 3 main businesses. So we're Judi Rx, we're a pharmacy benefit manager. So these are prescription programs for large employers. We are also Judi Cloud. So we license our technology to regional health plans across the country. And we are also Judi Care, which is third-party administration and medical administration.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So help me understand the economic impact of having data that lives in such a fragmented silo across the healthcare landscape in the US, right? So, you go to CVS, you go to Walgreens, you get your prescription from one doctor, those in the same hospital, those two doctors might not necessarily talk to each other. It has always surprised me as a non-American, growing up in a different healthcare system, how fragmented and siloed those systems are. Who pays the cost for that?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, the patient and the plan ultimately. And this is kind of the sad part about the United States healthcare system is there's been a massive underinvestment in technology. So I often joke the average age of a system that's processing a medical or prescription claim in this country is 20, 30 years old. So to put that in comparison, imagine using a phone from 30 years ago. It's not too smart and it doesn't offer too many service options. So let's fast forward to today. What is this problem we're identifying? So the way that we move claims data in the United States is very antiquated. And the reason why is we move claims from vendor A to vendor B, like we're taking a picture in time. But in those seconds or minutes or hours, claims have already changed. Claims are paid, reversed, coded, recoded. People are eligible, ineligible, but it's too late. The claims have already moved from System A to System B. And in that time, the next vendor is already adding to that file and making their own observations and passing it to another vendor and another vendor. So, what does this feel like to the average patient? Well, think about it. If you've ever had a medical procedure and you get 3 different prices for the same procedure, that's 3 different systems not speaking to one another. If you're a patient and you're wondering where your medication is or where you are in a workflow and no one has any answers, again, it's these separate systems. So what we did and focused on at Judi Health, was we're the first company that has created what we call unified claim processing. So this way there's no outside dependencies and you have what's called a single source of truth. So no patient or member is ever guessing or provided with the wrong information.
Gemma Allen
>> So who is your ultimate buying persona? It's the people who are buying these healthcare plans, employers, insurers. Who fundamentally is to benefit from data being more synergistic and more holistic, in terms of its output?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, I think the first person that we're trying to always service are the people that sponsor benefit plans in the United States. And so when we talk about a payer, it's kind of a broad term. That could be an employer group, that could be a union, a university. And typically in the United States, self-insurance is if you have about 500 employees or more. In addition, other entities that benefit from this technology are other health plans that license this technology to service their own members.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through these two— three businesses. Let's start with the Rx business. We can all understand conceptually what that is, right? So that is essentially helping pharmacies be more efficient, have a more holistic picture of patient profiles, and I guess perform their services in a far more cost-effective and data-effective way. Give me a typical use case.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yeah, I think where we're always coming into this process is the pharmacy benefit model was quite static in the sense that it didn't change for 20 years. And what was the problem is Nobody understands what the price of a drug is in the United States under the old model. And the reason why was data was viewed to be proprietary, that pricing was proprietary, and no one was allowed to know the real price of a drug. But who would want the end consumer not to understand price? Because I often say, once you understand price, you can't really be overcharged. Hmm. And so what we were trying to address was this black box, if you will. This world in which the prior operators of pharmacy benefit, the people that we compete with, would basically create these very opaque layers of what I'll call benefit administration. So what we wanted to do is to make sure everyone gets the same price. Why is there a different price for drugs every hour of every day in every pharmacy? This is one of the initial observations I made when I founded the company, which is why are there 100, 200, 600 different prices for a drug in a single month when an actual manufacturer probably changes the price of a drug twice a year? That's it. So we should have much more stability and much more closely priced. But what we were seeing was prices all over the map. If I had to compare it to something that most people relate to is if you go into the pharmacy, don't pick up your prescription yet.
Gemma Allen
>> Mm-hmm.
AJ Loiacono
>> Go to the over-the-counter section. Go pick up a bottle of Tylenol or Advil or take your pick of eye drops, and something magical happens in the U.S. healthcare system. It doesn't matter if you're insured or uninsured, you work for the largest employer or the smallest, it's the same price for that bottle of Tylenol. And if someone comes in 5 minutes after you, it's still the same price. And if I were to go across the street, nobody's selling me a bottle of Tylenol for $400 on a 30-count pill bottle. It's going to be in the same price range. And so when you move to the prescription counter, you lose that clarity. You lose that efficiency of buyers and sellers freely communicating on price. And so what we wanted to do was to basically take away the old model entirely. And why are we doing this? Is to pay a lower price, but also better service. Because what had happened is there had become so many conflicts of interest with these benefit operators that weren't us Who are they really representing? Their own interest or the patient and the plan? And quite clearly they were no longer aligned.
Gemma Allen
>> So I was about to go there. We think about the world of large pharma, right? Those guys get a bad rap, deservedly or undeservedly. They sure as hell have a rep. Is it a feature or a bug, though, that there's opaque pricing models? My thought as I listen to this is how has this not been regulated already? Why did it take a private company like yours to say, hey, we need to fix this and we use technology and innovative thinking and some level of collective agreement. And I want to understand how that works. Yeah, to do that.
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, I think what happened is if you were to go back in time 25, 30 years ago, the average cost of a prescription might have been like $15, $20. It was quite reasonable as more advanced therapies emerged, including biologics. And limited distribution drugs, the average price was going up. And when that occurred in the US, we have a very complex what's called a supply chain, which is how do you price a drug compared to other developed countries around the world? Because they're under more of a single-payer system, there's much more clarity because everyone is receiving effectively the same price in the benefit plans for those other countries. But you come to the United States and let's take our federal government. They have different prices for Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Defense, the VA, 340B pricing. All of these different programs have different prices for the same drug. Yet think about it, our largest and most sophisticated payer is the federal government, but even they have dozens of different pricing schedules. So what chance does a small employer have, or even an uninsured patient, receiving a fair price in the United States? And I think it's because no one challenged the process. I often say, something is wrong when you speak to someone who's been in the industry a long time and they say, well, that's the way it's always been done. That's a sure sign we need to innovate and we need to change this entirely. And so what we've been focused on from day one is how do we provide the lowest price with full transparency And instead of wasting all this time and energy on hiding data and hiding pricing and information, why don't we instead focus on the best care for the patients, the best outcomes, leveraging the data and analytics to assist the patient to make sure they're receiving the care that they need in a timely manner. This misalignment has probably put the US healthcare system back 20 years from where it should be.
Gemma Allen
>> And when you look at the economics of that, if you take one particular patient and you have good health, from an Rx perspective, you have a level of predictability, right? If you're a plan buyer, if you're somebody who's providing the healthcare, you can look at a persona or profile and create a whole load of predictive analytics around what it's going to cost you. cost creep in any business is a pain, right? What are the additional benefits, outside of just having a level of predictability around costs?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, let's take a look at the broader Judi platform and why we created unified claim processing. One of the biggest issues— let's start with safety. So in the United States, if you have a carve-out medical plan and a carve-out pharmacy plan, they're blind to each other. So if I was prescribed medication on the medical insurance side and then I'm prescribed medication on the pharmacy benefit side, these systems do not speak to each other in real time. And so if there's a drug-to-drug interaction or a quantity limit consideration, I have no visibility as both the patient and the prescribing physicians on both sides. So this is, to start with, a real safety issue. Now let's dig into what we'll talk about as a cost consideration. We have a model that's agnostic and independent. What we mean by that is we have no conflicts of interest because we have no interest in being a fulfillment entity or a surgical facility or a hospital, while many of our competitors over the last 30 years have done everything in their power to consolidate and buy these assets. And so for us, we're always trying to focus on how do we broadcast price efficiently. So if other fulfillment options enter into the workflow, we're willing to provide those to our members. The last area I want to talk about is the clinical considerations, which is, let's just say a member has a hip surgery. Well, Coming out of that hip surgery, you have a lot of questions including price as well as your post-op routine, but immediately with that data we could be communicating with the patient and giving them the information they need for physical therapy and physical therapy locations located within their network or from their home and what those options and more importantly what the costs are. All of this information up to this point, I call it the next action has always been elusive in the United States. We've always been kind of good enough. And I hate to say the reason why the U.S. healthcare system is operated so inefficiently is I think some of the legacy vendors in healthcare have really enjoyed the arbitrage on patient ignorance.
Gemma Allen
>> Of course. When you think about it, the last mile excellence is so critical, but who owns it, right? whose job is it to look at any one patient holistically and say, you have this condition and this condition and maybe there's a mental health element to this, for example, in so many patients, right? Who has ever really owned that relationship? So it is quite fascinating. I want to talk about the cloud business.
AJ Loiacono
>> Sure.
Gemma Allen
>> Did that kind of happen to you guys somewhat accidentally? First of all, help me understand how you came to create a cloud business. I'm sure you built something for your own customer use cases and it definitely has massive transferability from the perspective of multi-tenant and private cloud, which is so key to healthcare, especially right now, right, where sovereign cloud, private cloud, customers owning their own control plane, their own data plane, it's so critical. So talk to me about how it's happened and how it's growing.
AJ Loiacono
>> Amazing timing because I was just talking about this earlier with some board members. And so what's the origin behind it? The origin was, We started to look at the technology that was out there and we had this thesis of transparency and efficiency in the market and doing a better job servicing the patient. But it was quickly clear to us we couldn't do it with the existing technology or frameworks. So we had to build this end-to-end and we're incredibly thankful for our investors that enabled us to dream big and execute on that mission. But during that journey, we started to build a really good system. And the example I always try and give is If you gave me a recipe to make a croissant, I'd do an okay job at it. But if I could live in a French bakery for 2 years, I'm going to be really good at this. And so after building in our own backyard for a couple years, we really started to refine our workflows and our processes because we're using the very product that end customers, we believed, would one day want to license from us. And so we had a hunch that it was a really good piece of software, but more importantly, what was out there was aging out. It wasn't even being maintained anymore. And so, for the clients that we had alignment with, and a natural affinity to service, it was an easy partnership for us to forge, which is, we have this great technology for you to service your membership, and really not be limited anymore by the technology, because oftentimes the technology was defining the creativity. I often say we could think of, dozens of brilliant ideas to improve healthcare right now, but good luck implementing them on our aging infrastructure. But a natural extension of that kind of cloud mentality of both multi-tenant as well as sovereign is we started to see a pattern where our healthcare clients are very private. Obviously, they want to make sure their patient data is accounted for. They want to make sure their proprietary workflows are safe. And so they started to ask some very pointed questions about who is accessing this data in an age of AI. And this has become forefront of everything we are talking about now as an extension of our cloud services. And it's leading to some really exciting developments.
Gemma Allen
>> And is it opening up an entire new TAM for you? Do you have folks in the cloud business like customers or prospects that you've never worked with in other areas of your business? How new a frontier is this?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, it was, I would say, another pleasant surprise. I think if you execute and provide very good service and have strong references, you begin to get a reputation of people that want to speak to you about solving problems that they're observing in their own workflows. And so it wasn't just our customers that we were seeing that were directly using our Cloud, but some people that were tangential to our healthcare ecosystem that started to say, we have similar service issues and questions, could you help us address them?
Gemma Allen
>> So I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning, and that is across healthcare in the US, there are systems and applications that haven't been updated or really reimagined in 25, 30 years. Right. We know across hospital networks there's some key players there, folks that have been there a very long time and they're very deeply ingrained. Epic is a perfect example. Okay.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> How difficult is it for you or for any healthcare software company to manage integrations with some of these line of business or legacy applications? How much of a bottleneck is the fact that these folks have a certain level of vendor hostage, or you can call it what you will, but there is a vendor lock there. How do you get around that? How are we suddenly at a point where it's like, now AI is here and everything's fixed?
AJ Loiacono
>> I feel like you were part of my morning meeting. And the answer is it's an incredibly hard problem because even if— let's just say you have a brilliant application layer, so you're Judi Health, but when you work with any entity, and that could be an employer group, that could be another health system or health plan, they have other vendors and other systems. And depending upon the age of those systems, it could be very difficult. So this whole dance that we call data exchange, the pushing and pulling of information that powers both downstream applications, point solutions, as well as our own information, you have to exchange information securely and efficiently. So even though we focus on one universal application layer for what I call core administrative services, there's always going to be a legacy system that needs to receive data. And so oftentimes we spend an enormous amount of work converting to the file format and protocol that they can receive. And this adds obviously a large amount of lift. But the good news is once it's addressed, it becomes an automated workflow going forward.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So a fascinating company at a fascinating time. Talk to me about what's ahead for you guys. What's the commercial plan, the product plan? And how far away are you from ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, let's start with the commercial side of it. We're coming off of a very exciting year. It's our most successful selling season of all time, so we continue to grow at an extraordinarily brisk pace. All of our lines of business are showing incredible uptake. We have exceeded the expectations in every line of business, which is great for us. As far as additional products and solutions, we're excited to have some surprise announcements between now and the end of the year that we'll make. Maybe I'll be back. I'll be fortunate enough and we can talk more about it. But I think the other area is we always talk about the ability to have every option open in our future. And I think a healthy, successful company that continues to innovate and has a mission that we're executing on that really puts the American patient and the plan sponsors first. I think we have every opportunity open to us in the future.
Gemma Allen
>> The world is certainly your oyster, if not the USA as a starting point. Thank you so much for joining us on NYSE Wired: MedTech Unplugged.
AJ Loiacono
>> Thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is theCUBE Studio and we are talking NYSE Wired: MedTech Unplugged. Thanks for watching.
>> Palo Alto Studio Connection, Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm John Furrier, co-host here with Dave Vellante, my co-host. Welcome to theCUBE Studio here at the New York Stock Exchange. I'm Gemma Allen, co-host of NYSE Wired's MedTech Unplugged. And today we are talking about how healthcare is full of middlemen, fragmented systems, and data that somehow still doesn't talk to itself. Judi Health is betting that the way to fix that isn't another healthcare app. It's rebuilding the infrastructure underneath it. The bigger question is who actually benefits, who pays, and does putting all the data together really change the economics of healthcare? Joining me now to unpack that is AJ Loiacono, co-founder and CEO of Judi Health. Welcome.
AJ Loiacono
>> Thank you for having me, Gemma.
Gemma Allen
>> So maybe just to begin, give me the 101 on Judi. Help me understand exactly what this company does. Sure. And the business model behind this.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yeah, let's start with the name. So Judi is short for adjudication, which I often say is a fancy way of saying claim processing, which is how we basically think about all the workflows that go into handling a patient that has a benefit plan. At Judi Health, we have 3 main businesses. So we're Judi Rx, we're a pharmacy benefit manager. So these are prescription programs for large employers. We are also Judi Cloud. So we license our technology to regional health plans across the country. And we are also Judi Care, which is third-party administration and medical administration.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So help me understand the economic impact of having data that lives in such a fragmented silo across the healthcare landscape in the US, right? So, you go to CVS, you go to Walgreens, you get your prescription from one doctor, those in the same hospital, those two doctors might not necessarily talk to each other. It has always surprised me as a non-American, growing up in a different healthcare system, how fragmented and siloed those systems are. Who pays the cost for that?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, the patient and the plan ultimately. And this is kind of the sad part about the United States healthcare system is there's been a massive underinvestment in technology. So I often joke the average age of a system that's processing a medical or prescription claim in this country is 20, 30 years old. So to put that in comparison, imagine using a phone from 30 years ago. It's not too smart and it doesn't offer too many service options. So let's fast forward to today. What is this problem we're identifying? So the way that we move claims data in the United States is very antiquated. And the reason why is we move claims from vendor A to vendor B, like we're taking a picture in time. But in those seconds or minutes or hours, claims have already changed. Claims are paid, reversed, coded, recoded. People are eligible, ineligible, but it's too late. The claims have already moved from System A to System B. And in that time, the next vendor is already adding to that file and making their own observations and passing it to another vendor and another vendor. So, what does this feel like to the average patient? Well, think about it. If you've ever had a medical procedure and you get 3 different prices for the same procedure, that's 3 different systems not speaking to one another. If you're a patient and you're wondering where your medication is or where you are in a workflow and no one has any answers, again, it's these separate systems. So what we did and focused on at Judi Health, was we're the first company that has created what we call unified claim processing. So this way there's no outside dependencies and you have what's called a single source of truth. So no patient or member is ever guessing or provided with the wrong information.
Gemma Allen
>> So who is your ultimate buying persona? It's the people who are buying these healthcare plans, employers, insurers. Who fundamentally is to benefit from data being more synergistic and more holistic, in terms of its output?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, I think the first person that we're trying to always service are the people that sponsor benefit plans in the United States. And so when we talk about a payer, it's kind of a broad term. That could be an employer group, that could be a union, a university. And typically in the United States, self-insurance is if you have about 500 employees or more. In addition, other entities that benefit from this technology are other health plans that license this technology to service their own members.
Gemma Allen
>> Talk me through these two— three businesses. Let's start with the Rx business. We can all understand conceptually what that is, right? So that is essentially helping pharmacies be more efficient, have a more holistic picture of patient profiles, and I guess perform their services in a far more cost-effective and data-effective way. Give me a typical use case.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yeah, I think where we're always coming into this process is the pharmacy benefit model was quite static in the sense that it didn't change for 20 years. And what was the problem is Nobody understands what the price of a drug is in the United States under the old model. And the reason why was data was viewed to be proprietary, that pricing was proprietary, and no one was allowed to know the real price of a drug. But who would want the end consumer not to understand price? Because I often say, once you understand price, you can't really be overcharged. Hmm. And so what we were trying to address was this black box, if you will. This world in which the prior operators of pharmacy benefit, the people that we compete with, would basically create these very opaque layers of what I'll call benefit administration. So what we wanted to do is to make sure everyone gets the same price. Why is there a different price for drugs every hour of every day in every pharmacy? This is one of the initial observations I made when I founded the company, which is why are there 100, 200, 600 different prices for a drug in a single month when an actual manufacturer probably changes the price of a drug twice a year? That's it. So we should have much more stability and much more closely priced. But what we were seeing was prices all over the map. If I had to compare it to something that most people relate to is if you go into the pharmacy, don't pick up your prescription yet.
Gemma Allen
>> Mm-hmm.
AJ Loiacono
>> Go to the over-the-counter section. Go pick up a bottle of Tylenol or Advil or take your pick of eye drops, and something magical happens in the U.S. healthcare system. It doesn't matter if you're insured or uninsured, you work for the largest employer or the smallest, it's the same price for that bottle of Tylenol. And if someone comes in 5 minutes after you, it's still the same price. And if I were to go across the street, nobody's selling me a bottle of Tylenol for $400 on a 30-count pill bottle. It's going to be in the same price range. And so when you move to the prescription counter, you lose that clarity. You lose that efficiency of buyers and sellers freely communicating on price. And so what we wanted to do was to basically take away the old model entirely. And why are we doing this? Is to pay a lower price, but also better service. Because what had happened is there had become so many conflicts of interest with these benefit operators that weren't us Who are they really representing? Their own interest or the patient and the plan? And quite clearly they were no longer aligned.
Gemma Allen
>> So I was about to go there. We think about the world of large pharma, right? Those guys get a bad rap, deservedly or undeservedly. They sure as hell have a rep. Is it a feature or a bug, though, that there's opaque pricing models? My thought as I listen to this is how has this not been regulated already? Why did it take a private company like yours to say, hey, we need to fix this and we use technology and innovative thinking and some level of collective agreement. And I want to understand how that works. Yeah, to do that.
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, I think what happened is if you were to go back in time 25, 30 years ago, the average cost of a prescription might have been like $15, $20. It was quite reasonable as more advanced therapies emerged, including biologics. And limited distribution drugs, the average price was going up. And when that occurred in the US, we have a very complex what's called a supply chain, which is how do you price a drug compared to other developed countries around the world? Because they're under more of a single-payer system, there's much more clarity because everyone is receiving effectively the same price in the benefit plans for those other countries. But you come to the United States and let's take our federal government. They have different prices for Medicare, Medicaid, Department of Defense, the VA, 340B pricing. All of these different programs have different prices for the same drug. Yet think about it, our largest and most sophisticated payer is the federal government, but even they have dozens of different pricing schedules. So what chance does a small employer have, or even an uninsured patient, receiving a fair price in the United States? And I think it's because no one challenged the process. I often say, something is wrong when you speak to someone who's been in the industry a long time and they say, well, that's the way it's always been done. That's a sure sign we need to innovate and we need to change this entirely. And so what we've been focused on from day one is how do we provide the lowest price with full transparency And instead of wasting all this time and energy on hiding data and hiding pricing and information, why don't we instead focus on the best care for the patients, the best outcomes, leveraging the data and analytics to assist the patient to make sure they're receiving the care that they need in a timely manner. This misalignment has probably put the US healthcare system back 20 years from where it should be.
Gemma Allen
>> And when you look at the economics of that, if you take one particular patient and you have good health, from an Rx perspective, you have a level of predictability, right? If you're a plan buyer, if you're somebody who's providing the healthcare, you can look at a persona or profile and create a whole load of predictive analytics around what it's going to cost you. cost creep in any business is a pain, right? What are the additional benefits, outside of just having a level of predictability around costs?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, let's take a look at the broader Judi platform and why we created unified claim processing. One of the biggest issues— let's start with safety. So in the United States, if you have a carve-out medical plan and a carve-out pharmacy plan, they're blind to each other. So if I was prescribed medication on the medical insurance side and then I'm prescribed medication on the pharmacy benefit side, these systems do not speak to each other in real time. And so if there's a drug-to-drug interaction or a quantity limit consideration, I have no visibility as both the patient and the prescribing physicians on both sides. So this is, to start with, a real safety issue. Now let's dig into what we'll talk about as a cost consideration. We have a model that's agnostic and independent. What we mean by that is we have no conflicts of interest because we have no interest in being a fulfillment entity or a surgical facility or a hospital, while many of our competitors over the last 30 years have done everything in their power to consolidate and buy these assets. And so for us, we're always trying to focus on how do we broadcast price efficiently. So if other fulfillment options enter into the workflow, we're willing to provide those to our members. The last area I want to talk about is the clinical considerations, which is, let's just say a member has a hip surgery. Well, Coming out of that hip surgery, you have a lot of questions including price as well as your post-op routine, but immediately with that data we could be communicating with the patient and giving them the information they need for physical therapy and physical therapy locations located within their network or from their home and what those options and more importantly what the costs are. All of this information up to this point, I call it the next action has always been elusive in the United States. We've always been kind of good enough. And I hate to say the reason why the U.S. healthcare system is operated so inefficiently is I think some of the legacy vendors in healthcare have really enjoyed the arbitrage on patient ignorance.
Gemma Allen
>> Of course. When you think about it, the last mile excellence is so critical, but who owns it, right? whose job is it to look at any one patient holistically and say, you have this condition and this condition and maybe there's a mental health element to this, for example, in so many patients, right? Who has ever really owned that relationship? So it is quite fascinating. I want to talk about the cloud business.
AJ Loiacono
>> Sure.
Gemma Allen
>> Did that kind of happen to you guys somewhat accidentally? First of all, help me understand how you came to create a cloud business. I'm sure you built something for your own customer use cases and it definitely has massive transferability from the perspective of multi-tenant and private cloud, which is so key to healthcare, especially right now, right, where sovereign cloud, private cloud, customers owning their own control plane, their own data plane, it's so critical. So talk to me about how it's happened and how it's growing.
AJ Loiacono
>> Amazing timing because I was just talking about this earlier with some board members. And so what's the origin behind it? The origin was, We started to look at the technology that was out there and we had this thesis of transparency and efficiency in the market and doing a better job servicing the patient. But it was quickly clear to us we couldn't do it with the existing technology or frameworks. So we had to build this end-to-end and we're incredibly thankful for our investors that enabled us to dream big and execute on that mission. But during that journey, we started to build a really good system. And the example I always try and give is If you gave me a recipe to make a croissant, I'd do an okay job at it. But if I could live in a French bakery for 2 years, I'm going to be really good at this. And so after building in our own backyard for a couple years, we really started to refine our workflows and our processes because we're using the very product that end customers, we believed, would one day want to license from us. And so we had a hunch that it was a really good piece of software, but more importantly, what was out there was aging out. It wasn't even being maintained anymore. And so, for the clients that we had alignment with, and a natural affinity to service, it was an easy partnership for us to forge, which is, we have this great technology for you to service your membership, and really not be limited anymore by the technology, because oftentimes the technology was defining the creativity. I often say we could think of, dozens of brilliant ideas to improve healthcare right now, but good luck implementing them on our aging infrastructure. But a natural extension of that kind of cloud mentality of both multi-tenant as well as sovereign is we started to see a pattern where our healthcare clients are very private. Obviously, they want to make sure their patient data is accounted for. They want to make sure their proprietary workflows are safe. And so they started to ask some very pointed questions about who is accessing this data in an age of AI. And this has become forefront of everything we are talking about now as an extension of our cloud services. And it's leading to some really exciting developments.
Gemma Allen
>> And is it opening up an entire new TAM for you? Do you have folks in the cloud business like customers or prospects that you've never worked with in other areas of your business? How new a frontier is this?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, it was, I would say, another pleasant surprise. I think if you execute and provide very good service and have strong references, you begin to get a reputation of people that want to speak to you about solving problems that they're observing in their own workflows. And so it wasn't just our customers that we were seeing that were directly using our Cloud, but some people that were tangential to our healthcare ecosystem that started to say, we have similar service issues and questions, could you help us address them?
Gemma Allen
>> So I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning, and that is across healthcare in the US, there are systems and applications that haven't been updated or really reimagined in 25, 30 years. Right. We know across hospital networks there's some key players there, folks that have been there a very long time and they're very deeply ingrained. Epic is a perfect example. Okay.
AJ Loiacono
>> Yes.
Gemma Allen
>> How difficult is it for you or for any healthcare software company to manage integrations with some of these line of business or legacy applications? How much of a bottleneck is the fact that these folks have a certain level of vendor hostage, or you can call it what you will, but there is a vendor lock there. How do you get around that? How are we suddenly at a point where it's like, now AI is here and everything's fixed?
AJ Loiacono
>> I feel like you were part of my morning meeting. And the answer is it's an incredibly hard problem because even if— let's just say you have a brilliant application layer, so you're Judi Health, but when you work with any entity, and that could be an employer group, that could be another health system or health plan, they have other vendors and other systems. And depending upon the age of those systems, it could be very difficult. So this whole dance that we call data exchange, the pushing and pulling of information that powers both downstream applications, point solutions, as well as our own information, you have to exchange information securely and efficiently. So even though we focus on one universal application layer for what I call core administrative services, there's always going to be a legacy system that needs to receive data. And so oftentimes we spend an enormous amount of work converting to the file format and protocol that they can receive. And this adds obviously a large amount of lift. But the good news is once it's addressed, it becomes an automated workflow going forward.
Gemma Allen
>> Okay. So a fascinating company at a fascinating time. Talk to me about what's ahead for you guys. What's the commercial plan, the product plan? And how far away are you from ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange?
AJ Loiacono
>> Well, let's start with the commercial side of it. We're coming off of a very exciting year. It's our most successful selling season of all time, so we continue to grow at an extraordinarily brisk pace. All of our lines of business are showing incredible uptake. We have exceeded the expectations in every line of business, which is great for us. As far as additional products and solutions, we're excited to have some surprise announcements between now and the end of the year that we'll make. Maybe I'll be back. I'll be fortunate enough and we can talk more about it. But I think the other area is we always talk about the ability to have every option open in our future. And I think a healthy, successful company that continues to innovate and has a mission that we're executing on that really puts the American patient and the plan sponsors first. I think we have every opportunity open to us in the future.
Gemma Allen
>> The world is certainly your oyster, if not the USA as a starting point. Thank you so much for joining us on NYSE Wired: MedTech Unplugged.
AJ Loiacono
>> Thank you so much for having me.
Gemma Allen
>> I'm Gemma Allen here at the New York Stock Exchange. This is theCUBE Studio and we are talking NYSE Wired: MedTech Unplugged. Thanks for watching.
Gemma Allen
