At GC we have been on a journey to create the ‘Amazon of healthcare’ – not a trillion dollar company but rather a trillion dollar ecosystem of companies that emerge and scale to provide the missing systemic elements required for transforming healthcare, in America and around the world.  

One of those companies in that ecosystem needs to be a platform company dedicated to healthcare…one that delivers true operating leverage and potential new revenue streams to healthcare systems in order to serve their entire communities.

Today we are one step closer to achieving that goal.  

Commure and Athelas – two signature companies in GC’s health assurance portfolio – have decided to combine.   

The goal is to create what we believe can be a generational software business for healthcare – a suite of hardware and software that connects patient care, clinical operations, and administrative functions (revenue cycle) operations into a single interface, augmented by powerful AI. Automation software has the potential to remake the margin profile of healthcare while dramatically improving the quality of patient care. We believe the combined entities will have all the right elements – the healthcare system relationships, the expanding product suite and the rapid engineering firepower – to accomplish this goal.  

Commure started in 2017 as a GC creation company and has been focused on building an operating system that gives health institutions a cloud-based, ‘unified’ platform that connects a fragmented ecosystem of point solutions, makes data useful for clinicians at the point of care, and optimizes the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare businesses. Commure has been supporting institutions like HCA and Jefferson Health for their clinical workflow needs. And their Strongline product serves hundreds of thousands of clinical workers around the country to provide a safe work environment (that platform alone has grown 4X YOY). Across their different product lines Commure partners with over 500 different healthcare providers.

Athelas, which had its roots in serving the serious mental illness population with remote patient monitoring, has successfully expanded its offering to leverage AI and deliver next generation revenue cycle management solutions to its customers. Athelas’ RCM platform allows for revenue cycle, workflow automation, and clinical analysis on a single powerful dashboard. With the rise of LLMs in workflow automation and Athelas’s growing revenue cycle product suite, we believe Athelas can bring broader utility to Commure’s existing base of hospitals and healthcare system customers – institutions responsible for 60%+ of all healthcare spend. Another asset: Athelas’ engineering prowess. The team brings exceptional engineering chops at a time when AI is transforming workflows and applications across all dimensions of healthcare.

As we see it, the combined entity will have the ability to offer all the transformation capabilities that US healthcare systems need to achieve health assurance – our vision for a more proactive, accessible and affordable system of care.

The new company will be run by Tanay Tandon, the CEO and Cofounder of Athelas, and we're looking forward to his leadership in bringing the deep Silicon Valley engineering mindset to the combined company. 

I am personally very grateful for Ashwini Zenooz’s leadership over the last several years. Ash helped Commure transform from a few million dollars in revenue to what they project to be $100 million in contracted ARR by the end of January; and from serving a handful of customers to now supporting hundreds of healthcare institutions. I am delighted she will remain on the board and serve as an advisor to the company.

The new Commure is also going to be launching a center for health assurance transformation that will be dedicated to bringing platform capabilities to our health assurance partners. It will be overseen by Daryl Tol, Head of GC’s Health Assurance Ecosystem. Lastly, I will step in as the executive chair of the company and feel privileged to serve our health assurance partners with a much more comprehensive offering.  

We believe the new platform can accelerate the rate at which healthcare innovations are brought to America’s providers and patients. We’re excited to move one step closer to realizing our vision for the ‘Amazon ecosystem of healthcare’.