Dr. Marc Harrison tapped as CEO of General Catalyst's latest company

Venture capital firm General Catalyst has tapped former Intermountain Health CEO Dr. Marc Harrison to lead a new company focused on health system transformation.

The company, Health Assurance Transformation Corp., or HATco, was launched publicly by Harrison and General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja at the HLTH conference on Sunday in Las Vegas. The company, which will be owned by General Catalyst, will provide advisory services to health systems and help them pivot to value-based care, adopt digital platforms that can scale across the enterprise, align stakeholder interests and improve financial sustainability. 

Read more: What’s on tap at HLTH 2023?

Harrison said HATco will acquire a health system within its first year of operation as a proof of concept for its services.

“We want to demonstrate what the evolution of healthcare can look like and how we can make it clinically and economically sustainable, more accessible to regular people … and how we can achieve measurable changes in public health and health spending,” Harrison said. 

The goal is to help health systems and other provider organizations become more patient-forward, equitable and affordable, while giving them a set of tools that can help them compete with retail, big tech and private equity-backed entrants into healthcare delivery, he said. 

Taneja said once they acquire a system, they will work with the organization's management team to put together a plan for the transformation journey. One of the initial goals, Harrison said, will be putting the health system on a platform where digital solutions can scale across the enterprise and aren’t isolated. 

“We've got to get away from the flypaper of [narrow digital health] solutions and get to a place where whole platforms work to the benefit of doctors, nurses, payers, communities and individual people,” Harrison said.

On top of acquiring a health system, HATco will share best practices with General Catalyst’s health assurance network, a digital health ecosystem comprised of health systems, health tech startups and health plans. Half of the 20 partners in this ecosystem were announced publicly at last year’s HLTH event. 

Harrison left Intermountain after six years for General Catalyst in August 2022, following in the footsteps of former Jefferson Health CEO Dr. Stephen Klasko, who joined the venture capital firm in February of that year. Harrison said he was proud of the work he led at Intermountain in shifting the health system toward value and virtual care, but felt the industry needed more help than one system could offer. 

“The way the industry responded to COVID, it really demonstrated the need for a clicks-and-mortar world,” Harrison said. “At scale, conventional health systems were a having trouble with that. Even great places like Intermountain, it's really hard to move a ship that big.” 

Taneja said Harrison was a natural choice to lead this effort due their similar values on how healthcare needs to evolve.  

“As we went through COVID and leaned in to start building an ecosystem, the Amazon of healthcare as I’ve called it, it was clear that we would need to have somebody at the helm who can drive this transformation,” Taneja said. “Someone who has lived it before.”