Pittsburgh-based healthcare supply chain intelligence provider Symmetric Health Solutions announced it had received a strategic growth investment growth equity firm Spectrum Equity.
The announcement marks the first institutional capital raised by Symmetric, which has been profitable since its founding in 2018. In the past eight years, the company has become the supply chain item data foundation for health systems across the country. The new investment will fund new and expansive product innovations and hiring initiatives, the company said.
“Hospitals have been told for years that bad item data is just the cost of doing business. It isn’t. Most of our customers came to us after years of paying for data they still had to fix by hand,” said Rich Kucera, co-founder and CEO of Symmetric. “Spectrum’s backing lets us move faster on what comes next: tools that help hospitals see supply disruptions coming, protect revenue, and make better value analysis decisions, all built on data they can finally trust.”
Symmetric maintains the world’s largest database of continuously updated item data, containing nearly 20 million healthcare items. This database helps healthcare systems manage their own supply chain and ensure the items are up-to-date. The data pipeline draws on hundreds of sources, from regulatory registries to manufacturer catalogs to GPO contracts, and allows staff at more than 45 leading health systems to verify the data. This allows the healthcare system to manage its own supply chain while eliminating problems with outdated data that can impact a finance teams ability to analyze spending, or create problems with revenue leakage and excess costs.
“The opportunity for AI to improve healthcare operations is enormous, but you can’t leverage AI on top of data you don’t trust,” Michael Radonich, managing director at Spectrum Equity, said. “For decades, health system supply chain and procurement teams have relied on hand-reconciled data coming from thousands of sources with no shared standard. Symmetric has spent the last eight years working to solve that data problem, becoming the system of record for supply chain data at some of the largest health systems in the country.”