Healthcare organizations have no shortage of data. Claims records, pharmacy data, utilization reports, reimbursement trends, and patient histories continue to pile up at an unprecedented pace. Yet, despite the volume of information available, healthcare costs continue to rise, inefficiencies remain deeply embedded in the system, and employers still struggle to understand where their healthcare dollars are going. For Adit Parasuram, CEO of Health Cost IQ, the issue is not access to data—it is the inability to transform fragmented information into reliable intelligence. “Every health plan has claims data. Most have analytics platforms. Yet costs keep rising and waste keeps compounding,” says Parasuram. “The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s the quality, structure, and intelligence behind how that data is analyzed.”

That realization sits at the center of Health Cost IQ’s mission. The company is building a healthcare intelligence platform designed to uncover waste, improve transparency, and provide organizations with actionable insights that traditional analytics systems often fail to deliver. Instead of simply reporting what has already happened, Health Cost IQ aims to help organizations understand what is likely to happen next—and how to prevent unnecessary costs before they occur.

Parasuram’s path into healthcare technology was shaped by years spent building and scaling companies in other industries. He began his career in telecom with organizations such as Intelsat and British Telecom before helping grow Vubiquity, a company involved in licensing and distributing studio and network content. After Vubiquity was sold to private equity, he transitioned into healthcare technology through Binary Fountain, a company focused on patient experience analytics and sentiment analysis for health systems. That business was eventually acquired in 2020, but the experience exposed Parasuram to a much larger issue across healthcare, organizations were drowning in information while still lacking meaningful intelligence.

Health Cost IQ was originally founded by a data scientist whose doctoral research focused on proving how healthcare waste negatively impacts outcomes. That research eventually became the foundation for the company’s broader vision, building a data infrastructure capable of identifying waste, fraud, abuse, and inefficiencies across healthcare plans at a much deeper level than conventional systems. In fact, the scale of the problem is staggering. Parasuram notes that as much as half of private employer healthcare spending can be categorized as waste. Providers routinely charge several times above market rates, while employers often have little visibility into how healthcare bills are structured or why costs continue to escalate. Pharmacy expenses have also become a growing concern, with prescription costs consuming a significantly larger share of employer healthcare spending over the last decade. For Health Cost IQ, solving these problems starts with fixing the underlying data architecture itself. “Most platforms are running sophisticated algorithms on unstructured or unenriched claims data,” says Parasuram. “The algorithms are not the issue. The foundation underneath them is.”

The company’s answer to that challenge is their core platform, which includes multiple operational modules covering fraud detection, waste identification, abuse prevention, payment integrity, underwriting, stop-loss analysis, pharmacy optimization, geo-access strategy, and health plan management. These modules dramatically accelerate workflows that traditionally required weeks or months of manual actuarial analysis.

The reason why Health Cost IQ stands above other platforms is its proprietary payment integrity intelligence platform called Veris AI. Veris is named after the Latin word for truth, it operates as an AI-driven intelligence layer built on top of Health Cost IQ’s enriched healthcare datasets and proprietary architecture. The platform integrates multiple forms of validated healthcare intelligence before analysis even begins, including Johns Hopkins ACG risk stratification models, pharmacogenomics data, HEDIS quality measures, pharmacy databases, and care gap identification tools. The result is a highly structured and traceable data environment designed to minimize inaccuracies and provide organizations with actionable insights they can trust. Rather than relying heavily on open large language models that can introduce hallucinations or unreliable outputs, Health Cost IQ focuses on controlled, enriched intelligence that can withstand the demands of clinical and financial decision-making. “When your data includes that level of enrichment, you stop reporting on what happened and start predicting and preventing what could happen,” Parasuram says.

In one example, Health Cost IQ analyzed a population of 20,000 healthcare lives for a brokerage group seeking to evaluate risk exposure. Using only census data, the company completed the underwriting assessment in roughly 20 minutes and came within $5,000 of the actual projected risk outcome—an exercise that traditionally could have taken actuaries significantly longer to complete. Today, Health Cost IQ’s offerings reflect the growing demand for greater transparency, payment integrity, and cost accountability across the healthcare industry. Parasuram believes the current environment has created the perfect moment for platforms capable of delivering meaningful healthcare intelligence rather than surface-level analytics. “Healthcare transparency and the pressure to reduce waste are rewarding platforms like ours,” he says. “What we’re building is needed, and the market is responding to it.”

The company’s partnership with Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs further reinforces that mission. By integrating Cost Plus Drugs into its intelligence ecosystem, Health Cost IQ strengthens its pharmacy optimization capabilities while aligning with organizations pushing for greater pricing transparency and affordability throughout healthcare.

Parasuram sees the company’s future being shaped by what he calls a “data moat”—a continuously expanding intelligence foundation that grows stronger with every client added to the platform. Each new implementation enriches the system further, creating a compounding effect that becomes increasingly difficult for competitors to replicate. Health Cost IQ is also relocating its headquarters to Washington, D.C., reflecting the growing importance of healthcare policy, transparency initiatives, and government efficiency programs in shaping the industry’s future. “Our goal is to become the leader in payment integrity and intelligence for organizations committed to changing how healthcare costs are managed,” concludes Parasuram. “We want to be the de facto platform doing it accurately and completely.”