January 12, 2023 – Ardent Health Services has partnered with SwitchPoint Ventures to launch an innovation studio focused on transforming healthcare delivery and administration. The partnership is an outgrowth of the companies’ successful two-year collaboration in developing AI solutions, combining Ardent’s resources and broad clinical footprint with SwitchPoint Ventures’ expertise in artificial intelligence and innovation strategy.
The new studio builds on a model that has already delivered results, handcrafting solutions that use Ardent’s 30 hospitals and 200 sites of care to address entrenched challenges within healthcare delivery. The studio’s charge is to develop and deploy data-driven solutions across Ardent’s footprint, with an eye toward launching them as independent ventures serving the broader healthcare industry.
In 2021, Ardent and SwitchPoint partnered to develop Winnow, an AI solution for clinician recruitment. Winnow uses predictive analytics to help Ardent and other healthcare providers source, recruit, and retain clinicians who are ideal fits for each role. Winnow was recently awarded the 2022 NEXT Award for Best Healthcare Startup by the Nashville Entrepreneur Center.
Ardent has also implemented Polaris, SwitchPoint’s novel solution for accurately predicting patient volume – months in advance – in any clinical setting. Such visibility enables managers, for the first time, to deploy staff in an intelligent way to meet the predicted labor demand. Ardent has adopted Polaris in the belief that optimized schedules will have an extraordinary ripple effect: boosting the satisfaction and retention of clinical staff, streamlining hospital operations, and improving patient care and satisfaction.
The new venture is the latest in a series of partnerships between Ardent and disruptive health technology companies focused on reimagining the healthcare experience for patients and caregivers. The company recently announced the launch of a state-of-the-art continuous inpatient monitoring program with BioIntelliSense, a virtual nursing program with care.ai, and a remote patient monitoring initiative with Cadence.