Collaborating Across the Healthcare System with Rick Newell or Vituity

This is part of our executive insights series where Elion CEO Bobby Guelich speaks with healthcare leaders about their tech priorities and learnings. For more, become a member and sign up for our email list here.

Role: Chief Transformation Officer, Vituity | CEO, Inflect Health

Let’s start with a quick overview. What’s your background, and what are Vituity and Inflect Health all about?

Vituity is a leading, national, multispecialty, healthcare partnership that is 100% equitably physician owned with no private equity, no debt, no outside investor. We have more than 6,000 clinicians across 600 communities in both acute and outpatient settings, caring for more than 12M patients each year. In addition to our clinical services, we own and operate our own management service organization, revenue cycle management company, and our partners own the risk retention group, which handles all of our medical malpractice.  

I’m a practicing emergency physician board certified in both emergency medicine and clinical informatics. I’ve been with Vituity for about 20 years and currently serve as Chief Transformation Officer. In my role, I lead enterprise-wide innovation efforts, new practice line development, and early-stage partnerships and investments through Inflect, which is Vituity’s innovation and investment hub. At Inflect, we invest in top-tier early-stage startups through Inflect Capital, through Inflect Studio help launch and accelerate companies from concept to market by assembling founding teams and surrounding them with expertise, resources, and  infrastructure, and through Inflect Advisory provide strategic consulting.

What are your technology priorities at Vituity right now?

We’re focused on a few major areas, especially around AI and automation:

• AI for clinical operations: We’re using AI not for direct clinical decision-making, but to improve operational efficiency, looking at everything from how we can automate repetitive tasks, to how we can leverage agentic AI to make informed decisions in the back office, to how we can improve the efficiency of our clinical operations management team.
  

• Enterprise-wide knowledge management: Today, our clinicians and staff have to navigate multiple systems—HR, finance, benefits, etc.—to get simple answers. We're building an integrated, AI-powered interface that unifies all those data sources and can respond in real time to queries.
  

• Revenue cycle management: This space is ripe for AI including provider enrollment, AI coding, and mail handling. People are often shocked about how much of the business of healthcare still takes place through U.S. mail and fax, so even something as simple as mail/fax handling is ripe for AI and automation.
  

• Golden record problem: Like many healthcare organizations, we’re working on solving identity challenges—whether that’s physician aliases, facility names, or unique patient identifiers—to ensure we have clean, connected data across the enterprise. Without that, AI insights aren’t trustworthy.

How does that compare to or impact the work you’re doing at Inflect Health?

At Inflect, we’re not just focused on solving Vituity’s problems—we’re looking across the entire ecosystem to back companies rethinking care delivery. One of our core theses is that healthcare is shifting from a “one location, many patients” model to a “one patient, many locations” model. We’re looking at companies enabling care delivery across home, retail, virtual, and even immersive settings, such as VR for behavioral health.

Is there a particular trend or category you’re especially excited about right now?

Yes—and I’m obviously biased—but I’m most excited about technology that actually works for the physician and the patient. Historically, tech in healthcare hasn’t always done that. A lot of systems were designed without real input from clinicians or patients, which led to poor adoption and misaligned incentives.

That’s changing. A great example is Sayvant, a company we launched through Inflect Studio. While it might get bucketed with ambient AI scribing solutions, it’s actually far more comprehensive. We brought together physicians across specialties to shape the product around real clinical workflows. Then we layered in quality, compliance, security, revenue cycle, and risk experts from Vituity and beyond. The result is a platform that’s tailored not just to reduce pajama time, but to improve documentation quality, support clinical decision-making, surface quality measures, and optimize billing—all in real time.

Final thoughts—any advice for vendors or entrepreneurs entering the space?

Absolutely. We love backing founders who truly understand the problem they’re solving. Too often, we see technology built in search of a problem. The best companies come at it from the other direction: they’ve lived the problem, understand the workflow, and build with the stakeholders—patients, clinicians, payers—in mind from day one. With that, technology that works with the system, not against it, will always win; these companies need to understand all of the stakeholders that interface with their solution.

I also don’t think we’re at the point where we can remove clinicians from the clinical care loop entirely, and frankly, I’m not sure we should be yet. There’s a big difference between a patient interacting with technology directly versus a patient interacting with a physician leveraging technology in the care process. Over the next few years, we’ll start to see that shift happen more, but in my view, clinicians still need to be in the loop—especially when we’re talking about safety, trust, and complex decision-making.