Dive Brief:
- The American Medical Association is partnering with new, Chicago-based healthcare technology incubator Matter to create the "AMA Interaction Studio at Matter."
- The studio will serve as a simulated healthcare facility where physicians and entrepreneurs can collaborate to develop and test new technologies.
- The 450 square-foot space "is being envisioned to include modular furniture and advanced video and audio technologies that will allow users to better understand workflows and how new products and services will fit into a healthcare delivery environment of the future," Matter says.
Dive Insight:
Incubators are hot business these days. New York Presbyterian Hospital rents out space to New York-based tech accelerator Blueprint Health LLC, and runs computer systems out of Blueprint's offices, where it has an "innovation space." ProMedica Health System of Toledo, Ohio last year launched a business incubator, located in a 6,000-square-foot facility at the organization's Wildwood Medical Center Campus, to nurture startups in the medical-device and bioinformatics sectors.
"The AMA's partnership with Matter will create an environment where entrepreneurs can directly collaborate with and gain insights from physicians and the healthcare community to improve and advance technologies, products and services that will improve the health of the nation," said AMA CEO James Madara.
Providers stand to make a lot of money by repositioning their IT development projects for outside sale, so it makes sense that the AMA would want a piece of this trend. Perhaps the granddaddy of health systems with commercial IT development efforts underway is the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the nation's highest-grossing not-for-profit with 2014 revenues of $12.21 billion. Led by shrewd CIO Dan Drawbaugh, UPMC runs its own Technology Development Center, where roughly 200 techies toil to find new commercially-viable health IT products. UPMC's last success in this area was its investment in data management vendor dbMotion in 2006; Last year, after developing dbMotion's software for its own and others' use, UPMC made $67.8 million when it was acquired by Allscripts.