When Risant Health—the multi-system, multi-payer value-based care organization led by Kaiser Permanente—launched in April 2023, it set off a firestorm of interest and speculation. Right after, we held an interview with Debby Cunningham, KP’s SVP of Strategy, to learn more about the goals and choice of Geisinger as the initial system.
In June, Cone Health became the second system to join Risant. If the deal clears regulatory approval, financial filings show, Kaiser will make $1B of capital available to Cone for support as it transitions into Risant for the first five years, as well as up to $400M to support Cone’s integration into Risant and up to $300M for growth over ten years.
Risant is in talks with other new acquisition targets, KP Chair & CEO Greg A. Adams told attendees at HLTH recently, as it looks to pull in five to six organizations over the next several years and achieve total revenue between $30-35B.
Adams emphasized that Risant isn’t about, “bailing out financially strapped organizations,” but rather pulling in organizations that are 1) committed to value-based care, 2) leaders in the community and 3) financially sound on their own. They will continue to operate independently but collaborate on a tech-backed, value-based care platform. The goal is to “bring to that system the resources and tools to help it be successful, to help it to scale,” Adams said.
He also shared that these changes can conservatively improve the system’s cost structure by 2% to 3%. A majority of that comes from cost reduction and the rest (around 40%) is related to shared services across the enterprise. Geisinger has already seen a 1% improvement on their cost structure or margin within the first six months. It is also working on rolling out 200 primary care guidelines formed with the collective expertise of several health systems.
To learn more about how a leading system thought about the decision to join Risant, we held an exclusive interview with Cone Health’s CSO, Chris Cornue. He told us that Risant is looking for partners with a growing VBC footprint, but there’s also flexibility for health systems that need to maintain existing relationships with medical groups and other stakeholders.