Saar Mahna, J.D., MBA | 2026 MHE Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

I grew up in Ohio in a family of physicians, the son of a doctor whose work with injured workers and his efforts to reform parts of Ohio law taught me, early on, that healthcare is as much about systems and policy as it is about patients. I assumed for years I would become a surgeon. Life had other plans. I went to Ohio State for undergrad and then earned my MBA in 2013 and my J.D. in 2014, both from Ohio State. I started my career as an industrial investment banker at KeyBanc Capital Markets, which taught me how operators actually run businesses and how capital flows in and out of them. In 2015, I joined RxAdvance, an early-stage PBM [pharmacy benefit manager], leading finance. And that’s where I rediscovered healthcare and, more specifically, the prior authorization problem. I founded Banjo Health in 2019 to take a real swing at it.

Turning point in your career

While I was at RxAdvance, we were standing up specialty drug prior authorization workflows for a large Medicaid managed care plan. I had a front-row seat to what those reviews actually looked like: the queues, the back-and-forth, the patients waiting on therapies that could change the course of their illness. I remember thinking, very plainly, “There has to be a better way to do this.” That was the moment Banjo became inevitable for me.

Biggest day-to-day challenges

The hardest part of this job is prioritization. In a market moving as quickly as AI [artificial intelligence] in healthcare, there are always more good ideas than there is time, capital or attention to chase them. My job is to keep the team (and by that I mean mostly myself) focused on the handful of things that matter most for our clients and our members — and to say no, gracefully, to a lot of things that are genuinely interesting but aren’t something Banjo is ready to prioritize at that time. Beyond that, it’s the ordinary work of any growth-stage CEO: hiring carefully, supporting the team I have, navigating a complex environment, and making sure we keep earning the trust of the health plans and PBMs that let us into the most sensitive parts of their operations.

Use of AI

AI is the product, not a feature we bolted on. Banjo Health uses generative AI, NLP [natural language processing] and traditional machine learning to operationalize clinical criteria, support utilization management decisions, and reduce the administrative burden of prior authorization for our health plan and PBM partners. Today, we touch roughly 30 million lives and process about 3 million prior authorizations a year, and the system gets better with everyone.

Internally, we use AI in many of the same ways most modern teams do — drafting, research, code review, customer support — but we’re disciplined about it. My view is that AI isn’t going to replace human decision-making in healthcare. Rather, it’s going to reshape the conditions in which humans make decisions by surfacing better insights and catching the edge cases. The clinician stays in the loop.

Top priority

Scale responsibly. Our priority is to grow our coverage meaningfully — from the lives we serve today toward the 100 million lives mark — while making sure every new client onboarding meets the same bar for accuracy, transparency and clinical integrity as the first one.

Beyond that, we’re investing heavily in our platform so that the criteria layer becomes more transparent and interoperable across the ecosystem. The simple version: faster, fairer prior authorization at scale without ever losing sight of the patient on the other end of the workflow.

Recommended book, article, TV show or documentary

I constantly find myself drawn to books around philosophy and frequently come back to “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. Frankl survived unimaginable suffering and came out the other side with a clear-eyed conviction that meaning — not comfort, not certainty — is what sustains us through difficulty. For anyone working in a system as complicated, frustrating and high stakes as U.S. healthcare, that reframe matters. It reminds me, on the harder days, why the work we do is worth doing.

Making U.S. healthcare less expensive

I say this humbly, knowing how many smarter people have spent their careers on the question. My short answer is administrative complexity and misaligned incentives. Roughly a quarter to a third of every healthcare dollar in this country goes to administration rather than care, and a great deal of that is friction between payers, providers and patients negotiating over what gets covered, when and at what price. Add the consolidation we’ve seen on both the payer and provider sides, and competition does less work for the consumer than it should.

What to do about it is the hard part, and I don’t pretend to have the whole answer. But I do believe a meaningful slice of the cost can come out by attacking that administrative layer with better technology, better data standards and more interoperability — letting clinicians spend their time on patients instead of paperwork. That’s the slice we’re trying to address. The rest will take policy, payment reform and a lot of patient capital from people much wiser than me.

This year, I’d love to show my daughters how to grow some plants. It’s been on the docket for a while, and we’ve finally had a chance to plant some seeds. Fingers crossed they will sprout and we’ll remember to keep them watered!