The Next Chapter of Healthcare and the Work Ahead

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Health systems across the U.S. are facing unprecedented pressures, from clinician shortages and rising costs to increasingly complex patient needs. Many leaders are looking to AI as a powerful tool for system-wide change.

Yet most AI adoption in healthcare has been incremental, with limited results. Isolated pilots and point solutions layered onto existing workflows address narrow problems without changing the underlying systems. The result is a growing gap between what AI promises and what health systems have been able to realize in practice.

The organizations successfully bridging this gap are shifting from fragmented experiments to enterprise-wide transformation. That shift requires more than technology. It requires the courage to challenge longstanding ways of working and reinvent workflows across an entire institution, all while maintaining the rigorous governance and reliability standards that clinical environments demand.

The health systems that move early and execute at the enterprise level will not only operate more efficiently; they will help define the next operating model for healthcare.

Qualified Health was built to support health systems in that effort.

What It Takes to Make AI Work in Healthcare

When we founded Qualified Health, we saw four problems that needed to be addressed together:

Enterprise AI requires organizational transformation, working across the entire system, integrating fragmented data environments, redesigning inefficient processes, embedding into workflows, and navigating the idiosyncrasies of each health system. This requires sustained engagement at the C-suite level and the clinical fluency, technical depth, and operational rigor to drive execution from strategy through outcomes.
Fragmentation from point solutions prevents scale. The accumulation of point solutions creates duplicative data pipelines, fragmented user experiences, and compounding operational overhead, and clinical and operational risk. Scaling AI effectively requires a shared data foundation with standardized data models, reusable primitives that can be configured quickly and consistently governed, and one platform that extends across use cases without compounding complexity.
Governance must be core infrastructure. AI systems are often deployed before sufficient attention is given to explainability, auditability, and real-world performance across patient populations. Retrofitting governance after deployment is difficult and often incomplete. It must be embedded from the outset, with clinical oversight, decision transparency, workflow-level controls, and continuous monitoring built into the system.‍
Realizing value requires investment in the last mile. Many initiatives demonstrate technical capability but fail to translate into sustained use. Integration into clinical workflows, clinician trust, and day-to-day behavior change remain the primary barriers. Realizing value requires deliberate investment in workflow design, training, and change management alongside technical deployment.

These constraints require a different approach to building and deploying AI in healthcare.

That recognition shaped how we built Qualified Health.

A Different Model for Deploying AI in Healthcare

Qualified Health is a mission-driven Public Benefit Corporation built exclusively to serve health systems.

We are founded by former physicians, health system leaders, and safety and governance technologists who have built 0-to-1 healthcare technologies, managed multi-billion dollar health system budgets, shaped healthcare policy, and developed safety-critical AI systems.

From the outset, we set out to operate differently, as a strategic partner that works across the full scope of a health system’s priorities, spanning use cases, owning strategy through execution, and taking accountability for outcomes.

We provide a healthcare-native AI platform that brings together fragmented data systems, pre-built workflows, agent development tooling, and governance into a single operating layer. This enables health systems to deploy and scale AI use cases across the enterprise within a governed, scalable framework. And we work directly with leadership and frontline teams to ensure that deployment translates into sustained operational and clinical impact.

We have the privilege of working alongside visionary health system leaders who are tackling some of the hardest challenges in healthcare, all while still striving to deliver the best patient care possible. Our role at Qualified Health is to work with them side by side, take on the full scope of the problem, navigate real constraints and the messy middle, and do the work required to move the system forward.

Justin Norden, MD, MPhil co-founder and CEO at Qualified Health

Health systems are exhausted. They've invested in dozens of point solutions, run countless pilots, and still can't point to enterprise-wide impact. The market has sold them complexity dressed up as innovation. What health system leaders want is a partner who will take on the end-to-end challenge and stay accountable to outcomes. That's the standard we hold ourselves to at Qualified Health.

Shantanu Phatakwala, co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Qualified Health

What This Looks Like in Practice

What we have seen with our partners is that impact can materialize quickly when the underlying foundation is in place.

At the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB), within the first six months, we generated more than $15 million in measurable run-rate impact.

Qualified Health has been an exceptional partner as we build and execute our AI strategy at UTMB. Their team brings deep expertise and a real willingness to dive deep alongside our clinicians, operators, and leadership teams. Together, we've been able to focus on the highest-priority opportunities, move quickly from idea to implementation, and stay ahead of the curve. The ROI has already exceeded expectations.

Peter McCaffrey, MD, MS, FCAP, Chief AI & Digital Officer at UTMB

At Mercy, we are breaking down siloed systems and fragmented processes and redesigning workflows end to end.

This is about transforming care in a way that every patient encounter is safer, more connected and more human. AI allows us to simplify complex workflows, anticipate patient needs earlier and give caregivers the time and clarity they need to provide high-quality care. Our partnership with Qualified Health accelerates this transformation, helping us turn AI into a meaningful path for better outcomes and a better daily experience for the people we serve.

Byron Yount, PhD, Chief Data & AI Officer at Mercy

We’ve learned from these partnerships that the value of a platform compounds in ways that point solutions simply cannot replicate.

The fundamental advantage of a platform isn't just what it can do on day one; it's what it becomes over time. Every workflow we deploy, every model we govern, every data integration we build adds to a shared foundation that makes the next deployment faster, safer, and smarter. That compounding effect is what separates a platform from a collection of tools.

Beau Norgeot, PhD, co-founder and Chief AI Officer at Qualified Health

*Health system leaders and the Qualified Health team convene in Park City to exchange insights and drive enterprise AI transformation across their organizations*

The Opportunity to Fundamentally Change Care

Efficiency gains are meaningful. But the more consequential shift we are excited to contribute to is the transition from reactive to proactive care.

Healthcare has historically been organized around response, designed to intervene after deterioration rather than prevent it. At the core of this model is a long-standing inability to translate vast volumes of clinical and operational data into coordinated action.

That is now beginning to change.

Our platform integrates across siloed data sources, connects fragmented clinical signals, and interprets them in real time, enabling health systems to act on those insights across entire patient populations. What was previously passive data can now be an operational system for continuous improvement in care delivery.

In recent deployments with Anthropic and the University of Texas System, we are enabling health systems to apply evidence-based medicine at population scale. The platform continuously analyzes patient populations, identifies signals of suboptimal care, and enables earlier, targeted intervention.

The clinical opportunity goes well beyond efficiency. The gap between what we know about optimal care and what patients actually receive has persisted for decades. For the first time, we can apply evidence-based medicine to every patient across an entire health system proactively and at scale. That infrastructure to do so exists now, and what becomes possible as a result is a fundamentally different model of care.

Kedar Mate, MD, co-founder and Chief Medical Officer at Qualified Health

Announcing Our Series B

That progress marks the next phase of our work.

Today, we are announcing an oversubscribed $125 million Series B, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from Transformation Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, Cathay Innovation, and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund, an AI innovation fund created in partnership with Anthropic, as well as existing investors SignalFire, Frist Cressey Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Healthier Capital, Town Hall Ventures, and Intermountain Ventures.

At NEA, we are known for making very large investments in a small, select number of companies we believe in deeply, and we are going all-in on Qualified Health as the launch pad for health systems to transform their organizations. We will be a partner in building Qualified Health the way Salesforce was built for sales, the way Workday was built for HR. This is a category-defining opportunity.

Mohamad Makhzoumi, Co-CEO of NEA

Qualified Health is the team that approaches this work as medical care specialists, with a deep understanding of the realities health systems face every day. That perspective allows them to identify where AI can create meaningful clinical and operational impact. We’re excited to partner with Justin and the Qualified Health team as they help leading health systems navigate this next phase of healthcare.

Jared Kesselheim, MD, Managing Partner at Transformation Capital

Health systems are entering a structural shift towards enterprise transformation. At that scale, organizations need a partner they trust to help shape how AI is adopted across the institution and ensure it delivers real value. Very few companies have the technical depth, clinical understanding, and credibility to take on that mandate. We believe Qualified Health is emerging as that critical partner. The level of trust they have earned is both exceptionally rare and essential at this moment of transformation.

Simon Wu, Partner at Cathay Innovation

Healthcare organizations sit on an enormous wealth of clinical and operational data. What Qualified Health has built is the infrastructure to connect those signals, make sense of them in real time, and enable health systems to act on them at scale. That's the difference between AI as a tool and AI as a genuine transformation of how care works.

DJ Patil, General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures

We’ve seen multiple waves of innovation in healthcare, and the consistent failure point is the inability to influence day-to-day operations. AI will follow the same pattern unless it’s built for the constraints that health systems operate under. What stands out about Qualified Health is their focus on bringing workflows, decision-making, governance, and change management together in a way that enables durable adoption at scale and, ultimately, measurable value.

Ian Chiang, Partner at Flare Capital Partners

We’re honored by our investors’ belief in the work our health systems are doing with us, and in our ability to support their full enterprise AI deployment.

This investment allows us to deepen our existing partnerships, accelerate deployments, and expand the infrastructure required to support health systems as they move from early enterprise AI deployments to broader, system-wide transformation.

The Path Forward

The health systems we work with are taking on some of the hardest problems in healthcare, reducing preventable harm, closing persistent gaps in care, and building organizations that can sustain the demands ahead. We have seen firsthand what becomes possible when a health system commits to this work seriously, the speed at which impact materializes, and the degree to which it compounds over time.

What we believe, and what our partnerships continue to reinforce, is that the limiting factor is no longer technology. It is the organizational will to redesign care delivery from the ground up and the availability of trusted partners that are equipped and committed to supporting that over the long term.

In the next phase, we are focused on continuing to earn that trust. That means deepening our partnerships already underway, helping health systems scale what is working across their enterprises, and staying accountable to outcomes every step of the way.

The next chapter of healthcare will be written by the health systems willing to do this work. We consider it a privilege to do it alongside them.

Read the full story here.

If you’re a health system ready to move at enterprise scale, we’d welcome a conversation.

And if you want to help us build towards this future, come join our team.