Wellsheet CEO looks to grow intentionally

Wellsheet has partnered with a number of hospitals, but the health technology company reached a new level over the past year.

Ascension, the Catholic health system operating more than 100 hospitals around the country, chose to adopt Wellsheet’s AI-powered technology to aid its clinicians. WellSheet’s software quickly summarizes patient charts for doctors, nurses and other members of care teams, scouring all the data to provide the most relevant information.

Ascension has now implemented Wellsheet’s technology across its entire health system. Craig Limoli, the CEO and co-founder of Wellsheet, says he’s thrilled with the partnership with Ascension.

“They are using it across their hospitals nationally to provide these summaries to physicians as well as nurses, case managers … the whole care team is leveraging the product,” Limoli tells Chief Healthcare Executive®. “So we're up to tens of thousands of users across their system now.”

The deployment across all of Ascension’s hospitals only took about a year, even working with different electronic health record systems, he says. Ascension operates hospitals and other sites of care in 16 states and Washington, D.C.

“It certainly was quite the undertaking to do so many hospitals in such a short period of time,” he said.

The early returns are encouraging, Limoli says.

Some physicians are saving two hours per day in documentation, and physicians are also spending less time reviewing charts to find scans and other information in patients’ records, he says.

Wellsheet’s technology is also streamlining work for nurses, including the “hand-off” of patients when new shifts of nurses begin their workday.

“Hand-offs are incredibly important from a patient outcomes perspective, so we absolutely support those processes,” Limoli says.

Ascension’s commitment to using Wellsheet’s technology helped accelerate the complex rollout, he says.

“They've been fantastic partners,” Limoli says. “We could not have asked for better partners in this journey, and it starts with leadership at the time, really deciding this is something that they are prioritizing, and they've been on a journey to prioritize clinician experience for some time.”

The use of the software has expanded quickly as Ascension's doctors began working with it. Limoli says the enthusiasm of early champions of the software made a big difference.

“Once physicians on the ground gained access to the product, it really took on a life of its own,” Limoli says. “We see tremendous growth in adoption once it goes live, because physicians will tell their colleagues about it, it expands into the nursing and case management and pharmacy segments of the user base in these different systems and markets.”

Wellsheet’s AI technology also alerts clinicians to the possible need for additional tests.

“We try to kind of naturally build into the workflow both the presence and absence of information,” Limoli says. “So it's very easy to see if a patient hasn't had a cancer screening, or whatever the case may be, right in our summary views. So it's not just leaning on what's in the chart, but also determining what might need to be done based on what's not in the chart.”

As Wellsheet has grown, Limoli says that he also wants to make sure the company remains on track.

“I think about that a lot in terms of as we grow and expand,” he says. “How do we ensure that those kinds of foundational principles that got us to where we are, continue to be maintained?

“And I think it's about growing intentionally, not over-hiring too quickly, not raising too much money too quickly, either, and being very intentional about building out a team, the best of the best that understand what matters most in the company's culture and what has created the level of trust that our clients have in our technology,” he says.

Wellsheet managed to get through the difficulties of the COVID-19 pandemic, as the company was taking its software to hospitals that were focusing on the crisis at hand.

“Covid was was a really challenging time for the company, as we had to navigate selling into hospitals when they weren't really deploying new technology for clinical workflow during that time,” he says. “I think our resilience as a company got us through that period, and then we've seen an incredible amount of acceleration.”