Building networks is hard. And expensive. We’ve seen it firsthand. We’ve lived it. Not only is it expensive, but outsourcing network development is also inefficient and bad for business and even for patient care. We were frustrated that there was not an elegant solution to building specialty networks quickly and efficiently.

We asked ourselves, ‘What is it that healthcare needs?’ The answer is simple: Payors need to build their own network to care for their members. And yet we didn’t see anyone out there serving this need. What we did see in the marketplace was companies peddling access to their proprietary networks. The problem is that if you lease or pay to access another company’s network, they own it, not you. You have zero control over the network quality or size. And if you separate, then your members can lose access to their chosen providers.

Layer on top of that the extra costs around paying these groups a fee for access to their network, if you don’t own the network then you are going to struggle to get accurate utilization or access or even claims data. And without data, how do you know if your investment in specialty care is paying off?

Now you see the reason for Zula. We were frustrated that there were companies sitting between providers and carriers and between providers and patients.

We started Zula to deliver specialty Network Strategy, Network Design, and Network Development services directly to the health plan.