Symmetric: The Data Foundation for Healthcare Supply Chain

Hospitals run their supply chains on the item master: catalogs as large as 500,000+ rows of every single product they procure, each row with dozens of relevant attributes and pieces of metadata (such as identification numbers, classification codes, packaging specs, manufacturer and supplier lineage, and clinical descriptors) that make each item unique.

Whether a hospital navigates a supply chain disruption, is reimbursed for an implant, identifies a recalled device before surgery, or pays the price for a product negotiated by its GPO all depends on the accuracy of this item data. And today, no party in the health system supply chain bears full responsibility for maintaining it.

Symmetric’s four founders – Rich Kucera, TJ Dardet, Jon Boerner, and Ryan Kissell – set out to change that in 2018. As supply chain consultants at Accenture, Rich and TJ encountered this problem at nearly every health system they served, and together with Ryan and Jon, they spent eight years bootstrapping the company that now maintains supply chain data for over one-third of the 25 largest U.S. health systems.

Today, we are excited to announce a significant growth investment in Symmetric as their first institutional investor.

A Healthcare Supply Chain Data Problem That Compounds Every Year

Medical supplies are the second largest expense in a hospital after labor. U.S. hospitals report roughly $290 billion in annual supplies expense – about 20% of net patient revenue – and it is the largest expense line that hospitals can directly control. With medical and surgical supply costs growing about 8% each year since 2020 and global supply chains becoming increasingly volatile, hospital supply chain organizations now sit at the center of operational, clinical, and financial decision-making. But health systems cannot plan their inventory, bill the relevant payor, or manage their spend if they cannot see what exactly they buy, at what price, and under which contract.

The obstacle is the data itself. Manufacturers, distributors, and group purchasing organizations each describe the same product in a different way. None of these organizations take full responsibility for the digital record, or for the product-specific metadata that hospitals need and ultimately rely on. And this data is changing constantly: roughly 30% of a hospital’s item master turns over each year as products are launched, discontinued, and changed. GPO contracts generate thousands of amendments per month, and reimbursement codes are revised on a rolling basis. Most health systems have historically tried to solve this problem with legacy software, Excel spreadsheets, or uploading corrections to the ERP by hand – a fix that may go stale within months.

The cost of stale data reaches every department that relies on the record. In the revenue cycle, an implant that enters the system without a billing code is consumed in surgery and never reimbursed. In procurement, the same product entered under different item numbers fragments purchasing volume, obscures true spend, and forfeits the pricing tiers and rebates the hospital has already earned. On the clinical floor, a recalled device remains on the shelf because nothing connects the recall notice to the inventory record. During shortages or supply chain shocks, the sourcing team may have no reliable way to know which items will be impacted, nor identify a clinically equivalent substitute.

Individually, these are small failures. Across those 500,000+ items and thousands of daily transactions, they compound into leaked revenue, missed savings, and patient safety risk that stays hidden until the damage is done.

Why Symmetric

Symmetric built what the healthcare supply chain never had: a single, continuously maintained record of every product a hospital procures, delivered directly into their ERP and EHR systems via an AI-enabled data pipeline. The founders refined this pipeline over eight years, drawing on hundreds of sources, from regulatory registries to manufacturer catalogs to GPO contracts, and reconciling the conflicts among them into a single trusted record for each item.

The company’s database covers nearly 20 million healthcare items, each carrying up to 1,800 metadata attributes alongside five million verified substitutes. Importantly, Symmetric’s own customers contribute to this process – staff at over 45 leading health systems verify this data, and the network is growing. Symmetric now reports an average match rate of 96%, and that rate has risen every year since founding as the company adds new customers and matures their data pipeline.

What We Heard from Customers

Our diligence included interviews with dozens of supply chain, IT, and procurement leaders at hospitals and health systems, including current Symmetric customers and users of competing tools. Four themes were consistent.

• Symmetric power users live in the system daily, and they treat it as the source of truth for item and contract data. Customers described matching work that once took hours now taking minutes, and mass uploads that once took weeks now taking half an hour.

• Symmetric pays for itself – many times over. Customers pointed to improved charge capture and better-managed supply chain spend as direct outputs of Symmetric’s data.

• The data has become a safety and resilience tool. Customers described pulling recalled product from inventory before it reached a patient, identifying clinical substitutes during shortages, and using country-of-origin coverage across their entire item master to quantify tariff or geopolitical exposure.

• Customers see Symmetric as the foundation for what comes next. Health systems that plan AI-driven supply chain workflows need item, contract, and purchasing records they can trust. Because Symmetric already maintains those records inside the ERP, customers view the platform as the layer their AI tools will build on rather than one those tools will replace.

Partnering for the Road Ahead

Symmetric has built its trusted reputation on the accuracy of its data and the quality of its customer service. Our investment is intended to accelerate what is already working. The company plans to expand its go-to-market and customer success teams to serve more health systems and further support the ones already on the platform. Rich, TJ, Jon, and Ryan have always been product leaders at heart. Partnering with Spectrum provides them the support they need to serve the growing needs of hospital supply chain teams and tackle its ambitious product roadmap.

As we got to know the Symmetric founding team, we were struck by how deliberately Rich, TJ, Jon, and Ryan have built this company, and by how much conviction their customers have in Symmetric. We are honored to be their first institutional partner and excited for this next chapter.