MedStar Health

MedStar Health is a not-for-profit telehealth provider based in Maryland and Washington with 10 hospitals and 300 outpatient locations (including Virginia), as of January 2021. As of the same date, the company had 30,000 associates and 4,700 affiliated clinicians. MedStar claims to provide 5 million ambulatory visits per year.

In September 2023, the company announced that its maternal initiative, D.C. Safe Babies Safe Moms (SBSM), would begin using AI and machine learning to build a maternal and infant health safety surveillance system for hospitals to proactively identify health risks for both patients and their infants. The project was named AI/ML Learning to Reduce Maternal and Infant Health Disparities. The surveillance system would use natural language processing and clinical informatics technology to monitor patient health records and analyze clinical patterns of care. It would also analyze the sentiment and tone of provider notes for additional context and insights. The objective of this offering was to help care teams understand patient risks before they become emergencies and to address structural disparities in maternal care. The offering was launched as a part of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) Commitment to Action project, and aims to complete a beta model of the surveillance system within the three-year commitment period.

Key customers and partnership

In June 2023, the company partnered with at-home physical therapy provider Luna to provide care to patients in Maryland, Washington D.C., and Virginia. Through the partnership, MedStar Health was able to offer its patients at-home physical therapy treatment options, fulfilled by Luna's clinical network. The new service was called MedStar Health Physical Therapy at Home.

In July 2024, the company partnered with RLDatix, a healthcare operations software provider, to use AI-powered data extraction tools for analyzing patient safety events. The collaboration integrated MedStar Health's AI algorithms with RLDatix's risk management solutions to accelerate research on best practices for safety and care delivery. The partnership aimed at enabling healthcare organizations to extract data from thousands of patient safety event reports within seconds, identify trends, and uncover previously unforeseen risk factors affecting patient safety.

Funding and financials

In September 2022, the company received a USD 2 million research grant from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The grant was awarded to expand MedStar’s collaboration with Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare which was initiated in January 2021. The four-year research grant is aimed at creating a laboratory for studying patient safety. Researchers will employ cross-disciplinary approaches, measure human factors, and focus on design aspects of connected care systems used primarily by patients with chronic conditions and other vulnerable populations.