USC alumnus Andrew Nye founded Qatalyst Health in 2023 after teaching himself to code and use AI software over winter break.
After learning enough to create his own AI-driven software, Nye launched Qatalyst Health, an AI-driven medical software startup that aims to help skilled nursing facilities reduce Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement paperwork, in his third year of school.
Nye founded Qatalyst Health with the help of Darla Moore School of Business professor and Faber Entrepreneurship Director Jeffrey Savage, who now works as Qatalyst's Vice President of Sales. The two decided to found Qatalyst after seeing firsthand the challenges skilled nursing facilities face in billing and reimbursement.
“(Savage and I) originally went out to a facility in the Charleston area, kind of on a whim…and saw all of the redundant manual workflows that all the staff were doing. It was kind of a hard opportunity to pass up at that point.”
Skilled nursing facilities are nursing homes that provide long-term care and rehabilitation services for patients. When skilled nursing facilities admit patients, staff must read their hospital discharge summaries, which are often lengthy and complicated documents detailing patients' care plans, including the medications and equipment they need to recover.
Over the course of a patient's stay, nurses must apply for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement, which are payments to skilled nursing facilities in exchange for administering treatment or medication to individuals enrolled in these programs.
Qatalyst’s AI software, ROSA, aims to help make these arduous processes easier by reading through the documents and summarizing the valuable parts, Savage said.
"It can get really, really long and cumbersome...they have to distill down, okay, 'what's the care like? What medications are needed?'" Savage said. "Using AI...we're able to read through and take out those clear things, as well as do some of that reading between the lines for the nurse."
Qatalyst's website advertises that ROSA will save a facility at least 7.5 hours a week in time spent filling out forms.
“A nurse becomes a nurse because they want to help out the people that they want to serve,” Savage said. “And so this frees up the nurse, you know, kind of gets them out from behind the desk so that they can do more work.”
Nye said he had little prior experience with computer software, but he felt he would be more successful if he created the product himself.
“As a startup, you typically see the [in the] successful ones, founders are the ones who built the product, because then you know intimately everything about how everything works, so it just made sense in my head to do,” Nye said.
Nye said he credits several co-curricular experiences as a driving force behind his startup. Nye was part of the Finance Scholars program, created a hedge fund with other business students and served as president of the Gamecock Consulting Club during his time at USC.
Savage is the faculty advisor to the Gamecock Consulting Club and served as a "helper" to Nye when he was GCC president in his second year of school, Savage said.
“Andrew was a very independent type of guy,” Savage said. “Andrew definitely proved to me that he was a go-getter, that he would make [Qatalyst] happen.”
Since Qatalyst launched at the end of 2023, the company has expanded to work with seven facilities, and is projected to be working with over 100 by the end of 2025, Nye said.
“There are a lot of conferences we have scheduled, and a really strong initial push has just been word of mouth for us,” Nye said. “We have a pretty good referral program with all the administrators…they’re referring us around pretty quickly.”
After receiving a grant from the South Carolina Research Authority, Qatalyst hired five USC computer science students to further its software development. Third-year computer information systems student Leeon Israel was the first student Nye reached out to, and joined Qatalyst in Nov. 2024.
“I've always been really passionate about making technology that would benefit other people, and not just random things,” Israel said. “I knew that I would be building something that had a lot of potential and helped people who needed our software. And it's also just fun to build things, and I like being in the beginning from the ground up. So I thought that there was no better opportunity than Qatalyst."
While Israel was well-versed in computer science principles by the time he started at Qatalyst, working in the nursing and healthcare industry was a completely new experience for him, he said. Israel said that because of this learning curve, hiring is primarily based on commitment to Qatalyst’s mission.
“It's not even based on skill, it's more based on the passion that you have for what we're building… and the way we go about working together,” Israel said. “A lot of the things that we've made, we never really knew how to build prior, and so we kind of have to learn everything on the spot.”
Nye said the most rewarding experience with Qatalyst is being able to look back on how far the company has come.
“Having a team of developers working, seeing them all interact with each other… seeing how much the company has grown itself has been my favorite achievement so far, not any particular sale or product release or anything,” Nye said.
Nye expressed the importance of viewing failure as a learning experience, and that taking risks helped him learn.
“Just start,” Nye said. “Try to take as much risk as possible. My goal when I came to college was not necessarily…to fail, but to put myself in as many positions as possible where I have the ability to fail, because that’s where you actually learn the most.”