Zeromissed malignancies
Through our Intelligent Triage program for lung nodules — since 2020.
Innovation isn’t a department. It’s how rural health survives.
The healthcare industry isn’t producing the outcomes it should, and the cost equation is unsustainable. Nowhere is that clearer than in rural America, where hospitals close, specialists are scarce and life expectancy trails the rest of the country.
Geisinger was built as a promise to serve these communities. Innovation is how we keep that promise. Not as a side project, but as the core of who we are. We’ve been doing it long enough that it’s in our DNA, and we’re not stopping.
The question that drives the Steele Institute isn’t “What’s new?” It’s “How do we do this faster, better and at scale — for the people who need it most?”
Innovation that solves problems before they reach patients
Named for former Geisinger CEO Dr. Glenn Steele and founded in 2018, the Steele Institute turns bold ideas into better care. These are a few of the programs driving healthcare forward — and the results speak for themselves.
Programs driving healthcare forward:
- ProvenCare®: The 90-day surgical warranty. If a covered surgery needs more care within 90 days, we cover the cost — because accountability should be built into care, not billed after it.
- MyCode® Community Health Initiative: Over 370,000 participants in the largest health-system genomic biobank in the country. We’re finding disease before symptoms appear — and returning life-changing results to patients and their families.
- Geisinger 65 Forward: Primary care reinvented for adults 55+. Same-day appointments, on-site wellness, one dedicated team. Because growing older shouldn’t mean settling for less.
- Intelligent Triage: AI-driven routing that cut pulmonology wait times from 112 days to 12, with zero missed malignancies since 2020. We freed up 9,000+ visit slots and proved AI can save lives, not just time.
- Fresh Food Farmacy: Prescribing food, not just medication. For patients with diabetes and food insecurity, we treat food as medicine — because health doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
- Geisinger ACO: Coordinated care for 78,000+ rural Medicare patients across central and northeastern Pennsylvania, closing care gaps by addressing the social determinants that shape health long before anyone reaches a clinic.
Human-centered design. Cross-functional teams. Technology that removes friction.
We bring together clinicians, data scientists, engineers, behavioral experts and designers to solve problems before they reach patients. Our approach is simple: understand the real experience of care, find the friction points and strip them out — then measure whether it actually worked.
What sets us apart isn’t any single program. It’s a method we’ve proven again and again, as well as a commitment to scaling what works far beyond our own walls.
Innovation by the numbers
From rural Pennsylvania to the rest of the country
The most important chapter in Geisinger’s innovation story is the one we’re writing now.
In 2024, Geisinger joined Risant Health, a nonprofit formed by Kaiser Foundation Hospitals to scale value-based care across the country. Geisinger is the proving ground: the first health system to deploy a shared value-based care platform that brings Kaiser Permanente’s best practices into multipayer, multiprovider, rural environments.
The upshot? The innovations that work here won’t stay here. They’ll scale to rural communities across the country — because the stakes are national, and the model is built to travel.
“At a time when many rural communities are losing access to healthcare services, we’re committed to investing in the health of our community. Our neighbors have the benefit of receiving a level of care close to home in the kind of facility they would otherwise have to travel to cities like Philadelphia or New York to find.”
Megan Brosious
Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer, Geisinger