PBC Structure and Team
Public Benefit Corporation Rationale
PRISM will operate as a Public Benefit Corporation, a legal structure that formally encodes the primacy of patient benefit into corporate governance while maintaining the flexibility and growth potential of a traditional corporation. This isn't merely a mission statement or cultural value—it's a legal requirement that the company balance shareholder interests with a specified public benefit: improving patient health outcomes through early detection of medical conditions. Directors have a fiduciary duty to consider this benefit alongside financial returns, creating legal protection for decisions that prioritize patient welfare even when they might reduce short-term profits.
The PBC structure provides crucial protection against future mission drift that purely contractual or technological safeguards cannot guarantee. Even if PRISM's ownership changes, even if original founders depart, even if market pressures intensify, the public benefit requirement remains embedded in the corporate charter. Any attempt to repurpose the technology for care restriction or other patient-harmful applications would violate the fundamental legal structure of the company. Shareholders buying into a PBC understand they're investing in a company with dual objectives, preventing the pure profit maximization pressures that might otherwise compromise the mission.
This legal framework also provides cover for the expensive decisions that patient benefit sometimes requires. Maintaining the highest standards of data privacy even when less stringent approaches would be legal and profitable. Keeping screening recommendations conservative even when more aggressive suggestions might generate more revenue. Investing in rare disease detection that helps small populations despite limited financial returns. The PBC structure ensures these decisions are not just permitted but required when they serve the stated public benefit.
The choice of PBC over non-profit reflects practical realities about scaling healthcare technology. Development requires significant capital for infrastructure, engineering talent, and lengthy validation periods before revenue. Growth requires investment in deployment infrastructure and operational capabilities. Traditional philanthropic funding rarely provides the scale or timeline needed for this kind of infrastructure-heavy technology deployment. The PBC structure enables traditional venture investment and equity funding while maintaining mission alignment through legal requirements rather than just good intentions.
Patient Outcome Priority
Within PRISM's PBC framework, patient outcome improvement takes precedence over all other metrics, shaping every technical decision, business relationship, and operational choice. This isn't an abstract principle but a concrete framework that determines how the system gets built, deployed, and evolved. When accuracy improvements might generate more suggestions but with lower confidence, patient benefit argues for maintaining higher confidence thresholds. When business efficiency might argue for less frequent model updates, patient benefit demands maintaining currency with evolving medical practice.
This prioritization extends to considering how pattern recognition performs across all covered populations. The Public Benefit Corporation structure legally requires evaluating whether the system serves diverse patient populations effectively, not just those who are easiest to reach or most profitable to serve. By evaluating medical patterns with computational consistency regardless of where care was delivered or how it was accessed, the system aims to identify screening opportunities comprehensively across populations.
This prioritization manifests in architectural decisions that might seem economically suboptimal but serve patient interests. The complete data isolation between models that enables cross-validation reduces computational efficiency but improves pattern reliability. The consensus requirement that reduces false positives might miss some true opportunities but prevents alert fatigue that could cause physicians to ignore suggestions. The limitation to non-invasive, low-cost screening tests reduces the potential scope but ensures recommendations remain practical and low-burden for patients.
The patient outcome priority also shapes business relationships and partnership decisions. Insurance companies are engaged not because they're ideal partners but because they have both the comprehensive data necessary for pattern recognition and the existing provider relationships to communicate suggestions. The results-based compensation model ensures PRISM only succeeds when patients benefit from early detection. The open collaboration framework that shares collective intelligence across all participants maximizes pattern recognition capabilities for every patient regardless of their insurance carrier.
Even seemingly minor operational decisions reflect this priority. The choice to process patients continuously rather than on-demand ensures those not actively engaged with healthcare still receive pattern recognition. The decision to communicate only with primary care physicians rather than specialists or patients directly maintains appropriate medical oversight while avoiding patient anxiety. The commitment to peer-reviewed publication of findings ensures the medical community can validate and learn from PRISM's pattern recognition, improving care beyond just direct users.
Investment Framework Compatibility
The PBC structure enables PRISM to access traditional venture capital and growth investment while maintaining mission alignment, resolving the fundamental tension between healthcare's long development cycles and investors' need for returns. Investors understand they're buying into a company where patient benefit is legally required to factor into decisions, but they also recognize that genuine patient benefit through early disease detection creates enormous economic value that aligns with strong financial returns.
The investment thesis rests on the alignment between patient benefit and economic value creation. Early detection of conditions like primary aldosteronism doesn't just improve patient lives—it prevents hundreds of thousands of dollars in downstream costs from heart failure, kidney disease, and other complications. This cost reduction creates the economic foundation for PRISM's business model, where insurance companies share a percentage of documented savings. The better PRISM becomes at identifying true early detection opportunities, the more value it creates for both patients and payers.
This framework attracts a specific type of investor who understands that sustainable healthcare businesses must create genuine value rather than just shifting costs or restricting access. These investors recognize that PRISM's constraints—the constructive-only architecture, the limitation to beneficial screening, the physician autonomy preservation—actually reduce risk by ensuring the technology remains aligned with healthcare system needs rather than fighting against provider interests or patient welfare.
The PBC structure also provides investors with unique advantages in the healthcare space. The legal commitment to patient benefit helps overcome skepticism from providers and patients who might distrust purely profit-driven healthcare AI. The mission alignment helps attract and retain talented engineers and medical advisors who want their work to create meaningful impact. The structural protection against mission drift reduces regulatory and reputational risks that plague healthcare technology companies that prioritize profits over patients.
Founding Team Expertise
PRISM's founding team brings together rare combinations of expertise essential for transforming the concept into reality. Brian Jorden, the original visionary and chief architect, combines nearly two decades of experience building data systems for regulated industries with the pattern recognition insights that led to PRISM's innovative approach. His unique ability to see how billing data could reveal early detection opportunities, then architect a system to capture those patterns while maintaining absolute privacy, provides the technical foundation that makes PRISM possible.
Timothy Collins contributes deep insurance industry expertise from his 26-year career culminating in technology leadership at SafeAuto, where he led digital transformation and major platform implementations. His understanding of how insurance companies actually operate—their data systems, their regulatory constraints, their economic pressures, their organizational dynamics—ensures PRISM integrates smoothly into existing infrastructure rather than requiring disruptive changes. This operational wisdom transforms theoretical pattern recognition into practical deployment.
Ryan Herchig brings rigorous computational and AI expertise, with a PhD in Applied Physics and current work in AI/ML algorithm development focusing on complex optimization problems. His ability to transform functional prototypes into optimized systems addresses the critical challenge of making PRISM's pattern recognition economically viable at scale. His experience with scientific publication and validation ensures PRISM's findings meet academic standards that build credibility with the medical community.
Together, this founding team covers the essential domains: the architectural vision and regulated industry experience to design the system, the insurance operations knowledge to ensure practical deployment, and the computational expertise to optimize performance. Each founder brings not just technical skills but networks of relationships in their domains that accelerate PRISM's development and deployment. Their complementary expertise ensures PRISM addresses real healthcare challenges with technically sound solutions that can actually be implemented in complex healthcare environments.
Advisory Relationships
PRISM seeks to establish advisory relationships with medical professionals, healthcare researchers, and industry experts who can guide the system's development and ensure it serves genuine clinical needs. Medical advisors will help identify which conditions are most suitable for pattern recognition, what screening tests provide the best benefit-to-burden ratios, and how suggestions should be communicated to maximize physician receptivity. These clinical perspectives ensure PRISM focuses on medically meaningful patterns rather than statistical curiosities.
Academic partnerships with medical research institutions will provide both credibility and capability. Researchers can validate PRISM's pattern recognition against clinical outcomes, publish peer-reviewed studies of the system's effectiveness, and identify new conditions where early detection could provide value. These partnerships also enable PRISM to contribute to medical knowledge, sharing insights about disease progression patterns that might advance understanding beyond just screening recommendations.
Industry advisors with experience scaling healthcare technology companies provide guidance on navigating regulatory requirements, managing insurance company relationships, and building sustainable business models in healthcare's complex ecosystem. Their experience helps avoid common pitfalls that derail healthcare technology companies, from HIPAA compliance complexities to the challenges of enterprise healthcare sales cycles.
The advisory network also includes experts in AI ethics and healthcare equity who ensure PRISM's development considers broader implications. How can the system ensure it doesn't perpetuate or amplify existing healthcare disparities? What safeguards prevent potential misuse as the technology evolves? How can benefits be extended to underserved populations? These perspectives shape PRISM's development to maximize benefit while minimizing potential harms.
Growth Strategy
PRISM's growth strategy emphasizes proving value through measured deployment before scaling, building confidence through demonstrated results rather than aggressive expansion. Initial implementations with forward-thinking regional insurance companies establish proof of concept, demonstrating that pattern recognition can identify beneficial screening opportunities that improve outcomes and reduce costs. These early deployments provide operational experience that refines everything from model training procedures to suggestion communication formats.
Success with initial partners creates reference implementations that accelerate subsequent adoption. When a regional insurer demonstrates reduced complications and cost savings from early detection, larger insurers gain confidence to implement PRISM themselves. Published case studies and peer-reviewed research from early deployments provide evidence that overcomes natural skepticism about AI in healthcare. Each successful implementation makes the next one easier, creating momentum that drives organic growth.
The collaborative framework amplifies this growth dynamic. Each new participant improves pattern recognition for all existing participants, creating powerful incentives for current users to encourage others to join. Early adopters benefit from later participants' larger training populations. Later adopters benefit from the refined system and proven value. This positive-sum dynamic where everyone benefits from growth drives toward comprehensive adoption.
Geographic expansion follows a deliberate pattern that maximizes learning while minimizing risk. Starting with states that have favorable regulatory environments and concentrated insurance markets allows refinement of operations before tackling more complex jurisdictions. Building density within regions before expanding nationally ensures strong local support and reference customers. This measured expansion ensures each new market benefits from lessons learned in previous deployments, improving success rates while reducing implementation costs.
This document establishes PRISM's organizational structure and growth approach. The Self-Aligning Incentive Structure document explains how the business model reinforces the PBC mission. The Open Collaboration with Privacy Protection document details how the collaborative framework accelerates growth. The Research and Publication document describes how academic validation supports adoption.