LEADERS of Care Eco Corp, the Brentwood-based specialist in optimizing healthcare providers' revenue-cycle management operations (RCM), gathered last week in Nashville to fine-tune plans for expanding the company's business in 2026 and beyond.

CareEco COO Chris Kinney MBA told VNC the company will continue to prioritize opportunities for organic growth that are steadily surfacing through referrals from within CareEco's network of strategic partners.

Kinney explained that in 2023, CareEco founders concluded that most healthcare providers were destined to continue struggling to deliver vital healthcare services on a financially sustainable basis, unless provider management teams acted with real urgency on the need to optimize legacy RCM practices and systems that had in many cases been leaking value for decades. 

Kinney told VNC that CareEco management spent much of 2024-25 methodically shifting away from the company's previous emphasis on marketing its RCM platform, tools and services to both payors and providers, in order to focus more intensely on enabling providers to cope with the multi-contextual complexity of coding, compensation, regulation, laws, standards and reporting requirements.

These days, said Kinney, there is "no hotter topic" among hospital and clinic administrators than upgrading revenue cycle management to capture rapidly all the revenues providers have earned.

Provider interest in RCM optimization is rising steadily, in part because the largest healthcare insurance payors are increasingly using artificial intelligence to adjudicate claims for reimbursement, which is likely to result in lower revenues for any providers who have not adopted technologies that enable them to optimize claims-filing and reimbursement outcomes by using "multi-contextual, scalable technology solutions." 

Hospitals and clinical practitioners cannot simply "outsource billing," "throw more people at it" or "make it somebody else's problem," said Kinney.

Asked about CareEco's own usage of AI and related assets, the COO responded, in part, "We have our own proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) engine with a custom-developed large language model trained on our data. We do not to purchase, white label, or utilize other AI systems within the AI elements of our platform. We leverage the AI in strategic areas to solve business challenges, along with the natural language processing (NLP), custom algorithms, and other more traditional computing methods to power the CareEco platform."

Team: (L-R) Ram Neelapu, Raj Nandarapu, Corey Johnson, Joe Hutts, Nick Burnett, Chris Kinney

Angel-backed CareEco has raised north of $4.5MM since its inception in 2019.

The latest raise closed in Q2 CY 2025. 

Kinney said CareEco now has 26 shareowners on its cap table, with controlling interest in the company held by CareEco management.

The company has a total 45 team members, including 39 associated with its presence in HITEC City, Hyderabad.

Kinney declined to comment on current financial results, but said the company's capital raises have afforded the team "good visibility" as CareEco focuses on execution, team expansion and its technology stack.

In addition to Kinney, the management team includes:

• Co-founder, CEO Corey Johnson MBA (HCA, Fresenius, Alltech)
• Co-founder, Chief Product & Information Officer Raj Nandarapu (EviCore, HCA)
• Chief Strategy Officer Nick Burnett MBA (ThriveWorks, Synchronous Health, CoreCivic)
• VP-Product Delivery Ram Neelapu MCE (Optum, Cognizant)

A partial listing of the company's investors and-or advisors:

• Joe Hutts MBA Board Chair (HCA, Intuitive Health, BreatheAmerica, Surgis, PhyCor)
• Marc Watkins MD, MSPH (Kroger, The Little Clinic)
• Josh Willeford MAcc (OssoVR, Surgis, United Surgical Partners Intl)
• Shawn Fry - (OptimalMD, Prevalent Health, Axcension, hospital CIO) 
• Adam Middleton (HC Advisory Network, MedCath)
• Stephanie Thompson PharmD MBA (HCA, Vanguard Health, HealthTrust, UT HSC)
• Greg Eisele MHA (MDR Inc., HCA, Medical Care Intl.)

Asked about outside advisors, Kinney listed attorney Mark Wilson of Riggs Davie; banker Debbie Wasson of Studio Bank; and, accounting is with Katlin Pendleton MBA of KP Financial Consulting. Pendleton spent more than a decade in HCA and KPMG roles.

Asked about competitors, Kinney provided a small sample 2011-2020-vintage businesses, including Washington, D.C.-based AGS Health LLC; Alpharetta, Ga.-based NYX Health; Boston-based Codametrix; and Austin-based Iodine Software.

Looking for signs of sector consolidation, VNC found, e.g., that Texas-based Elevate Patient Financial Solutions (fka MedData) bought the aforementioned NYX Health a year ago, and has made at least four other buys in the past five years, with support from PEs Audax and by Parthenon Capital.

VNC notes that CareEco announced in a 2024 LinkedIn post that abovementioned advisor Shawn Fry also serves as CareEco's chief innovation officer, then adding Fry was also founder and general partner of Audax Capital, an independent family investment office.

Asked about CareEco's own inorganic growth options, Kinney acknowledged the company has at times received interest from potential suitors, adding that the CareEco team is aware of types of acquisitions that might complement CareEco's offerings, over time.

While onboarding and serving new providers, rather than payors is CareEco's priority, Kinney confirmed that the company continues to support some of its earliest payor adopters, some provider-focused divisions of payors and some self-insured employers who seek to track their healthcare spend more effectively.

CareEco aims to complete each new client's situation-assessment and onboarding tasks within 30 days.

In the course of building its strategic network, Care Eco allows some consultants, RCM billing companies and others to white-label CareEco's software and analytic tools for use in performing analyses and other projects for their own clients.

Any customization called-for must fit within CareEco's current offering. If warranted, a broader overhaul of RCM processes can be negotiated.

COO Kinney, 34, is a Louisville native who landed in Nashville in 2013, and later married and became a father. The family resides in Davidson County.

Kinney earned his MBA at Vanderbilt University's Owen Graduate School of Management (2022), after earning a bachelor's in entrepreneurship at Western Kentucky University.

His prior career included roles with HCA (digital engagement, app/API development project lead), and business development and project leads with three techcentric Nashville firms: CTS Inc., Graybar and TEKsystems.

He also served in leadership roles in youth mentorship-oriented The Oak Project, a nonprofit affiliated with Operation Andrew Group, among other pursuits with nonprofits.

For the record: At inception in 2019, CareEco was known as LeliVet Corporation, and was based briefly in Pennsylvania before being relocated to Nashville by CareEco cofounders Johnson and Nandarapu.

Note: VNC's quick scan of cohort members entering Project Healthcare 2023-25 at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center suggests the firms most relevant to this story were: Darby Brown's HealthworksBetter (2024) and Ali Afshar's ArtiMed (Fall 2025). VNC

.last edited 1600 17 December 2025