HCA Healthcare has agreed to sell off physician workflow software maker PatientKeeper to Commure, a General Catalyst-backed firm looking to build an open, universal foundation for healthcare applications.
Although the companies did not disclose the terms of the deal, they said HCA Healthcare is now a shareholder in Commure.
The system will license the Commure platform so that it may continue using the PatientKeeper software at its more than 180 hospitals, executives said, and will continue to work with the tech platform and its parent venture capital company to build new provider-focused tools.
“We believe the combination of PatientKeeper’s physician-friendly clinical software and Commure’s modern cloud infrastructure and resources will help promote the development of state-of-the-art solutions more quickly than either could accomplish independently,” Sam Hazen, CEO of HCA Healthcare, said in a statement. “Innovation and collaboration are key to our continual efforts to improve outcomes for our patients and the health of our communities. We look forward to working with General Catalyst in pursuit of this vision.”
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Further, the companies said this deal also paves the way for new strategic collaborations between HCA Healthcare and General Catalyst. Going forward, the major health system will work with General Catalyst’s broader tech ecosystem on co-development of new innovations, they said.
“This is a new chapter of radical collaboration between venture capital and the healthcare industry,” said Hemant Taneja, managing partner of General Catalyst and co-founder and executive chairman of Commure, in a statement. “Commure benefits by having access to HCA Healthcare’s insights and real-world use cases from their more than 2,000 care sites. And HCA Healthcare, now a shareholder in Commure, can tap the best innovations and ideas in the venture capital ecosystem. It’s a win for all stakeholders.”
PatientKeeper was founded in 1996 and acquired by HCA Healthcare back in 2014. It has more than 75,000 active users and more than 50 healthcare system clients, according to the purchase announcement.
The group’s software optimizes physicians’ time with an electronic health record by streamlining and automating their clinical workflow, either through a desktop or mobile app interface. It also offers revenue cycle management tools to hospital and practice group customers.
In an accompanying blog post, Brent Dover and Phil Meer, Commure and PatientKeeper’s respective CEOs, said PatientKeeper will operate as a standalone division within its new owner. Both teams will be maintaining their headcounts and growth plans following the deal’s close, they said.
However, the acquisition marks an opportunity to bring PatientKeeper’s offerings onto Commure’s cloud infrastructure, which is designed as a secure, interoperable foundation for healthcare apps. Doing so will make it easier to deploy and develop PatientKeeper’s provider tools going forward, the companies said.
“[The PatientKeeper team has] made incredible progress in bringing an empathetic mindset to the software they develop for their care teams,” Dover said in a statement. “By combining that with Commure’s cloud-based approach, we can create an industry-leading software platform that will power the next generation of health assurance products and companies.”