It started with a relatable pain point. Jake Fackrell, a big data entrepreneur and current Co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at Savvos Health, watched his company’s health insurance premiums skyrocket 30 percent annually. Despite his success in launching and scaling technology operations, he found himself offering his 60 employees high-deductible plans that offered little practical value.
This personal frustration led him to question the foundation of the U.S. healthcare system. In a recent discussion on The Go-to-Market Podcast with host Amy Osmond Cook, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CMO of Fullcast, Fackrell detailed how he uncovered a fragile system of opaque pricing, misaligned incentives, and administrative waste—the same system that forces over 500,000 families into bankruptcy each year.
Instead of adding another incremental feature to a broken system, Fackrell used his expertise in data aggregation to build a new payment rail from scratch. This article explores how modern technology and a direct cash model can create significant value by replacing decades-old manual claims processing. By rethinking how money changes hands, this new approach creates a clear win for employers, employees, and providers.
Why the Traditional Healthcare Payment System Is Fundamentally Broken
The American healthcare system is not suffering from minor inefficiencies; it is experiencing a systemic failure in design. To understand why a new approach is necessary, it’s essential to examine the core dysfunctions that created an industry where few win except those who profit from complexity. The traditional healthcare payment system fails because its complexity, opaque pricing, and misaligned incentives benefit intermediaries, not patients or providers.
The Opaque Pricing Problem and Why No One Knows the True Cost of Care
Consider the absurdity of the current system. A patient walks into a hospital for a procedure, and neither the patient, the provider, nor the payer knows the final cost until months after the provider renders the service. As Fackrell explains, “You go in and you have a surgery or even a doctor’s visit and you hand over an ID card, a health ID card, and that starts this process of claims adjudication and claims processing. And you don’t know as a consumer what that’s gonna end up costing you.”
This opacity creates a chain reaction of issues. Patients receive surprise bills and balance invoices weeks or months after they thought their care was complete. Providers face financial uncertainty because they cannot predict when or how much payers will pay them. The entire experience becomes adversarial, with every stakeholder left guessing about the financial outcome.
The Incentive Misalignment Crisis in a System Built on Volume, Not Value
The scale of administrative waste in healthcare is staggering. Fackrell points to a $500-billion-a-year industry called Revenue Cycle Management, which exists solely because providers must fight to collect payment from insurance companies and payers. This massive industry adds no value to patient care; it exists only to navigate the complexity the system itself created.
This challenge mirrors a broader conversation happening across industries. As discussed on The Go-to-Market Podcast, the healthcare sector is attempting to shift from fee-for-service models to value-based care. The goal is to reward quality outcomes rather than the volume of procedures performed. Yet transforming that revenue model remains an enormous undertaking.
The parallel to sales operations is striking. According to the 2026 Benchmarks Report, “Sales channel underperformance often results from misaligned incentives, not a lack of leads or skill set. When employees are rewarded for activity rather than outcomes, they focus on being busy instead of being effective.” The same principle applies to healthcare. When the system rewards administrative process over patient outcomes, complexity becomes the default.
The Employer’s Dilemma of Soaring Premiums and Unusable Benefits
For business owners like Fackrell, the frustration was personal and immediate. “Every year I was having these renewal meetings with my broker and we were always, the premiums were always going up by 20, 30 percent,” he recalls. “It was very, very difficult ’cause your healthcare expenses and premiums would go up every year.”
The concrete numbers tell the story. Fackrell was offering employees plans with $3,000 deductibles. One company that recently switched to Savvos had been providing employees with $9,000 deductibles. These high-deductible plans cost employers significant money while providing employees with benefits they could barely use. The health insurance became a liability rather than an asset.
How a New Payment Rail Unlocks Value and Transparency
Rather than accepting the system’s inherent flaws, Fackrell applied the entrepreneurial toolkit he had used to solve complex data problems in other industries. The result was a new approach to healthcare transactions.
Applying an Entrepreneur’s Toolkit to Turn Unstructured Data Into a New Model
Fackrell’s background in data aggregation proved essential. Before healthcare, he built companies that gathered raw, unstructured information from thousands of sources and transformed it into valuable, actionable data. One venture processed obituaries to create death records faster than the Social Security Administration could produce them. Another aggregated real estate data for industry professionals.
This experience taught him to find signals in the noise and to question existing processes. “We had competitors in the space trying to just create bells and whistles on an outdated, crazy existing process that didn’t work,” Fackrell observes. “Instead of going to the root cause, they were just trying to add little bells and whistles. We thought, let’s just reinvent the whole thing.”
His approach exemplifies a successful vertical go-to-market strategy. Rather than building a generic solution, Fackrell identified a deep, specific problem within a vertical and built a tailored system to address it.
Unlocking 50–90% Savings by Eliminating Claims Through Direct Cash Pay
The core innovation is elegantly simple. Instead of processing claims through third-party networks, Savvos negotiates direct cash payments with providers at the time of service. “What if you could just pay the provider at the time of the procedure so they don’t have to try to collect their money?” Fackrell asks. “There’s no collections. There’s no revenue cycle management.”
The results are dramatic. When providers know they will receive guaranteed payment immediately, they are willing to offer substantial discounts. “They say, well, if you’ll pay us at the time of the procedure, we’ll roll out the red carpet for you. We’ll give you 50, 60, 70, and sometimes 80 or 90 percent off of their contracted rates.”
This approach mirrors what other healthcare organizations have achieved through operational simplification. Sonic Healthcare unified multiple fragmented data sources into a single platform, establishing one source of truth and enabling transparent, data-driven planning. The principle is the same: eliminate unnecessary complexity to unlock efficiency.
Creating a Pre-Care Communication Hub, Not a Post-Care Battlefield
The Savvos platform transforms the timing and nature of healthcare communication. Fackrell describes it as “kind of like Slack for healthcare before the surgery.” All stakeholders, including patients, providers, and the plan, communicate on a single platform before any procedure takes place.
This represents a fundamental shift. Traditional healthcare operates as a post-procedure claims battle where parties fight over payment after services are rendered. The new model creates pre-procedure alignment where stakeholders agree upon price, services, and payment terms upfront. Everyone knows what will happen and what it will cost before anyone enters an operating room.
By creating a new payment rail based on direct cash payments, Savvos eliminates administrative waste and unlocks massive savings for all parties.
A New Model Where Everyone Wins by Realigning Incentives for Better Outcomes
When payment mechanisms are fixed, benefits flow to every stakeholder in the healthcare ecosystem. The model creates a situation where no one must lose for others to win.
For Employers and CFOs: Slashing Costs While Offering a Zero-Deductible Benefit
The business case is compelling. Employers see their premiums decrease while simultaneously offering employees a dramatically better benefit. “Their premiums are coming down as the employer, the self-funded employer group, and they’re able to offer their employees a much, much better benefit than what they’re previously used to,” Fackrell explains.
This outcome matters deeply to CFOs who must balance cost control with talent acquisition and retention. A zero-deductible, zero-out-of-pocket health benefit transforms the health plan from a costly liability into a competitive advantage.
The parallel to commission management is instructive. Just as Savvos automates and simplifies complex provider payments, Fullcast Pay automates complex commission payouts to eliminate manual work and disputes. Both systems replace broken, manual financial processes with streamlined, automated solutions that benefit all parties.
For Employees: A Better Patient Experience Without Financial Anxiety
The patient experience transforms completely. “They walk outta that doctor’s office or that surgery. They never have to worry about making a payment because it’s all done through the platform,” Fackrell says. “They don’t have to worry about balance bills, EOBs, or invoices, none of that’s coming in. It’s done. The procedure is done. They walk out and it’s already taken care of.”
Fackrell notes that the biggest compliment Savvos receives is not about cost savings. It is about the experience itself. Patients consistently report that their interactions through the platform represent the best healthcare experience they have ever had. This proves that cost reduction and superior patient experience are not mutually exclusive.
For Providers: Guaranteed On-Time Payment and an Escape From RCM Chaos
Providers gain freedom from the administrative burden that consumes their resources. They receive 100 percent of the agreed-upon price, on time, and without chasing payment through complex billing cycles. This allows them to focus on patient care rather than revenue cycle management.
The efficiency gains mirror what Jud Whidden Consulting Inc. achieved for a medical client by automating commission calculations. That engagement reduced processing time by 88 percent and increased accuracy to nearly 100 percent. Automating and guaranteeing complex payment calculations ensures everyone benefits.
This new model creates clear benefits for employers (lower costs), employees (better benefits), and providers (guaranteed payment), proving that the system doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
Final Thoughts
Jake Fackrell’s journey proves that the most powerful healthcare payment innovation is not a new piece of technology. It is a new way of thinking. By refusing to accept the broken status quo, he uncovered the central flaw in the system: a payment model that benefits no one.
By replacing the post-care claims battle with a pre-care collaborative agreement, Savvos Health has not only cut costs but has fundamentally realigned incentives to favor transparency, efficiency, and a better human experience. The company’s recognition as number 220 on the Inc. 5000 list validates the market demand for this approach.
This is more than a business model; it is a mission to “cure healthcare” by fixing the industry’s core payment process. For the 500,000 families who face bankruptcy each year due to healthcare costs, this new approach offers hope that the system can change.
For business leaders facing their own operational challenges, Fackrell’s story offers a clear lesson: sometimes the most effective solution is not to optimize a broken process but to replace it entirely.
Whether you are rethinking healthcare marketing strategy or streamlining commission management with Fullcast Pay, the principle remains the same. Question the assumptions, align the incentives, and build something better.
