The future we're building together

People often ask what Turquoise does. In a crowded health tech startup space brimming with companies built to improve one element of healthcare or another, it’s a fair question. When we explain the details, reactions vary from a polite head nod with no follow-up questions to an impassioned retelling of a personal experience about the stress of receiving an unexpected healthcare bill. That second group of people helps lay the foundation for why we exist.

Turquoise exists because the most expensive part of American healthcare doesn't stem from clinical care. It stems from the math that occurs before and after care is administered. For decades, the United States has built a financial system akin to a teetering house of cards: layers stacked on layers, held together by legacy standards, private code sets, and workflows designed for paperwork rather than people. If you've ever been a patient or worked in the healthcare industry, you know the result is a daily tug-of-war of denials, corrections, and rework. It's an environment where patients encounter uncertainty instead of answers, and where even the simplest question—"What will this cost?"—quickly collapses into an unhelpful response: "It depends."

Before we were the founders of Turquoise, we learned these realities in the trenches of appeals and billing battles, watching families drown in medical debt because the healthcare transaction was broken.

The industry's default transaction is wasteful in every sense: financially, emotionally, and operationally. Every claim that returns an error, every custom file format, bridge routine, or bill edit, every opaque contract term, every manual workaround is friction turned into cost—to the tune of over $265 billion in annual administrative waste. And that cost is not just an abstract statistic you read about online. It shows up as delayed care, surprise bills, collection calls, hours of administrative labor, and a quiet, restless national resignation that healthcare will always be confusing and expensive.

But the truth about the business of healthcare is simpler and more hopeful: in many cases, the information needed to pay for care can be known before a patient ever receives treatment. When pricing and benefits are computable and standardized, the chaos that exists today falls away. The system can behave like a modern marketplace instead of a black box. In that world, patients benefit from knowing the cost of care upfront, and providers focus on offering increased value across price, quality, and access. Payers and employers are enabled to take their fiduciary responsibility seriously.

Our mission is to build a waste-free healthcare transaction—a cleaner, simpler interaction between providers, payers, and patients. We will leave the waste exhaust behind. We're here to replace ambiguity with clarity, fragmentation with standardization, and opacity with transparency. We believe the future is one where healthcare payments are predictable, explainable, and fast. Where a family can focus on healing instead of spreadsheets, and where "it depends" becomes the rare exception, not the operating system.