By Mudit Garg, Co-founder & CEO, Qventus
Today marks an important day for Qventus. We are excited to announce $50 million in growth capital led by Thomas H. Lee Partners, L.P. (“THL”), a premier private equity firm investing in growth companies and one of the world’s leading automation investors. We are also proud to share a strategic partnership and investment by Premier, Inc. a leading healthcare improvement company uniting an alliance of approximately 4,400 U.S. hospitals and health systems and more than 225,000 other providers and organizations.
THL and Premier are joined in the investment by ThedaCare, along with existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners, Mayfield Fund, and Norwest Venture Partners. The funding round and partnership position us to expand our technology services to hospitals and health systems across the United States—and address the massive inefficiency in the healthcare system.
Each year, the healthcare system loses approximately $1 trillion to waste, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association (“JAMA”). One major contributor is inefficient operations. Despite significant investments in electronic health records systems, most operational processes are still highly manual, relying on physicians, nurses, and other staff to act as the “glue” that holds operations together while they deliver care. The shortcomings of these processes were exposed over the last two years by the Covid-19 pandemic, as evidenced by the nationwide crises in hospital capacity and staffing shortages. The healthcare system is now at a breaking point—physicians and nurses are experiencing epidemic levels of burn out, patients are unable to access the care they need, and hospital margins are under intense pressure.
To address these challenges, health systems are digitally transforming their operations with AI- and machine learning-based automation software. Building on successes with back-office automation, leaders are now extending automation into the area of care operations — the operational activities involved in the delivery of care, such as the management of discharge planning, OR access, system-wide patient flow, and more, as well as operational processes that connect patient care beyond the hospital.
Care operations automation solutions create enormous value for health systems. By improving utilization of resources such as beds, ICUs, nursing staff, and operating rooms, they streamline throughput, decreasing costs and increasing revenue. Additionally, by eliminating manual steps and using AI to guide decisions, automation solutions reduce the burden on frontline teams, improving job satisfaction and retention. And by improving efficiency and visibility, they enhance the patient experience.
As the leader in care operations automation, Qventus has achieved significant milestones helping health systems drive breakthrough efficiency improvements. In 2021, Qventus’ real-time platform generated over 15 billion patient-level predictions, enabling health systems to automate access and patient flow for more than 2 million patient encounters across our Inpatient, Perioperative, Emergency Department, and Command Center software solutions. As a result, health systems using Qventus were able to eliminate more than 200 years of excess days and generate over 10X ROI. Health systems using our perioperative solution were able to add over 2 cases per OR per month, increase block release lead time by over 7 days, and improve margins by over $3M per facility.
To further accelerate our market leadership, we are excited to partner with world-class investors who bring domain and operational expertise in scaling automation technology businesses. The new growth capital will enable us to expand our product vision, enhance our market presence, and help care teams deliver world-class healthcare to patients across the country.
Additionally, through our partnership with Premier, we will collaborate on making care operations automation solutions available to more provider customers, and we will also co-develop new solutions that combine Premier’s expertise and unique data assets with Qventus’ technology platform and expertise in AI and machine-learning. As an industry leader, Premier has created one of the most comprehensive databases of actionable data, clinical best practices, and efficiency improvement strategies. Together, we will bring new innovations to market that extend scarce clinical labor to focus more on patient care and value-additive activities.
As we embark on this next chapter, the new growth capital and partnership will allow us to help more health systems run the world-class operations that are essential for delivering world-class care — unlocking significant efficiency improvements across the U.S. healthcare system.
Read the full announcement here.
