LAS VEGAS—Kaiser Permanente made waves when it announced in April 2023 that its new nonprofit subsidiary, Risant Health, was acquiring 10-hospital Geisinger Health.
In June, the company named North Carolina’s Cone Health as the second acquisition target on its path toward building a multisystem, multiregional value-based care entity. Cone Health employs more than 13,000 people as well as over 700 physicians. For its 2023 fiscal year ended Sept. 30, it reported over $2.8 billion in total operating revenue.
Kaiser Permanente, the country’s largest nonprofit health system, has pledged commitments of up to $5 billion in Risant Health over several years.
Risant Health plans to acquire "five to six" health systems over the next several years, Greg A. Adams, Kaiser Permanente chair and CEO, confirmed Sunday afternoon at the HLTH 2024 conference. The company is talking to new acquisition targets, Adams said, without providing any more details.
The HLTH 2024 conference kicked off Sunday in Las Vegas and is projected to draw 12,000 attendees from across the industry to plot the future of healthcare innovation.
During a main stage session on Sunday, Adams revealed some details about the health system's strategy to build out its nonprofit subsidiary. With Risant Health, Kaiser Permanente aims to expand and accelerate the adoption of value-based care at scale.
Risant Health’s goal is to achieve total revenue of between $30 billion and $35 billion, according to company officials. The company aims to bring together regional health systems that will continue to operate independently while collaborating on a tech-backed value-based care platform.

"You know, one of the things that I've learned as we kind of embarked on this journey is that there are many community health systems across the nation that have been on the journey of becoming a value-based organization, many of them for decades. And, yet they are challenged to maintain that commitment, and they're challenged to achieve scale, and that's where we come in," Adams told Alexandra Drane, co-founder and CEO of Archangels during a fireside chat.
"We're looking for organizations that are committed to value-based care. We're looking for organizations that are committed to quality and quality outcomes. We're looking for organizations that are leaders in their community. This is not about bailing out financially strapped organizations. We're looking for organizations that, on their own, can be financially sound. And then finally, we're looking for organizations that are committed to this, this mission and our mission."
Risant Health operates separately from Kaiser Permanente's core model of a closed integrated care network. Though the member systems would keep their operations separate, experts have suggested that their combined scale would bolster negotiations with larger commercial payers.
Adams also encouraged other healthcare leaders to "be bold" and explore new strategies to improve healthcare.
"I often say to leaders in our organization that we don't always get to choose the moments we lead. Sometimes the moments choose us. And I think for myself and for Kaiser Permanente, this is one of those moments. This is a moment for us to lead," he said.
Adams acknowledged the financial headwinds that health systems are facing, including reimbursement pressure and changing patient expectations.
"We have 2 million Medicare members. Everybody's aware of the changes that are occurring with CMS [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] and that we're all kind of struggling with. How do we maintain your service and have a margin. So we're very focused, with 2 million members, how do we make sure we're delivering the care and the service and quality outcomes," Adams said at HLTH.
"Coming out of COVID, consumer expectations of healthcare have changed. People want access. They want answers. They want transparency. So we're focused on our consumer program, with three components. One of those is to return to our service culture and make sure our entire organization is focused on serving our members, serving our population. Two, we are a large system and we're focused on making sure that we eliminate the pain points. We're really focused on making sure that the way we measure, the way we understand our consumer experience, that that's occurring in a way that we're not only resolving but what we're anticipating, what our members' issues are," he noted.
Kaiser Permanente is focused on "doubling down" on its integrated care and coverage model, he said. "We're focusing on making sure that we're providing high quality, affordable healthcare, that we're delivering the service and the outcomes for which we're known," Adams said.
"One of the things that Henry Kaiser used to say is that the only way to truly know your future is to create it," Adams said, referring to the industralist who co-founded Kaiser Permanente. "I think it's a moment for us to lead. It's a moment for us to be open. It's a moment for us to take risk."
Drane joked that Kaiser Permanente, which is nearly 80 years old, is a storied brand with a long legacy but is not known for being a disruptor.
"And then you go and announced Risant Health. People did not see this coming. I definitely did not. Is this a foundation personality change? Are you having a mid-life crisis?"
Adams pushed back and noted that Kaiser Permanente has a history of innovation in healthcare.
"If you really stop and look, we're an amazing, innovative organization. We were one of the first to own value-based care, integrated financing and delivery. One of the first to really embrace equity, understanding healthcare disparities and committing to eliminate disparities. We were the first to evolve in Medicare Advantage, and we led the foray into electronic medical records. It is only fitting that we are the first to step out and say we can evolve, we can innovate, we can bring secret sauce of KP into the community health system and we can change healthcare in this country," Adam said.
Community health systems that are brought under the Risant Health umbrella will benefit from its value-based care platform and resources. These systems, like Geisinger, would continue to operate as regional or community-based providers with the benefit of additional “expertise, resources and support” from the larger organization, Kaiser said.
"Community health systems can remain focused on operating and meeting the needs of the community. So brand, leadership, governance remains in place. What we're doing is bringing to that system the resources and tools to help it be successful, to help it to scale," Adams said. "The work that we've done, as we've looked at health systems, shows that we're able to improve their cost structure by 2% to 3%. I think that's conservative. Part of it is what the value-based platform does. We're estimating that to be about 60% of the cost reduction. The other 40% is really related to our enterprise and what we're able to do in terms of shared services."
The Geisinger Health acquisition closed six months ago and that strategy shows promise, Adams noted.
"As we look at what we're able to achieve in six months in the trajectory for Geisinger, we're approaching a 1% improvement to their cost structure or their margin. So this is real, and it's an opportunity for us to lift up these systems. It's an opportunity for us to really begin to think about healthcare in this country from a more evidence-based systematic process versus the local, fragmented fee-for-service model," Adams noted.
Risant Health can pull together the collective expertise of several health systems to develop value-based care guidelines and best practices. "We are rolling out phase one in Geisinger. The first phase is primary care guidelines and we're rolling out more than 200 [guidelines]," Adams said.