Olive, an artificial intelligence company tackling healthcare administration tasks, has closed $51 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst. Also participating in the raise were the company's existing backers Drive Capital, Oak HC/FT, Ascension Ventures and other unnamed investors.

WHAT THEY DO

Olive's "AI Workforce" is designed to automate a selection of tedious, high-volume administrative tasks for healthcare organizations. It can deployed across a number of departments within an organization, including IT, supply chain, human resources, clinical administration and revenue cycle.

The company built its tool to be system agnostic, secure and prepared for healthcare-specific workflows. In addition, Olive says that it uses machine learning to find patterns among its data feeds, thereby allowing the tool to identify workflows and processes ripe for optimization.

The Columbus, Ohio-based company was founded in 2012, and was previously called CrossChx. In 2016 it landed $15 million in funding for its tablet-based patient check-in system, called Queue. It then pivoted its focus to AI and collected 32.8 million in July 2018.

Olive noted in its announcement that Olive now has a presence among more than 500 U.S. hospitals in 41 states. In a September 2019 update, the company also said that its technology had completed a total of more than 350 million actions across all of its clients and their workflows.

WHAT IT'S FOR

Olive said that these funds will boost the AI company's growth, and "further its mission" of offloading the burden of administrative processes from hospital staff.

“The AI workforce is here, and the days of disconnected bots that don’t learn from each other are over,” Sean Lane, CEO of Olive, said in a statement. “The time is now and this investment enables us to accelerate our vision of the internet of healthcare – where when one Olive learns, all Olives learn.  We’re on a mission to radically change the way healthcare leverages and views an AI workforce.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT

AI and automation have been pegged as an answer to overwhelmed workforces and repetitive, yet error-prone, tasks, and it seems like these technologies are gaining ground with each passing year.

Similar to Olive, Lumeon has also developed what it calls a "care pathway management system" which builds on EHRs and aims to lower healthcare costs through intelligent automation and orchestration of operations. The company raised $28 million in late 2018, and very recently cut a deal with the Mayo Clinic.

ON THE RECORD

“As a recent health system CEO, I appreciate the duress our hospitals are under as they focus on delivering the best patient care possible under challenging circumstances all while needing to keep the lights on,” said Dr. Ronald A. Paulus, the former president and CEO of Mission Health, who will be joining Olive's board of directors. “Olive’s reliable automation of essential back-office processes saves time, reduces errors and allows staff to focus on higher-order work. I am excited to be working closely with Olive's management team to maximize the outsized positive impact we can have in healthcare on both the administrative and clinical fronts.”