By Mathew Keller, RN JD
Regulatory and Policy Nursing Specialist
Regulatory and Policy Nursing Specialist
It’s been well reported that Allina Health, a $3.9-billion nonprofit healthcare organization, “invested” $108 million in Health Catalyst, a private for-profit technology company. As part of the deal, Allina is outsourcing its “data warehousing, analytics, performance improvement technology, and personnel to Health Catalyst.” In fact, the money Allina spends on Health Catalyst “represents the cost of what the staff and tools” were costing Allina, according to Allina CEO Penny Wheeler. In other words, Allina took a segment of its business and paid to outsource it to a for-profit company.
The conflicts of interest abound. For starters, Allina CEO Penny Wheeler is on the Health Catalyst Board of Directors. While she claims she’s not being paid to be on the Health Catalyst Board, we’ve seen no such proof.
And even if it were true that she’s not being paid, there’s a natural conflict of interest between being on the board of directors of a for-profit company where you have a fiduciary duty to the company to maximize profits, while you’re at the same time running a nonprofit where you have an ethical duty to provide charitable care. Which one wins out: maximizing profit for your for-profit company, or providing a community service through your nonprofit? When the two are doing business together, it stands to reason that the aims are mutually exclusive.
As Health Catalyst CEO Dan Burton wrote in a press release, one of the aims of the deal with Allina Health is to “’Turbocharge’ financial… outcomes.” But is turbocharging financial outcomes really what non-profit healthcare is all about?
Perhaps Allina has given us our first glimpse of where its priorities lie when it comes to Health Catalyst vs. Allina Health. While 4,800 of its nurses are on the outside of the hospitals, asking for Allina to come to a fair deal, Abbott Northwestern Hospital’s senior vice president couldn’t be bothered — he’s in Salt Lake City, at Health Catalyst’s annual conference.
Make no mistake: at a time when Abbott Northwestern is facing a crisis, at a time when the employees who actually deliver the care patients receive are outside of the hospital doors, at a time when leadership is needed more than ever, Abbott’s senior vice president’s time and attention are focused on one thing: Health Catalyst.