Today we’re taking another step forward in making the promise of Health Assurance a reality.
This morning we announced a strategic collaboration agreement with Intermountain Healthcare, a nationally recognized, non-profit healthcare system and a leader in both digital transformation and value-based care. The collaboration will involve jointly exploring opportunities to accelerate the shift to value-based care through digital and other solutions–leaning heavily on General Catalyst’s Health Assurance Network companies and broader access to the innovators ecosystem.
This is the third such collaboration we’ve announced in the last 10 months–including formal strategic partnerships with HCA Healthcare (announced last July) and Jefferson Health (announced last November). We have long believed in the need for ‘radical collaboration’ between technology investors and leading healthcare systems, and these collaborations are great examples of how these two worlds can come together to dramatically improve the patient and provider experience.
Like any great collaboration, this one with Intermountain is based on shared values and a shared understanding of what needs to happen to achieve the promise of Health Assurance–going from a “sick care” system to a more resilient, proactive system designed to help people stay well, bend the cost curve, and make quality care more affordable and more accessible to all.
The Intermountain team has been a driving force in the migration to value-based care, and deeply understands the importance of interconnectedness and interoperability as core aspects of making that happen. Last October, Intermountain teamed with Presbyterian Health Services, SSM Health, and Kaiser Permanente to launch Graphite Health–a member-led, non-profit company with the goal of creating a common data language and a standardized, interoperable data platform. The vision is simple and powerful: to create the ‘App Store’ for healthcare to facilitate the distribution of digital tools for both health systems and entrepreneurs alike. Many of our own portfolio companies are working on different dimensions of digital healthcare infrastructure and interoperability. Building on Graphite’s early momentum, we hope to leverage Transcarent, Olive, Commure, Cadence and Sprinter (amongst others) to accelerate progress here–and provide a suite of modern and connected solutions for delivering value-based care.
In my many discussions with Marc Harrison, MD, Intermountain’s much admired CEO, I am always struck by his vision for what a digitally transformed healthcare experience will look like (he talks eloquently about the ‘digital Hippocratic Oath’ and true best-in-class digital consumer experiences) as well as his real-world pragmatism in making change happen. He shares our belief in building businesses that will endure and is a true long-term thinker, a rare trait that is nonetheless essential in creating the healthcare sea-change that we together are committed to achieving.
We can’t wait to get started and build something transformational together.
