Leaders from New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based Northwell Health and Pittsburgh-based UPMC told Becker's a collaborative approach is best for using technology to solve healthcare's most pressing issues.
UPMC and Nashville, Tenn.-based Vanderbilt Health on Nov. 19 became the latest of 11 health systems to join a digital consortium with startup studio Aegis Ventures. The collaborative originated from the studio's work with Northwell more than five years ago to build and commercialize digital products.
The partnership approach enables them to find digital remedies to the problems facing the industry as a whole — namely how to provide quality healthcare without a lot of financial wiggle room — while also sharing the risk that comes with product development and investment.
"Partnering with other like-minded, learning organizations will only enrich the solutions that we can build," said Aman Mahajan, MD, senior vice president for health innovation at UPMC Enterprises, the health system's innovation and venture capital arm. "It allows us faster, more accelerated development and to be able to scale our solutions to other systems."
The consortium meets regularly to discuss healthcare challenges they hope to overcome and bring up solutions that have worked at the member health systems or brainstorm new ideas. Individual health systems choose whether to coinvest, codevelop or become a customer of a given platform.
"Once we've decided there's something a health system identified, built and is rolling out, we can take those shared learnings and that shared solution and scale it much faster," said Richard Mulry, president and CEO of Northwell Holdings, the health system's venture capital group. "So it derisks it, both from an investment perspective, but also extends our ability to accelerate the improvement in patient care delivery much faster."
The health systems also are located in different regions of the country so can collaborate without competition getting in the way. Other members include Endeavor Health (Evanston, Ill.), Indiana University Health (Indianapolis), Memorial Hermann Health System (Houston), Novant Health (Winston-Salem, N.C.), Ochsner Health (New Orleans), Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus), Sharp HealthCare (San Diego), and Stanford Health Care (Palo Alto, Calif.).
The consortium members ask themselves: "Does it solve a shared problem? Does it bring value to the organization? Is it something that isn't already developed where we wouldn't have to incur all the time and technical debt to build? Is there no other market solution out there, or could we do it much better?" Mr. Mulry said. "Then we do business plans, get approval for funding, and partner with Aegis to develop those."
This approach is different from simply coinvesting, the leaders say. "Health systems can always come together and form a syndicate and drop money into a company," Mr. Mulry said. "It doesn't necessarily mean they're aligned in their efforts or their approach to making that solution work."
The consortium's initial focuses are patient engagement, artificial intelligence-powered diagnostics, workflow automation, and empathetic AI. The startups that have already come out of Aegis Ventures' work with Northwell include AI operational efficiency platform Ascertain, patient digital companion Caire and retinal imaging company Optain.
The health systems also aim to reach peers outside the collaborative. "We are certainly hoping that, together, we're able to build a few tech-enabled and other business partnerships that would provide improvements and benefits to patients at UPMC and also be scaled up, commercialized and implemented at not just our partnering institutions, but also other health systems across the country," Dr. Mahajan said.