Bain Capital takes majority stake in LeanTaaS

LeanTaaS has been getting more hospitals to use its scheduling software to improve efficiency in operating rooms and infusion centers, and now the California company has received its own infusion to propel its growth.

This week, Bain Capital Private Equity, the Boston-based investment firm, announced it has acquired a majority stake in the company from two existing investors: Insight Partners and Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s Growth Equity business. The LeanTaaS management team will continue to lead the company.

The financial terms of the transaction weren’t disclosed. LeanTaaS said in a news release the deal “includes a significant growth capital commitment from Bain Capital that will enable LeanTaaS to continue to accelerate its rapid growth trajectory and innovative market-leading suite of cloud software solutions.”

Sanjeev Agrawal, LeanTaaS president and chief operating officer

The deal, which is subject to regulatory approval, is expected to be completed in the third quarter of 2022. Insights Partners and Goldman Sachs will continue to hold stakes in the company, LeanTaaS and Bain Capital said.

LeanTaaS has placed its software in more than 130 health systems and more than 500 hospitals around the country. Its cloud-based software is designed to help attain more scheduling efficiencies in surgical procedures, infusion centers and managing in-patient volume. The company touts its ability to help hospitals and health systems unlock their capacity.

• Related story: LeanTaaS aims to bring smarter scheduling systems to hospitals

Some of the systems using LeanTaaS software include New York-Presbyterian, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, Penn Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center, CommonSpirit, Stanford Health Care and others.

'Air traffic control'

Sanjeev Agrawal, LeanTaaS president and chief operating officer, likens the software to “air traffic control.”

In a roundtable this week, Agrawal talked about how the airline industry now processes far more flights per day than it did decades ago. He said he wants the LeanTaaS software to do the same for the healthcare industry.

The company’s iQueue software uses artificial intelligence and data science to anticipate problems in scheduling and opportunities to book more appointments.

The software takes into account the speed of surgeons in performing procedures, accounting for a veteran physician who may take less time on a procedure than a younger surgeon. Health systems also use the software to predict when infusion centers could get busier, such as the middle of the day, and allows providers to bring in patients for cancer treatments at different times to avoid logjams.

LeanTaaS officials say their long-term vision is to manage patient flow and hospital capacity all in one platform. Agrawal said the company’s software, utilized by creative healthcare leaders, offers enormous potential to help hospitals and improve the patient experience.

“We aren’t even at the base camp on the way of climbing Everest,” Agrawal said.

• Related story: Digital transformation of healthcare must gain speed

Solving white space

Patrick McGill, executive vice president and chief transformation officer at Community Health Network in Indianapolis, said during the LeanTaaS roundtable his system just began using the company’s software in April, and the early results have been impressive.

In the first month, the software helped the system create more than 1,200 hours of operating room procedure time that was not previously available. “That’s pretty significant in one month’s time,” McGill said.

McGill said the system began using the software at its main hospital and is expanding it to the infusion chairs and hopes to expand to inpatient bed placement.

The real opportunities in healthcare for cutting costs and finding greater efficiency is in the white space between surgeries or infusion appointments, he said. The LeanTaaS tools “help solve that sort of white space problem … which is what everyone is struggling with right now,” McGill said.

“This is a data-driven approach to culture change,” he said.

'Significant growth investment'

Aaron Miri, senior vice president and chief digital and information officer at Baptist Health, said the system adopted the LeanTaaS software in 2019. Miri said the system’s analytic component proved especially useful during the COVID-19 pandemic, since it examined zip codes with higher cases and allowed the system to shift procedures.

“Once it’s going, you’re just feeding data and it continues to optimize,” Miri said.

Baptist Health said it has seen a 110% return on its investment with the software.

In addition to the financial benefits, Miri said it’s helping doctors get more time back in their day. “The number one return on investment for any physician is time,” he said.

In the roundtable, Agrawal said that the system can help hospitals as more health systems are continuing to consolidate.

“This will help systems stay competitive,” he said.

Mohan Giridharadas, founder and CEO of LeanTaaS, said in a news release that Bain Capital’s investment will spur the company’s growth.

“We are delighted to partner with Bain Capital going forward as they share our vision for building a broader healthcare optimization platform and have an excellent track-record of building and scaling leading healthcare technology companies,”  Giridharadas said in the news release announcing the deal. “This significant growth investment will provide us with valuable resources to accelerate our impact.”

Devin O’Reilly, a managing director at Bain Capital Private Equity, said in the release that LeanTaaS “is at the forefront of AI in healthcare, creating exceptional value for customers and poised for continued rapid expansion.

“We are thrilled to support LeanTaaS’ vision for transforming care delivery through automation and improving the quality of US healthcare,” he said.