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A Healthcare Network Built Through Growth and Acquisition
InnovaCare Health is a personalized care provider treating more than 250,000 patients across 47 facilities. Since the company was first incorporated in 1998, its business has evolved significantly, with growth occurring through both organic expansion and acquisition. As is often the case in fast-growing healthcare organizations, the procurement function did not keep pace. Each facility initially managed its own purchasing activities, and arrangements developed in an ad hoc manner across the network.
When InnovaCare began centralizing procurement, the gaps in spend management became obvious. To put cost-effective procedures and governance in place, the company hired procurement leader Patrick Michaud to head the overall transformation, take on supplier management, and create a dedicated procurement organization. Technology would clearly need to be part of the solution. Michaud selected Levelpath to simplify InnovaCare's workflows and inject visibility and efficiency into the procurement process.
Outcomes from the procurement transformation:
- 60% faster procurement cycle times across the network
- 18% reduction in total contracts through consolidation of overlapping suppliers
- 47 care facilities now operating under a single governed procurement process
- Two full-time procurement hires avoided as Levelpath's AI absorbed manual analysis work
The Challenge: Ad Hoc Spend Across 47 Facilities
Before Michaud arrived, InnovaCare's procurement activities reflected the organic growth of the business. Individual facilities used different suppliers on various contracting terms, sometimes signing agreements that were not in InnovaCare's broader interest. Inconsistencies and duplications were common, and many facilities were paying more than they should have for goods and services that could have been negotiated at the network level.
The network's scale represented a substantial opportunity. With 47 care facilities and 250,000 patients, InnovaCare had buying power that no single facility could match. Capitalizing on that scale required a system capable of providing insights into both spend levels and the supplier landscape, and the legacy ERP environment was not built for the job.
Healthcare adds a layer of complexity that other industries do not face. Compliance audits, the requirements of private equity ownership, and the regulated nature of care delivery meant that any new procurement process had to be defensible, auditable, and consistent. A streamlined process that lost the audit trail would not be acceptable. InnovaCare needed both speed and rigor.
Why InnovaCare Chose Levelpath
Michaud evaluated procurement platforms with two priorities: flexibility and AI capability. Older systems carried too much weight in unused features, and newer systems were often inflexible to the demands of an iterative governance process. InnovaCare needed a platform that could be configured to its specific workflow without months of integration work, and adapted as the function matured.
"Without an AI platform for procurement like Levelpath, it would be a very manual process to do the analysis and triage all of our requests. Other legacy systems don't have the flexibility to get all the data that I need upfront. With Levelpath, we have been able to put a structure in place quickly, and easily train the business user on the new process."
The user experience mattered as much as the technical capability. Operational users at care facilities are not procurement specialists, and they should not need to be. Levelpath's intuitive design meant that adoption across InnovaCare's distributed footprint could happen quickly, without forcing facility staff to develop tech-savvy procurement skills.
Centralizing Intake and Standardizing Workflows
Levelpath's AI platform allowed InnovaCare to establish a clear rule: any direct third-party spend must be raised through Levelpath. From there, Michaud could easily intake requests, assign appropriate workflows, and run agreement exercises when needed. What had been an ad hoc process turned into a structured, repeatable one almost overnight.
The cycle time reductions were immediate. InnovaCare reported procurement cycles running up to 60% faster than under the legacy process. The savings did not stop at speed. By bringing all requests through a single workflow, the team identified cases where InnovaCare had been using overlapping suppliers with varied payment terms, paying higher costs on items that could have been consolidated. The result was an 18% reduction in the total number of contracts and avoided hiring of two additional procurement employees who would have been needed to manage the workload manually.
Real Estate, Maintenance, and Closed-Loop Governance
Levelpath's impact extended into areas that procurement teams often struggle to reach. Real estate is one of the largest categories of spend for a healthcare network with 47 physical facilities, and InnovaCare brought it under the same governance model.
"By incorporating all of our real estate transactions and workflows into Levelpath, we have streamlined operations, reduced administrative burdens, and leveraged our buying power to negotiate better terms. We have not only achieved substantial cost savings but also enhanced our internal governance processes. Now, we have a simplified yet comprehensive system for property management, complete with a proper paper trail of approvals."
Maintenance procurement is another example. Before centralizing, each of InnovaCare's 47 care facilities would call the centralized maintenance team directly. Repairs would be dispatched without clear cost approval, and unexpected costs would hit the VP of Operations budget, causing overruns that were beyond the operations leader's control. InnovaCare used Levelpath to build a procurement workflow where all requests, other than emergency callouts, route through the Vice President of Operations to accept or deny a quote. The result is what Michaud calls "a closed loop, controlled, highly visible and fully governed process that just was not there before."
Executive Buy-In Through Reporting and Visibility
For Michaud, success has not just been measured in faster cycles or lower costs. Cultural change at the executive level has been equally important.
"From a reporting standpoint, my CFO, CEO and COO are avid consumers of the reports that I build from Levelpath. Executives now have visibility that they didn't have before."
That executive visibility was part of the original reason InnovaCare's private equity ownership pushed to build a dedicated procurement function. Bain Capital, in particular, recognized that the business needed purchase governance and the ability to show the controls in place. That level of visibility was never going to come from the ERP system alone. Levelpath has delivered it, and the C-suite is now consuming the reports as part of normal operating cadence.
A newly appointed General Counsel also adopted the platform quickly, instigating new contract policies and embedding key governance steps directly into Levelpath. As Michaud described, "Our GC had been here for less than two weeks, and immediately picked up on what InnovaCare could do from a governance perspective, from a signing authority." The system supports compliance with healthcare audits and the requirements of private equity ownership without adding administrative weight.
Adoption Across the Network
Initial hesitation from clinic staff transformed quickly into enthusiastic support. While Michaud's team expected resistance to a new approval process, system usage results spoke for themselves. Today, InnovaCare's operations team, VPs, and provider group managers are the function's biggest champions, recognizing the value Levelpath's AI platform brings to their daily operations.
Procurement receives five or more requests for new purchases or contracts every day, and that volume has risen steadily since Levelpath went live in January 2024. Most users access the platform on desktop, though a growing group, particularly on the executive team, prefers mobile.
Michaud has perspective on what made adoption work: "With Levelpath, our users are actively going into the system to make requests, look for updates, and collaborate on projects. These actions show that our team has already shifted their behavior, which is amazing." For a non-tech-savvy user base, the lift was modest. The reward was a procurement function that everyone in the business can see and use.
Looking Ahead
Michaud is now focused on building out the procurement function further. There is more operational work to bring into Levelpath, particularly InnovaCare's tail spend. From there, procurement will turn to greater supplier consolidation, providing both spend efficiencies and facility consistency across the network.
The longer-term goal is to bring all transactions, suppliers, and contracts into the system, creating a 360-degree view of spend that supports facility audits and broader business agility. As Michaud put it, "We're not quite there yet as an organization and I haven't pushed it because the volume across 45+ facilities would increase exponentially, but Levelpath will make this transition super-easy once we get to that final mile of spend."
InnovaCare's procurement story is a case study in how a fast-growing, multi-facility business can turn a back-office function into a strategic engine. With Levelpath, the team is delivering speed, savings, and governance simultaneously, and they are doing it with a structure designed to scale as the network continues to grow.
