Premier Acquires Stanson Health to Expand Reach of Stanson CDS Platform

Recently, VCBeat (WeChat Official Account: vcbeat) learned from foreign media reports that U.S. healthcare company Premier has announced the acquisition of health technology firm Stanson Health for $51.5 million. The transaction is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Premier, founded in 1968, is a healthcare company and a group purchasing organization (GPO). It unites approximately 4,000 U.S. hospitals and health systems, along with around 165,000 healthcare providers and organizations, leveraging the collaborative power of the Premier Alliance to lead the transformation of healthcare toward lower costs, higher quality, and greater value. By integrating data analytics, collaboration, supply chain solutions, consulting, and other services, Premier enables better care outcomes at lower costs.

Image source: Unsplash official website

Founded in 2013 and headquartered in Los Angeles, California, Stanson was co-founded by Scott Weingarten, former CEO of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the healthcare company Zyn Health. As a leading developer of next-generation Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS), Stanson enables health systems to integrate its CDSS directly into Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and combine it with relevant patient analytics. This integration empowers clinical solutions to guide physician decision-making, reduce unnecessary or inappropriate care, enhance the quality of patient care, and improve value and safety across the entire health system continuum.

Stanson CDS solutions are currently used in more than 300 hospitals, supporting approximately 100,000 healthcare providers. In the 2018 KLAS report on clinical process improvement products, Stanson CDS was ranked as the number one clinical decision support solution and received the highest scores among CDS products in other 2018 surveys evaluating clinical decision support tools.

Regarding the acquisition of Stanson, Premier stated that the transaction is not expected to have a material impact on its fiscal 2019 earnings and projected modest earnings growth in the coming years. In a statement, Susan DeVore, President and Chief Executive Officer of Premier, said, “This strategic acquisition complements and enhances our core data and analytics services, enabling us to directly expand the reach of Stanson’s clinical decision support (CDS) solutions into areas where they can have the greatest impact.”

Susan DeVore also highlighted Stanson’s decision support system, noting that it can be integrated into major EHR platforms, including Epic, Cerner, and Athenahealth. Clinicians will only engage with the EHR-integrated system when their patients meet specific criteria and the system provides concrete recommendations directly relevant to the physicians’ decision-making.

Group Purchasing Organization (GPO) is an entity that aggregates the purchasing needs of various healthcare institutions, leveraging its collective buying power to negotiate with suppliers and help these institutions secure discounts and lower purchase prices. In the United States, while a small number of hospital procurement departments still procure supplies directly from suppliers, the vast majority of hospitals choose to purchase medical supplies through GPOs. According to statistics from the Healthcare Group Purchasing Association, 96%–98% of hospitals are members of at least one GPO. It is estimated that GPOs can help hospitals reduce costs by approximately 10%–15% compared to direct procurement by the hospitals themselves.

Cedars-Sinai, established in 1902, is a non-profit integrated academic health sciences center. Each year, more than 350 residents and graduate students participate in the medical education programs at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, completing their specialized training there. The medical center emphasizes interdisciplinary biomedical research led by collaborative efforts between physicians and clinical researchers, as well as clinical teaching in advanced medical technologies. Currently, under the leadership of more than 230 principal investigators, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has over 800 ongoing research projects spanning cardiovascular disease, genetics, gene therapy, gastroenterology, neuroscience, immunology, internal medicine and surgery, organ transplantation, stem cells, biomedical imaging, and cancer research, among others.