NASHVILLE, Tennessee—Kaiser Permanente caused a stir when it announced nearly two years ago that its new nonprofit subsidiary, Risant Health, was acquiring 10-hospital Geisinger Health. It marked the first step in its ambitious plan to form a multisystem, multiregional value-based care organization.
In June, the company named North Carolina’s Cone Health as the second acquisition target, with that deal closing in December.
Kaiser Permanente CEO Greg Adams said Risant Health plans to acquire five to six health systems over the next several years, with a focus on nonprofit organizations that have put an investment into value-based care.
But these are not traditional M&A plays, Risant Health executives contend.
Risant Health is not merging these health systems into its own operations but, instead, is connecting Geisinger and Cone Health—and future health systems it acquires—through its value-based platform.
"The value-based platform is the engine that makes Risant go," said David Grandy, chief product officer at Risant Health, during a fireside chat Monday at the ViVE 2025 conference.
Grandy and Ben Hohmuth, M.D., chief medical informatics officer at Geisinger Health, offered a rare look under the hood—a peek at that value-based “engine,” if you will—during an on-stage interview at ViVE with Maya Goldman, health reporter at Axios.
Kaiser Permanente is an integrated delivery model—it operates hospitals and medical groups and offers insurance products. That model has enabled Kaiser Permanente to scale up value-based care to produce demonstrably better clinical outcomes at lower cost, according to Grandy, who served as vice president of innovation at the health system for six years.
The overarching goal of Risant Health is to bring the benefits of its integrated model to more patients in the U.S. and shift more care to a risk-based, value-based approach.
"To do that, we can't just replicate the services and solutions and technologies that have been proven to work inside KP, because the integrated model is different. We've got to figure out how to adapt and contextualize those same solutions to a multi-payer environment across different types of relationships with physicians, whether they're employed docs or in a clinically integrated network arrangement or fully independents," Grandy said.
Geisinger Health has been on the "road to value" for decades, he noted. "We're looking for high-performing community health systems with a commitment to value-based care," he said, without giving any hints as to future acquisition targets for Risant.
“There's true expertise here. In many ways, Risant then becomes the accelerant, the catalyst. But it's taking knowledge and expertise from these storied organizations and figuring out how to put them together, productize them, if you will, and then take them to scale,” Grandy said.
Risant Health is focused on developing solutions in four areas—patients and members; physicians and the clinical workforce; health plans and business operations and then operational efficiency, including inpatient, ambulatory and the continuum of care.
Geisinger has rolled out three products as part of the Risant value-based platform, with two clinician-facing solutions. Hohmuth said. The health system is now using Abridge’s ambient AI documentation technology. Kaiser Permanente has an enterprise agreement with Abridge.
Geisinger also has implemented value-based care guidelines, a resource developed by Kaiser Permanente that pulls together collective expertise and best practices. The health system also rolled out virtual care navigation and triage services through digital health company Ada Health.
“At first, as you might expect with any acquisition, there's a lot of apprehension. What does this mean? And trying to message people that we're not becoming Kaiser, we're not becoming KP, we're becoming Risant, but we're also remaining Geisinger. We’re trying to figure out this thing that is Risant. The concept of the value-based platform, it remains sort of a little bit ephemeral and conceptual to the thousands of people who work for Geisinger until it starts becoming real,” Hohmuth said.
Geisinger has seen some early benefits from these solutions as part of the value-based platform.
Providers have saved 35 minutes during their workday thanks to the ambient AI documentation solution, he noted. Primary care doctors have reported a 70% decrease in “pajama time,” and a 55% decrease in self-reported burnout, he said.
“That's huge, and we're scaling that rapidly,” he said.
Kaiser Permanente’s care guidelines provide best practices for 510 common clinical conditions. Geisinger has gone live with 210 of those resources so far, which are integrated into its electronic health record, and those are available to all 300 of the health system’s primary care doctors.
The shift to value-based care has been slow for many organizations as they attempt to straddle both the traditional fee-for-service and value-based payment models.
"Part of our challenge, I think, is to get smart about what actually works, what the business problems are to solve in a particular context and to adapt in smart ways to the local business context while still maintaining consistency," Grandy noted.
Market to market, rolling out the value-based platform will not be a carbon copy approach as Risant Health continues to grow through acquisitions. "At the end of the day, when physicians across five to six Risant Health systems are all agreeing to that standard of care in primary care, that can be pretty powerful," Grandy said.
He added, “Many who have gone before us in this space have maybe tried a technology-first solution, or maybe tried to solve a problem through service, or maybe have said we're going to carve out some component of the value-based arrangement. We're trying to look in smart and thoughtful ways across all of those domains, technology and services together to drive meaningful, sustainable change.”
Risant Health faces the challenge of scaling value-based care as it works with different payers as the health systems under its umbrella range from integrated, closed systems to pluralistic systems that work with multiple insurers.
To make this work, payers will need to take on more risk, Grandy noted.
“We can have those conversations with payers and bring real-world data to demonstrate if we put these kinds of products in market when the value-based platform is mature and you're serving a Risant Health organization, you can achieve these outcomes with us. You can have a real conversation about what it means to take some form of risk, ideally double-sided risk,” Grandy said.
Federal and state payment policies will also be key to Risant Health’s work, including Medicaid plans moving to value-based arrangements, he noted.
“Also, payment reform for things like telemedicine and parity in terms of billing. If we're going to try and drive the total cost of care down, if we're going to achieve an affordability mandate, and at the same time, give people more options, that means doing things that are upstream of traditional face-to-face care. If we’re using those solutions to improve quality, to get people to the most clinically appropriate site of service, and ultimately reducing cost, there should be some financial reward for that in the form of parity,” he noted.
At Risant Health, the longer-term goal is to accelerate progress on value-based care both within its health systems as well as other providers across the country.
“My hope is that the solutions that we put in market and the outcomes that they achieve inspire other health systems to take plays out of our playbook,” Grandy said. “It truly is about transforming health and healthcare in this country, making it more affordable, better experience, better outcomes. If we can prove that in partnership with organizations like Geisinger and Cone and the other three to four that will come, then I think we have a roadmap for not-for-profit health systems across America to get increasingly towards value.”