Silna Health CEO on balancing urgency with accuracy within prior authorization

Each week, we schedule our rounds with Healthcare Brew readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Within the often-frustrating world of prior authorization, providers and payers alike have turned to AI tools for help.

One of the companies in this space, Silna Health, automates prior authorizations and other health insurance-related tasks for clinicians. The startup was founded in 2023 and has raised $27 million from funders like investment bank Bain Capital Ventures and venture capital firm Accel.

Healthcare Brew talked to Silna’s Co-founder and CEO Jeff Morelli about what it takes to lead a healthcare AI startup.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?

A lot of times in technology, there is a mantra to move fast and break things, but in healthcare, that is not a luxury we can afford. So much of my job is balancing the act of executing with a maniacal sense of urgency along with ensuring that we strive to have the highest level of accuracy and trust in the systems that we are building. The core focus on my job is to ensure that we are ruthlessly seizing the opportunity in front of us, while making sure that we are focused on our long-term success, [which] is to build a company that our customers truly love and admire.

What’s the best change you’ve made or seen at a place you’ve worked?

One of the most meaningful changes I’ve made is introducing a weekly Sunday email to align the entire team. In the early days, we were moving fast but often in parallel, and people didn’t always have clarity on what the company had accomplished or what truly mattered in the week ahead. The Sunday email created a simple operating rhythm: a recap of key wins, the top priorities for the business, and a short reflection on what’s top of mind for me as a founder.

What healthcare trend are you most optimistic about?

I’m most optimistic about technology that finally connects clinical decision-making with reimbursement in real time. When providers can instantly see whether a treatment aligns with evidence-based guidelines and how it will be covered, it eliminates guesswork, reduces administrative friction, and prevents avoidable denials. This shift enables more consistent, guideline-driven care and allows clinicians to focus on patients rather than navigating insurance bureaucracy.

What healthcare trend are you least optimistic about?

I’m least optimistic about the continued fragmentation of health tech into narrow point solutions that behave more like isolated tools than true end-to-end products. Too many offerings address only a sliver of a workflow, forcing providers to juggle an expanding maze of logins, integrations, and still-manual phone, email, and fax processes. Instead of reducing complexity, this proliferation often increases it, leaving clinicians with a greater operational burden, not less.