A noted entrepreneur and an innovator of disruptive business solutions, Ravi Ika founded nirvanaHealth in 2013 and serves as President and Chief Executive Officer. He launched nirvanaHealth to address the amount of waste in the healthcare system and to improve care by creating a single integrated platform for payers and PBMs to manage their pharmacy, behavioral health, and medical business—something that has been a dream of every payer.

With this goal, Mr. Ika and the nirvanaHealth team built Aria from the ground up leveraging technology such as robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning (ML), and artificial intelligence (AI). Aria provides comprehensive automated transactional services for all payer and PBM administrative, medical, behavioral, pharmacy, financial, care, quality, cost, & risk management, and compliance management functions across the entire administrative and care continuums of healthcare. Aria facilitates the 3,500+ functions typically fulfilled by payers and PBMs. It does so in a way never before imagined in the payer or PBM industries: by automating each of these functions with a bot and logically deploying these bots into modules to achieve enterprise automation. Among the valuable results of this platform is the opportunity to implement innovative risk models, which means total care can be administered at 75-80% of premium dollars rather than the 90% currently allocated for actual care, and administrative costs which currently range from 10-15% can be reduced by a third to half while also improving member care.

Mr. Ika recognizes the $4 trillion annual healthcare market has long been in need of transformation. Together, payers and PBMs manage the majority of this spend wherein $900+ billion is wasted annually, which is due in large to the lack of cloud platforms built on RPA, ML, and AI to manage the complex multitude of functions fulfilled by these organizations.

More than 20 years ago, Mr. Ika recognized a similar transformational opportunity in health insurance. Industry insiders, challenged to reduce administrative costs by 30% and avoidable medical costs by 20%, saw these goals as unachievable. Mired in paper-based processes, the industry also struggled with a myriad of fragmented, inflexible, and expensive legacy systems. Mr. Ika responded to this opportunity by launching ikaSystems, an enterprise payer platform company. Disrupting obsolete paradigms, he delivered unprecedented change long before passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The ikaSystems platform decreased administrative costs for many health insurers by as much as 50% and significantly reduced avoidable medical costs. With these results, ikaSystems raised more than $120 million capital from Providence Equity and Essex Woodland Ventures. Mr. Ika now seeks to accomplish much bigger transformation across both the payer and PBM enterprises.

Known for building and inspiring world-class teams, Mr. Ika takes a hands-on approach to ensure his clients’ success. Over the years, healthcare industry leaders have come to rely on his vision and talent for creating enterprise platforms that radically disrupt legacy business paradigms and deliver significant value. Mr. Ika has a Master of Science degree in Environmental Engineering from Old Dominion University and worked as a research scientist at Harvard University prior to his entrepreneurial career, he also serves on the Board of Trustees at St. Mark’s School.