For years, LeanTaaS has helped hospitals move patients through the building faster. Its new acquisition is meant to solve what can get in their way from leaving for the next part of their care.
The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company announced Sept. 1 that it acquired Aidin, a care transition platform founded by Russell Graney and used by more than 200 hospitals. Aidin coordinates more than 2 million referrals a year across a network of 21,000-plus post-acute providers, connecting hospitals to skilled nursing facilities, long-term acute care, dialysis and home health.
LeanTaaS’ iQueue for Inpatient Flow is built to move patients through a hospital stay efficiently. Aidin, based in New York, now picks up at the handoff to whatever comes next, which is a common pain point for hospitals around the country.
“Imagine if the exit from the hospital and into a long-term care facility were as smooth as moving a patient from one room to the room next door,” Mohan Giridharadas, founder and CEO of LeanTaaS, said in an interview with Becker’s.
That’s not the reality most care teams work in today. Discharge planning often doesn’t start until the day of or the day before a patient leaves, when nurses and physicians begin working the phones, calling nearby facilities one by one to check insurance coverage, service capabilities and openings, all while the patient waits in a hospital bed that could otherwise turn over.
“The last mile — determining the point of discharge and then identifying the capacity available at that next site of care — is the single hardest part, because it requires coordination outside the assets a health system actually owns,” said Paul Moskowitz, a partner at Bain Capital Private Equity who leads the firm’s healthcare IT investments, including LeanTaaS.
Aidin “created a brilliant two-sided marketplace,” said Mr. Giridharadas. It’s free for post-acute providers to join: Hospitals submit a patient’s needs, the platform matches them against providers based on insurance and services, and qualifying facilities get a window of typically a few hours to respond. Providers that respond quickly and follow through earn higher standing in future matches, similar to a rating system.
The result, according to figures in the companies’ announcement, is a reduction in length of stay by an average of 0.86 days, a 50% cut in placement time and roughly $1.7 million in annual savings per hospital.
Vanderbilt University Hospital already uses both platforms. “Vanderbilt Health uses both LeanTaaS and Aidin to improve patient flow. We are excited to see these solutions work better together and make care transitions simpler for our teams and patients,” said Lee Ann Liska, MBA, president and COO of Vanderbilt University Hospital.
Mr. Giridharadas has previously shared a broader ambition: making LeanTaaS a “central nervous system” for health systems, sensing, understanding, acting and learning across the patient journey. He described the Aidin deal as an extension of that framework. The payoff he expects health systems to notice first isn’t subtle. Post-acute placement has historically been “a net negative,” he said, a source of delay that left patients settling for “the least bad option in front of them.” He expects that to flip as post-acute providers compete for referrals in real time, meaning patients get their preferred setting more often, beds turn over faster, and ED boarding eases.
Mr. Moskowitz sees the deal as part of a broader shift in what Bain is looking for across healthcare: three forces converging on health systems at once. Margins are shrinking from Medicaid and ACA enrollment reductions, flat reimbursement and rising costs. Demand is growing for solutions with easy-to-measure ROI, and health systems increasingly bear financial risk for entire episodes of care. “Solutions like [LeanTaaS and Aidin] actually help health systems be more confident in the decisions that happen downstream, outside of the site of care that they own,” he said.
LeanTaaS is used across more than 1,200 hospitals, centers and clinics. Its inpatient flow product alone delivers an average of $10,000 in annual savings per bed. Aidin extends that math past discharge. LeanTaaS is betting the beds that open up next depend on what happens outside the hospital’s own walls.
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