WellSpan Health and General Catalyst Expand Partnership to Advance AI in Healthcare

WellSpan Health, a Pennsylvania-based health system, has announced a significant expansion of its partnership with venture capital firm General Catalyst to co-develop and implement artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in healthcare. This collaboration marks a major step forward in the integration of AI solutions within a real-world healthcare setting.

Strategic Partnership Aims to Transform Healthcare Delivery

The expanded partnership designates WellSpan Health as the first transformation partner for General Catalyst's Health Assurance Transformation Corporation (HATCo). This alliance will combine HATCo's technological expertise with WellSpan's healthcare experience to develop and scale AI-powered solutions across various aspects of healthcare delivery.

Roxanna Gapstur, Ph.D., President and CEO of WellSpan, emphasized the partnership's potential: "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."

The collaboration aims to achieve several ambitious goals:

• Reclaim over 400,000 clinical hours annually through AI technologies
• Target double-digit business performance improvements over five years
• Develop integrated solutions to connect fragmented healthcare systems

Focus Areas for AI Implementation

The partnership will concentrate on three primary areas for applying automation and AI technologies:

1. Revenue cycle and business functions to enhance financial sustainability
2. Workforce automation to address administrative tasks
3. Personalized and proactive care delivery using data analytics, AI, and digital health innovations

Daryl Tol, President of HATCo, highlighted the potential broader impact: "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."

Expanding Horizons in Healthcare Innovation

This partnership builds upon WellSpan's existing collaborations with General Catalyst portfolio companies, including Commure, Aidoc, and Hippocratic AI. The health system has been at the forefront of adopting AI-powered tools to improve care quality, operational efficiency, and workforce capacity.

Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, noted the significance of this expanded collaboration: "The timing of this partnership also underscores the rising urgency and appetite for transformation in health systems."

As part of the agreement, WellSpan will provide consulting and support to HATCo, leveraging its internal innovation and development teams to advance AI technologies in other healthcare settings. This collaborative approach aims to create new workflows and approaches to simplify healthcare delivery, potentially extending to applications of technology from outside the healthcare sector.