University of Maryland Medical System Spins Out SaaS Platform

After four years, Gallion Health is finally an independent company.

Effective this month, the cloud-based digital supply chain application is the first company to be spun out of the University of Maryland Medical System’s iHarbor Innovation Center, a technology and incubation studio that focuses on creating technology-based solutions to common problems facing healthcare institutions.

“Gallion validates the System’s innovation pathway and is already paying dividends for our member organizations, our staff, and our patients. Discovery is one of our values at UMMS and through applications like Gallion, we are continuing to be an innovation leader in the industry,” UMMS President/CEO Mohan Suntha, M.D., said.

UMMS has made an initial seed investment in the spinout to support Gallion Health’s growth as the organization explores future external investment opportunities.

A Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, Gallion is now available for other hospital systems. The product seamlessly integrates with electronic health record (EHR) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, automating critical tasks such as consumption tracking, charges, and contract compliance.

Before Gallion’s implementation in 2021 automated these processes, UMMS relied on a manual labor-intensive paper-based process that had the potential for errors and inefficiencies. Data from the deployment of Gallion across UMMS’ 11 hospitals shows significant operational improvements; completion time has been reduced by 75% and the defect/error rate has lowered from 18% to just 3%.

Gallion has helped UMMS save $2 million by improving invoice accuracy, streamlining operational efficiencies, and accelerating charge capture three-fold. The System saved an additional $3.5 million through the retention of competitive contracts, compared to the median contract benchmark.

“Gallion represents exactly what iHarbor stands for,” UMMS Senior Vice President/Chief Innovation Officer Warren D’Souza, Ph.D., stated. “It is a transformative digital solution that saves time, saves money, accelerates the revenue cycle, and improves outcomes, and it’s something that is scalable across the industry.”

Healthcare technology veteran Jeff Sopko has been hired as Gallion’s first CEO. “Gallion is an innovative platform, and I look forward to shepherding the company into this next chapter,” he commented. “I am grateful to Dr. Suntha and the System for trusting my team to market Gallion to hospitals nationwide.”

Sopko has worked in leadership roles for well-known medtech companies like Becton Dickinson and Medtronic. He later served as president and CEO for Standard Molecular, a Massachusetts-based genomic testing startup, and Direct Diagnostics, a Texas-based lab testing company that commercialized a saliva test capable of identifying pathogens. He joined the Gallion team in May to help prepare for the transition.

In January, Gallion was a finalist for the Gartner Power of the Profession Supply Chain Awards.

The University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) is an academic private health system, focused on delivering high-quality care and putting discovery and innovation into practice at the bedside. Partnering with the University of Maryland School of Medicine and University of Maryland, Baltimore, which educates the state’s future healthcare professionals, UMMS is an integrated network of care, delivering 25% of all hospital care in urban, suburban, and rural communities across the state of Maryland. UMMS puts academic medicine within reach through primary and specialty care delivered at 11 hospitals, including the flagship University of Maryland Medical Center, the System’s anchor institution in downtown Baltimore, as well as through a network of University of Maryland Urgent Care centers and more than 150 other locations in 13 counties.

The iHarbor Innovation Center at the University of Maryland Medical System (UMMS) focuses on solving complex but common problems in healthcare. iHarbor is reimagining healthcare delivery, operations and administration, developing transformational products and solutions that dramatically improve health care outcomes, efficiency, quality and value.