SAIGroup, a prominent Silicon Valley investment firm, has acquired Bethesda health tech platform provider GetWellNetwork Inc., which specializes in creating software tools for hospitals and payers to improve patient engagement and health outcomes.
Michael O’Neil, who founded Get Well in 2000, will remain the company's CEO. Romesh Wadhwani, who founded Palo Alto's SAIGroup and serves as its CEO following several successful startup exits over the years, will take on the role of chairman of Get Well.
While O’Neil declined to share the financial terms of the acquisition, he told me this will mark a transformative period of "innovative growth" for a company that currently employs over 300 people, about a third of whom live and work in Greater Washington. He expects to post between 10 and 20 job openings in the coming days as Get Well, which will retain its name and branding, works to embed artificial intelligence tech from SAIGroup's growing portfolio of health care tech companies into Get Well's platform.
O’Neil said Get Well's software, used across five countries to offer bedside education tools for hospitalized patients in addition to those receiving acute care, is already seeing over 10 million patient interactions annually across the more than 1,000 health care organizations that use its tech.
By incorporating SAIGroup's RhythmX AI data platform and its generative AI tech, powered by Eureka AI, into Get Well's offerings, O'Neil is confident the company will be better equipped to deliver personalized patient services at a much larger scale. RhythmX AI leverages SAIGroup assets, according to the SAIGroup website, which includes data related to 300 million patients, 1.8 million health care professionals and more than 4.4 billion annual claims.
"It's just like we step into both a platform with data and capabilities that will instead of requiring us 24 to 36 months to be able to drive the type of innovation we want, it's going to really come quite rapidly," O’Neil said. "That's why we are so attracted to, candidly, joining Romesh and the team. It is going to be amazing."
Get Well credits its patient engagement tools with decreasing readmission rates by over 40% and reducing preterm births by 36% due to the company's ability to offer patients individualized health recovery plans.
"If you think about it, RhythmX AI will be freeing up capacity and Get Well will actually help to fill that with patients who actually are really highly engaged in their care," O’Neil said. "It creates quite a powerful flywheel of value that we think we can bring to really large, complicated health care providers who are trying to simplify care for their docs and for their patients."
Collectively, SAIGroup's companies employ over 4,000 people globally and generate about $700 million in annual revenue. Wadhwani, who resides in Palo Alto, previously sat on the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and actively sits on the board of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which is located at 1616 Rhode Island Ave. NW.
The acquisition is the latest of nearly a dozen M&A deals that have taken place involving local tech companies in recent weeks. Experts believe there are even more local M&A deals to come amid several factors that are helping to fuel an uptick in deal flow.
