On Monday, venture capital firm General Catalyst announced its third collaboration with the health system, leveraging the former’s portfolio strengths to drive the overall transformation of healthcare. In an interview prior to the announcement, the key partners spearheading the effort expressed an ethical vision that companies like General Catalyst have in driving industry reform beyond just lowering costs for cash-strapped health systems , also improves patient outcomes, but also addresses health equity concerns.
This time, the partner is Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare, which will be able to borrow from General Catalyst’s “health insuranceA network of 102 companies. These companies have developed technology solutions to address specific pain points that health systems currently have. Being part of the network means Intermountain will be able to take an ecosystem approach to digital transformation, rather than plug a hole here , plug a gap there. At least, that’s the vision around “health assurance,” a generic catalyst term explained by venture capital firm managing partner Hemant Taneja in a Zoom interview before Monday’s announcement.
First, it’s about building a healthcare system that focuses on proactive care, because the end consumer wants help, not expensive sick care. The second is a concerted effort to lower healthcare GDP. You know if that 18% will drop to 8% someday, hopefully we have more money to invest in our community. The third thing is health equity.
[Intermountain] First, believe in the same ecosystem approach as we do. They were very focused on the idea that they needed a partner who needed to bring the worlds of click and mortar together.
Among the 102 companies in the network is Transcarent, Olive, Sprinter Health, Commure and Cadence. All of these companies are currently working with Intermountain, according to Taneja.
“This collaboration between Intermountain and General Catalyst can help advance the movement of population health and value-based care by connecting us with a network of innovators outside of traditional healthcare,” said Marc Intermountain Healthcare President and CEO Dr Harrison said. A press release announcing the collaboration.
E.g, transparent An attempt is being made to bypass multi-tier benefit consulting firms and work directly with self-insured employers to improve the patient experience and reduce costs in several areas, including oncology care and surgical care. olives is an AI-powered tool that automates thankless tasks in healthcare, such as managing prior authorizations or inventory. The company’s software can also pull up patients’ insurance and contact information when they sign up for an appointment. sprinter health Efforts are being made to overcome last-mile delivery issues in healthcare by offering certain services, such as lab tests, directly at home. commune A FHIR-based developer platform has been established to allow health systems and other startups to build and deploy their own healthcare applications. At last, Rhythm is a remote patient monitoring company that allows health systems to manage chronically ill patients outside the clinic and intervene when necessary.
Prior to the partnership with Intermountain, General Catalyst had announced Similar efforts with Jefferson Health in Pennsylvania and HCA Healthcare in Tennessee.
The venture capital firm isn’t the only company trying to forge a fruitful marriage between startups and the healthcare system.considering CNAC, Healthcare incubators such as matter and start health They want to make meaningful connections between entities with novel ideas and those looking for them, whether they are health systems or established life sciences companies. But without naming any companies, Taneja seemed to suggest that other efforts were looking at the issue in piecemeal fashion. They also charge for individual consulting projects, while General Catalyst is supposedly bringing a system-wide approach to the digital reincarnation of healthcare.
We do not do this to collect these fees [health] system consulting fees,” he declared. “Given that they are all on the brink of bankruptcy, we do not think they have sufficient resources for such consulting,” he declared. “We bring [are] We have a deep technology track record of building companies that actually scale and products that scale.
I don’t think anyone else has a sense of purpose around us and has such a set of capabilities and ecosystems.We also have enterprise companies and these [health] The system requires network security. They need data infrastructure. We have all these capabilities, and we build a lot of these companies on a regular basis. So, you know, I kind of felt like we were put on earth to really play that role.
But it would be a mistake to think that this is an entirely altruistic effort. The company can reap significant financial benefits in the future. All companies that are part of the “Health Care” network are General Catalyst portfolio companies. So if they gain traction in the market, they become more valuable, and the greater exit opportunity they have helps enrich the pockets of GC and its LPs.
“Through this relationship to the system, these companies have been successful, and we’re definitely one of the largest of these companies — usually we’re the largest shareholder, so that’s obviously in our favor,” he said.
The success of these companies will ultimately depend on reaching internal metrics that Taneja has not expanded but said is very important. These fall broadly into three categories – a) how the portfolio companies actually achieve the priorities identified by the health system; b) how these companies work with each other to drive the overall synergy of the system, rather than having a bunch of point solutions; c) Clinical and cost metrics – how these companies are enabling provider systems to keep people actively healthy, or at a bare minimum, and how they can reduce costs.
Over the past nine months, General Catalyst has cemented its relationship with the health system, but will future collaborations involve large employers that are also grappling with ballooning health care costs?
“You know, it’s a really interesting question,” Taneja would only say.
However, given that employers—especially large, self-insured ones—are actively trying to jump on the value-based care bandwagon, Some contract directly with suppliersdon’t be surprised if General Catalyst works with employers in the future.
The more intriguing question — if they are actually thrown to the planet to play a key ethical role in healthcare transformation — is whether the health safety net will include non-universal catalyst companies. Surely other VCs have some cool companies with similar goals?
Photo: 9am, Getty Images
