General Catalyst, HCA Healthcare Team Up on Digital Innovation
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SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
AUTHOR: Brian Gormley
Venture-capital firm General Catalyst has joined with hospital chain HCA Healthcare Inc. in a collaboration aimed at injecting digital innovation into medical care.
General Catalyst and HCA plan to consider various business opportunities, such asco-investing in startups or building companies together, said General Catalyst Managing Partner Hemant Taneja. General Catalyst, a technology and healthcare investor, has made early investments in digital-health companies such as Livongo Health Inc., which helps patients manage diabetes and other chronic conditions. Livongo went public in 2019 and was acquired by virtual health company Teladoc Health Inc. in October 2020 in an $18.5 billion deal.
Through the partnership, General Catalyst seeks to better understand the challenges HCA faces and technologies that could address them. The seeds for the collaboration were sown through a 2019 meeting in Silicon Valley between HCA Chief Executive Sam Hazen and Mr. Taneja, who introduced him to a group of innovative health-technology companies. The two discussed ways they could collaborate, said Jennifer Zimmerman, General Catalyst’s chief marketing officer.
The firm and HCA will have regular meetings to discuss opportunities, which could also include ways for existing General Catalyst portfolio companies to work with HCA, she said.
HCA has reached its first deal through the partnership, agreeing to sell its PatientKeeper business, which provides software and mobile applications to physicians and care teams, to Commure Inc., a General Catalyst-backed company that is building a technology platform to help healthcare providers collaborate on patient care. HCA also said it had made an investment in San Francisco-based Commure, which Mr. Taneja founded in 2017. He is also Commure’s executive chairman. The companies didn’t disclose terms of the sale or investment.
Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA, which has more than 180 hospitals in its network, said it would continue to deploy PatientKeeper technology at its hospitals and would license the Commure platform. It said it would also work with Commure and General Catalyst to develop new solutions for care providers. The merger gives Commure access to PatientKeeper’s healthcare domain expertise and enables PatientKeeper to move its technology onto Commure’s cloud, Mr. Taneja said. General Catalyst’s partnership with HCA is an example of the type of collaboration between the medical and venture-capital sectors that can lead to better and lower-cost healthcare, he said.
An HCA spokesman wasn’t immediately available for comment. In a statement, Mr. Hazen said combining PatientKeeper and Commure would lead to the development of new solutions more quickly than either could accomplish independently.