WellSpan Health, an eight-hospital health system, inked a partnership with General Catalyst three years ago to use technology to tackle staffing shortages.
The Pennsylvania-based system is doubling down on that collaboration, expanding its work with the venture capital firm and its portfolio of companies to codevelop artificial intelligence tools.
General Catalyst said WellSpan Health is the first transformation partner to its Health Assurance Transformation Corporation (HATCo). The collaboration will combine HATCo's access to technology and know-how alongside WellSpan's proven expertise in healthcare technology in a real-world setting.
With the agreement, HATCo will "deploy a team to WellSpan to co-develop their technology stack, leveraging solutions, both General Catalyst portfolio companies and external, that bring the best of care to WellSpan's patients and prove what the future of healthcare can be," Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, wrote in a LinkedIn post about the expanded collaboration.
In the past two years, WellSpan has partnered with several General Catalyst portfolio companies including Commure, clinical AI startup Aidoc and Hippocratic AI. The health system has been "crucial early adopters steering how AI-powered tools can improve care quality, operational efficiency and workforce capacity," Taneja wrote.
WellSpan began working with Aidoc in 2022, and it was one of the first health systems to launch Hippocratic AI's generative AI healthcare agent a year ago. The health system has invested in both startups.
"We've done very deep co-creation, co-development work with Hippocratic AI and we're seeing such terrific results in terms of the transformation with people, process and technology within our own organization that we really felt like deepening this partnership to go further over the next five years would be really important," Roxanna Gapstur, Ph.D., president and CEO of WellSpan. told Fierce Healthcare,
What originated as idea sharing and access to emerging startup innovations evolved into a broader collaboration, "representing a comprehensive co-creation partnership where we're jointly developing and scaling breakthrough solutions," Gapstur said.
The partnership will serve as a cornerstone of the health system's five-year strategy, Gapstur said, and the organizations will design and implement new AI technologies to improve the employee and patient experience. The collaboration aims to reclaim more than 400,000 clinical hours annually as a direct result of AI technologies, enabling WellSpan team members to focus more time on caring for patients, executives said.
The health system also is targeting double-digit business performance improvements over the next five years.
"With healthcare systems trying to integrate cutting-edge healthcare technology, it can be challenging because often we have older, fragmented systems. Making sure that we have a pretty ambitious set of goals around bringing that together and connecting care across the ecosystem, we think is really important," Gapstur said. "Often systems can have many different point solutions that don't always integrate and work together. We're excited to have this opportunity to work with General Catalyst on something that connects the ecosystem and makes things easier for team members and patients."
WellSpan Health operates more than 220 care sites and eight hospitals in south central Pennsylvania and northern Maryland and also operates home care services and a behavioral health organization.
The partnership with WellSpan comes as HATCo moves ahead with its acquisition of Akron, Ohio-based Summa Health. In November, HATCo announced it signed a definitive agreement to buy Summa Health for $485 million.
"This partnership is happening earlier than I expected," Taneja wrote in the LinkedIn post. "When we launched HATCo, I assumed we’d need to first validate our health assurance thesis through our ownership and work at Summa Health before others would be ready to commit. But WellSpan’s experience working with our portfolio companies and witnessing tech-enabled possibilities was validation enough. The timing of this partnership also underscores the rising urgency and appetite for transformation in health systems."
WellSpan and General Catalyst will target three areas to apply automation and AI technologies, Gapstur said—revenue cycle and business functions for "financial sustainability"; workforce automation to tackle administrative tasks; and personalized and proactive care delivery using data analytics, AI and digital health innovations.
In this third area, WellSpan and General Catalyst will focus on care navigation to ensure that consumers and patients can easily navigate through the healthcare system, Gapstur said.
Daryl Tol, president of HATCo, said the solutions the organizations develop together have the potential to strengthen WellSpan and "offer a model that other health systems can learn from as they work to improve outcomes, manage costs and support the wellbeing of their care teams."
WellSpan will provide HATCo with consulting and other support, using its internal innovation and development teams to help advance AI technologies in other health systems and healthcare settings.
"WellSpan has been very forward-thinking around how we use people, process and technology, and we've developed quite a bit of expertise over the last three years around how to work with artificial intelligence, ensure safety and quality for our patients, and develop a whole new set of skills internally around how our teams are monitoring and working with AI," Gapstur said. "We believe that we're well-positioned to be co-development partners with General Catalyst in creating new workflows and new approaches to making healthcare easier."
General Catalyst's healthcare portfolio spans more than 120 companies, and there is the potential for WellSpan Health to expand its collaboration with the VC firm even further, Gapstur said.
"I think we will develop some ideas together on where we could go next. We have even thought through, 'Are there companies outside of healthcare that are in the General Catalyst portfolio that could be applied to healthcare?' I think there are many, many different ways we could go, but we're going to be, of course, looking for the things that will be highest value for our care teams and our patients," she noted.