KPI Ninja is quietly but quickly growing.
The Lincoln, Nebraska-based startup does more much than provide healthcare organizations with data analytics. The company’s robust toolbox of products and services is helping deliver quality care and improved outcomes for patients.
KPI Ninja takes pride in working “shoulder-to-shoulder” with healthcare organizations and their providers to drive down costs while accelerating organizational performance improvements.
As its name suggests, KPI Ninja’s products and services provide key performance indicators relevant to a number of components within healthcare organizations.
Features include seamless integrations with several different data sources, through the big data driven Ninja Universe platform with integrated and unified dashboards across organizations, patient health data analytics, automated reports, and more.
Thanks to our sponsor
The KPI Ninja founding team story begins with three friends on the same cricket team who became college roommates. Vijay Musunuru, Chief Product Officer, recounted how they began KPI Ninja. He explained that their idea to start a company was partially inspired by the TV series Shark Tank, a bit of intrigue and curiosity about what they could build themselves, and a collective fascination with disruption.
Their serendipitous friendship, along with their respective educational backgrounds and combined deep experience in data analytics, has led to a founding partnership that has quietly grown into a multimillion-dollar company since its founding in 2014. Moreover, they boot-strapped their company for more than two years – retaining the company’s equity between the three co-founders: Vineeth Yeddula, Vijay Musunuru, Naren Parimi.
All three hail from India, and all attended the UNL. Vineeth and Vijay both hold master’s degrees in industrial and management systems engineering from UNL, and Naren holds a master’s degree in computer science from UNL. KPI Ninja employs twenty-one fulltime. The founders plan to hire more over the next two years.
During a wide-ranging conversation, the co-founders explained that they built KPI Ninja to solve a problem they observed over the years while working in healthcare. They found that healthcare organizations were failing to optimize outcomes by exploiting the power of analytics. KPI Ninja is built to help healthcare institutions deliver improved outcomes using powerful data analytics along with strategic consulting.
“We observed the rapidity at which healthcare has shifted to tech, though many organizations in the industry have difficulty keeping pace in shifting a massive volume of information from paper to electronic. Healthcare organizations have a daunting task of managing not only their clinical data, but also everything else from financial to operational components of their business,” said Vineeth.
“Furthermore, it’s not adequate to simply track and manage data. What matters most is how the data is used to improve patient care as much as possible, and as economically possible. KPI Ninja’s core mission is to be the principal partner in this effort.”
Naren added that there has been a fundamental shift in healthcare from volume to value-based care while balancing costs and reimbursements. He explained that KPI Ninja has always derived its data analytics solutions through careful validation of their hypotheses, and by getting at the fundamentals and basics of problem solving.
“We work on iterations while doubling down and maximizing, whether it be our ideas, our resources, or our client relationships. We have built a multimillion-dollar business with a small team and have earned a reputation of excellence by word-of-mouth. Our mix of technology, performance management advisers, and healthcare expertise is compelling to our clients and is what sets us apart,” said Naren.
KPI Ninja has three primary market foci. The first is its partnership with health information exchanges to leverage the massive amount of data to support the population health needs in the region.
The company’s second market focus is direct primary care organizations (membership-based models) in which members have unlimited access to primary care services. KPI Ninja’s robust analytics solutions arm these providers with the key performance indicators necessary to improve patient outcomes and provide critical ROI data.
The company’s third target market is critical access hospitals – small community-based hospitals of which there are more than 64 in Nebraska and 84 in Kansas, and several others surrounding Nebraska which make up 30% of the region’s market share. The KPI Ninja team is seeking to bring its solution to rural healthcare, a market they view as critically underserved.
KPI Ninja’s fundamental philosophy, and what its founding members believe distinguishes their company from other analytics companies, is not only their industry knowledge and experience, but also the close partnership dynamic they build with their clients.
“We are not just a pretty dashboard,” said Vijay. “In addition to our robust data analytics, we provide strategic advising and performance improvement expertise coupled with a strong tech platform to help healthcare organizations achieve their goals.”
Lisa Fisher, Operations Director at Strada Healthcare in Omaha, one of KPI Ninja’s clients, agrees, and remarked on Strada’s experience working with KPI Ninja.
“As a direct primary care organization that bills outside of the typical insurance model, Strada Healthcare strives to reduce costs and provide our member patients the very best holistic care. In doing so, it is essential that we demonstrate value and documented metrics of our success. KPI has been our valued partner to produce the measures that prove our model works, with very little administrative burden on our providers.”
Lisa went on to say, “We found immediately when introduced to KPI Ninja and the team, that they demonstrated a genuine interest in improving direct primary care through meaningful metrics. Working with the KPI team has been a tremendous value-add, and I’ve never experienced anything like it before during many years of working with data teams and analytics tools. KPI Ninja’s philosophies, methodologies, and service are superior. I spend exponentially less time validating when mapping their data, because I have yet to find an error – it’s absolutely remarkable.”
Visit https://kpininja.com/ to learn more about this company.
