The team at The Tegria Blog sat down (virtually) with Wasif Rasheed, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, Providence, and a member of Tegria’s governing council. It was an opportunity to reflect on the October 2020 launch of Tegria, explain Tegria’s fit with Providence’s mission and vision, and look ahead to 2021 and beyond.

1. Start us at the beginning. How did the vision take shape for what would become Tegria?

It was clear from the beginning that when Providence started along its Health 2.0 journey we would need to operate in new and different ways. The healthcare environment was increasingly turbulent–even before the pandemic–and we needed to navigate all the challenges plus improve patient access, experience and outcomes. At the same time, we needed to ensure sustainment and growth of the Providence Mission which inspires us.

Tegria is a vehicle through which we have been able to pursue some of the core tenets of the Health 2.0 pivot. This approach was designed to transform our organization and the industry, as well as to diversify our revenue streams, strategically redeploy capital, and modernize the way we deliver administrative services.

Tegria serves as an extension of Providence’s Mission in important ways. First, it accelerates technical, clinical, and operational advances that further our vision of health for a better world. Second, as a for-profit company, Tegria generates financial returns that remain in the not-for-profit ecosystem, allowing Providence to expand the scope of its community benefits. Finally, Tegria supports the pursuit of bold revenue diversification goals that serve to enliven and enable the Providence Mission.

As a healthcare services and solutions provider, Tegria builds upon the Providence history of investing in IT and digital innovation and enables us to bring these offerings to health systems outside of the Providence family. We launched Tegria to help healthcare organizations operate more efficiently, improve long-term well-being, and better serve their communities. We believe that as we transform Providence, and our customers, with new technologies and services, we will transform the healthcare industry. This sentiment is reflected in Tegria’s mission, and it’s been thrilling to see both the Providence and Tegria missions come to life through our work.

2. As a Providence executive and a board member of Tegria, you’ve been at the center of building Tegria. How did you choose the various components and capabilities?

In building Tegria, we thought about the services that Providence – and other systems like it – need most. With Tegria, our goal is to provide health systems with the support they need so they can focus on and sustain their core mission of providing care.

Tegria is organized to allow us to focus our core offerings and provide a comprehensive and unified set of products to health system customers. Tegria provides end-to-end EHR solutions and services for Epic and MEDITECH, and it provides services and solutions spanning the revenue cycle. This enables Tegria to serve as a single-source solution with an expanding product and service portfolio to address areas where providers face substantial performance challenges.

Tegria also invents new technologies through Lumedic and QuiviQ, while housing and developing the necessary data infrastructure and insights needed to grow our product lineup and develop the right technology to continue to meet health system needs into the future. The combination of these businesses creates a virtuous cycle (e.g. as Tegria’s RCM and data experts collaborate to develop tech-enabled revenue cycle solutions, their technology consulting colleagues can serve as implementation partners providing real-time health system feedback which in turn leads to continuous improvement of our solutions).

Tegria is committed to responding to pressing problems that Providence and other health systems face. Creating healthcare-informed, customer-centric solutions is core to what we do.

3. Tegria is helping other health systems transform with ideas incubated and in place at Providence. What do you see as the most important ideas for the industry to deploy to achieve transformation?

There is a significant opportunity to transform patient and caregiver experience and medical outcomes. As an industry, healthcare is at least ten years behind in its ability to unlock the power of technology to drive real change that results in greater collaboration on care, better transparency in pricing and procedures, and greater insights for therapies and treatments. We have a lot of work to do to get the industry caught up.

Part of what we have done with Tegria has been taking successful businesses in their own right and combining them underneath a single banner with shared resources and a common vision. Tegria is fundamentally a platform to promote change. We believe that in bringing our services, consulting, RCM, data and technology into one group, we can create a far stronger, more unified and scalable offering for Providence and other health system customers. This collaboration is what will ultimately unlock transformative value at scale.

While this combination enables us to drive synergies via economies of scale, it also creates new potential to cross-sell and develop complementary products and solutions based upon a common vision, patient focus, and data platform. If we are truly going to transform healthcare, it is technology-driven collaboration akin to what we are building with Tegria which will be key.

4. What are your hopes for Tegria? Where do you see it in a year, three years, five years?

When we launched Tegria, we set an ambitious goal of driving $1B in annual revenue by 2023, and we’ve made phenomenal progress to date in marching toward that goal. As we continue to pursue growth, I see Tegria bringing on additional companies and expanding its scope and product offerings to better serve the needs of our health system customers.

But beyond revenue goals, perhaps what I am most excited about is the transformative performance improvement that I know we can drive for our customers. Tegria emerged from Providence recognizing unmet needs in the market – no one was providing end-to-end services and technology designed specifically to address health system pain points.

As we continue to build out our capabilities five years from now, I want Tegria to be synonymous with excellence and innovation in healthcare.

5. Anything you want to add?

One thing that hasn’t come up yet, but is important to state, is the way Tegria will be different. We are taking big, bold positions on the vision of healthcare transformation, and we are aspiring to be the difference-maker in this work.

How will we be successful where others have failed? We are in a unique and wonderful situation of blending one of the largest and most tech-savvy health systems in the country, with unparalleled patient care, technology, and revenue cycle services know-how and expertise. We are a small and growing entity, yet we have attracted incredible leadership talent, and have an ability to collaborate in depth within spaces and disciplines that have historically operated as silos. This is evident in the “better together” work already started in our technology consulting and services group. As we merge and grow and evolve, it will be a game changer for us. Our vision to transform healthcare will be realized through the distinct way we engage with our customers, execute, and collaborate for their success.