Spotlight: Joel Fenelon @ Pangaea Healthcare

A spotlight is a short-form interview with a leader in health tech. In this spotlight, you'll hear from Joel Fenelon, co-founder and CEO of Pangaea Healthcare.

What does Pangaea Healthcare do?

Pangaea Healthcare is building a revenue intelligence platform on a clear conviction: The future of RCM is payers being present by proxy at every step of healthcare operations.

Instead of EHR-centered billing workflows that apply payer logic too late or not at all, we embed payer-aware intelligence directly into clinical and operational workflows so that care, documentation, and claims are shaped with reimbursement in mind from the start.

How did you end up working in health tech?

My path into health tech started with my father’s own painful experience navigating the healthcare system. Watching someone you love suffer needlessly because people and systems failed to coordinate properly leaves a mark, and it creates a kind of fire that never dies.

When I later met my cofounder Levinski, we recognized that same failure pattern at scale. Value isn’t being lost because providers don’t care; it's being lost because the systems around them are brittle and disconnected. Billing teams work hard, but are trapped in workflows that force them to manually reconstruct reality from incomplete data.

Once you see that clearly, it’s hard to look away. Health tech became the arena where building better systems could meaningfully improve both financial sustainability for providers and ultimately, patient care.

How does your role intersect with revenue cycle management (RCM)?

My role sits at the intersection of product, operations, and revenue reality. I spend time with billing teams, operators, and executives to see exactly where RCM breaks down in day-to-day execution.

That perspective directly shapes what we build. We design around the precise moments where claims slow, denials occur, or critical data goes missing. I’m deeply involved in translating real operational friction into product requirements and ensuring our software performs under true production pressure.

What do you think RCM will look like two years from now?

RCM will no longer be a downstream, reactive function. It will be embedded directly into how care is delivered and managed.

Payer requirements, risk signals, and reimbursement logic will be present by proxy throughout patient management, shaping documentation, workflows, and claims before revenue ever has a chance to break. Instead of applying payer rules after the fact, health systems will design encounters with those constraints in mind from the start.

Most routine billing work will be automated end-to-end, driven by intelligence that understands payer behavior and learns continuously from outcomes. Human teams will (potentially) be smaller, more specialized, and focused on oversight, exceptions, and optimization rather than manual reconstruction and cleanup.

The organizations that win won’t treat RCM as a back-office necessity. They’ll treat it as core infrastructure designed to produce predictable revenue as a natural output of care.