Qventus has engineered a method to bring a faster surge of healthcare artificial intelligence solutions to its customers.
The company is coining the capability the “AI Solution Factory” to mimic the high-speed production of an assembly line. Qventus says the method stems from its experience over the past decade in building healthcare AI, as well as in deploying its inpatient capacity and surgical growth solutions.
Healthcare organizations that Qventus has deployed with have asked the company to automate more parts of the workflow to speed the implementation of AI and gain more efficiency throughout the system. Qventus has traditionally focused on bringing a single AI solution to market, but its new high-speed process will enable it to bring more solutions to its core customers.
Whereas in the past Qventus, might have worked on a single AI solution for years to bring it to market—such as its inpatient capacity and surgical growth solutions—it now has the building blocks in place to work on multiple AI solutions that can serve a range of clients, executives said.
While it can bring more automation to health systems more quickly, Mudit Garg, co-founder and CEO of Qventus, stressed the company aims to build for depth, not breadth.
“We are now working with these core institutions to much more rapidly and much more quickly bring a series of deep solutions,” Garg said. “I think there's a lot of buzz around the industry of AI being applied everywhere … but I think what we've learned is that an 80% good, shallow solution doesn't ultimately scale. We will build [with] the same ROI focus, we will do the same workflow embedding ... but do it much, much more rapidly, because we find ourselves in this unique position of having built all the components required to do that.”
It’s the company’s latest move to capture more of the health systems' operations. Qventus launched AI operational assistants last year, allowing health systems can co-develop with the company to automate a various tasks, including chart mining, continuous risk determination, care gap orchestration, intelligent document management, patient concierge and calls.
According to a survey of 400 healthcare leaders done by Qventus investor Bessemer Venture Partners, 64% of leaders say they are open to co-developing a product with a third-party vendor rather than building internally or buying from an incumbent.
“What we've realized, and have been guided by our customers towards, is this idea of a broader operational assistant platform … We believe at Qventus that there needs to be an operational platform of record,” Steve Kraus, partner at Bessemer and Qventus board member, said in an interview. “All the things that happen within a health system in terms of patient flow, patient scheduling, discharge management, those are all operational in nature. And so we believe Qventus is building the operational platform of record for the industry.”
Kraus joined the board of Qventus after its series B funding round in 2018, led by Bessemer. Qventus raised a $105 million series D "mega-round" led by global investment firm KKR in January, which Bessemer also joined.
In its series D round, Qventus gained new strategic investors, including Northwestern Medicine, HonorHealth and Allina Health. The company has raised $200 million to date.