In this episode of The Grand Round-Up on Health Tech Nerds, hosts Kevin and Martin sit down with Eliana Berger, co-founder and CEO of Joyful Health, to talk about the company's $17M Series A led by CRV and why the future of practice finances goes well beyond revenue cycle.
Eliana grew up watching her family run a behavioral health practice, where nights and weekends were consumed by insurance paperwork. That experience sent her into about a dozen clinics as a fractional consultant, where she found the same problem everywhere: practices had no clear picture of what they were owed, who would pay them, or where their revenue had gone quiet. What looked like a staffing or workflow problem turned out to be something more fundamental. Revenue was moving through seven disconnected systems — the electronic health record, billing platform, clearinghouse, payer portals, and bank account — and no existing system connected them. Providers could see money was missing. They just couldn't pinpoint where.
That's the infrastructure gap Joyful was built to close.
Topics in this episode
- Why healthcare still lacks a unified financial system of record
- What Eliana saw working inside practices as a fractional consultant
- The difference between AI agents and AI services, and why it matters for denials
- Why a significant share of denials are never appealed at all
- How Joyful combines AI-powered investigation with expert billers to own the outcome
- The payer-provider tug of war, and why AI will eventually be on both sides
- Batch reprocessing as an alternative to one-at-a-time appeals
- The longer-term vision: contract-to-bank-account financial visibility for providers
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