Marietta, Ga.-based Wellstar Health System has launched a new company that uses AI to help health systems comply with constantly shifting regulatory requirements.
The 11-hospital system’s innovation and venture capital arm, Catalyst by Wellstar, spun off Polysight with $1 million in preseed funding Dec. 17.
“One of the big problems that we’ve identified over the last couple of years is the management of the complexity of the regulatory and compliance space in healthcare,” Hank Capps, MD, president of Catalyst by Wellstar and executive vice president and chief information and digital officer at Wellstar Health System, told Becker’s. “There were very few solutions that were really building a modern approach to both the ingestion and understanding of all those changes in real time.”
Polysight employs closed large language models with agentic AI to continuously monitor regulatory updates and proposed rules, flagging important changes proactively and accurately. Wellstar is piloting the solution.
“We are spending lots of dollars as a healthcare industry to manage this ever-changing landscape,” Dr. Capps said. “So anything we can do that can reduce cost and make healthcare more affordable to our patients, we want to really zero in on that.”
Catalyst by Wellstar rolled out in 2023, promising to invest $100 million in digital health startups over the next five years. It started its first company, nurse scheduling platform Vflok, in 2024, also with $1 million in preseed funding (the startup has since raised another $1.5 million). The venture fund has invested over $40 million in two dozen companies to date.
Wellstar Health takes a unique approach to spinoffs, identifying problems then finding entrepreneurs to solve them — the health system discovered Polysight CEO Rinku Patel, PharmD, via a nationwide search — and bringing the ideas quickly to market.
“We are spinning companies out much earlier because we believe a company can grow faster when it’s not bound by being inside a corporate environment,” Dr. Capps said. “We’re not building it just for Wellstar. We’re building it for the industry.”
