Dive Brief:
- Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Healthcare is launching an innovation initiative designed to encourage collaboration between healthcare inventors, entrepreneurs and industry experts. Intermountain includes 22 hospitals and 185 physician clinics.
- The program, Innovation at Intermountain, is being led by healthcare industry accelerator firm Healthbox. Healthbox operates in five US markets as well as London and Tel Aviv, and has a portfolio of more than 80 active companies.
- Components of the initiative include the Intermountain Foundry, which offers a structured approach to turning high-potential employee ideas into commercial businesses; A program of strategic investments and partnerships with growing healthcare firms; and the Healthbox Salt Lake City Accelerator, which will connect healthcare entrepreneurs with needed resources.
Dive Insight:
Traditionally, hospitals have relied on outside vendors to solve problems and maintain a culture of discovery and innovation. But this approach has flaws, not the least of which is that the vendors seldom understand emerging problems and opportunities in hospital operations as well as the hospital itself does. Creating an atmosphere where the hospital is directly tied in to new, potentially game-changing entrepreneurial healthcare businesses makes a lot of sense.
Increasingly, health systems are adopting this model in one form or another. For example, New York-Presbyterian Hospital has integrated a tech startup incubator into its IT plans. The hospital has rented out space to New York-based tech accelerator Blueprint Health and expects to use the space to collaborate on technologies it can use.
This approach won't work for every hospital or health system, but for those who have the management bandwidth to find entrepreneurial solutions to their problems, it looks like a very smart way of doing business.