According to CB Insights, the USA represents 75% of the global digital health market. Hunger for better solutions is being addressed from many sides. Could innovation be accelerated by better collaboration among different medical institutions in the U.S.?

You can find, listen, subscribe, rate, follow, share Medicine Today on Digital Health podcast on Podbean or in iTunes. Suggestions, comments will be highly appreciated either here or on Twitter.

Speaking broadly, IT in healthcare is at the moment usually an added layer to existing ways of working, consequently too often being a source of frustration and anguish instead of aid for medical professionals. In the 20th episode, you will get a glimpse into the attitude toward digital health solutions in three important US healthcare institutions — Stanford Healthcare, Mount Sinai Health System, and UPMC.

Payer & Provider Approach: A Venture Arm

Rasu Shrestha, the Chief Innovation Officer from UPMC, explains how UPMC is investing in innovation, with its position of being payer and provider. To give startups maximum support, UPMC established a separate investment entity — UPMC Enterprises.

http://enterprises.upmc.com/

In the podcast, Rasu elaborates how is UPMC integrating startup solutions into the system and where the state of EHR interoperability in the medical center is since they use solutions from both biggest rivals in health IT, EPIC and CERNER.

“The biggest Achilles’ heel of successful systems is complacency. Once you’re big and successful, you may feel you don’t need to change anymore. That’s when you start failing. What we’re trying to do with our startups, is put ourselves out of business,” is one of his provocative thoughts.

Apart from being passionate about interoperability, he also believes we’re just at the beginning of true improvements with technology: “I believe we approached healthcare innovation from the wrong side. Technology is currently a barrier — we need to type in the data, we hide our passwords under keyboards. Innovation, when done right, will make tech invisible.”

Internal/External Collaboration and Markets Outside US

Mitesh Rao, Chief Patient Safety Officer and Director of the Center for Advancing Patient Safety at Stanford Healthcare talks about the relation between external startups and internal innovation at Stanford Health. Around dozen pilots with startups take place every year, however, the conversion rate of getting those solution used in practice afterward is meager. The majority of innovation comes from the outside. For one thing, because the environment in Silicon Valley where the medical center is based, is very lively.

Mitesh is a mentor to quite a few startups, so he also talks about reasons for high failure rates of startups and where they are failing. Rule nr. 1: have a medical/healthcare expert in the team from day 1.

How Can Collaboration Be Increased?

Mount Sinai has an innovation incubator lead by Ashish Atreja, Chief Innovation and Engagement Officer. To make it easy for doctors to be confident about what they recommend to their patients, a platform for doctors to prescribe apps was developed.

[embed]https://youtu.be/hNC7QYQP-lM[/embed]

Around a year and a half ago Ashish also founded NODE — Network of Digital Evidence in Health — a US organization trying to increase collaboration among different medical institutions in the US. “We were sitting in a panel, and someone from the audience asked what kinds of pilots we were doing. I explained, and then the panelist from Kaiser Permanente said they were doing a lot of the same pilots. We were looking at each other like fools because it takes so much time, money and effort to do a pilot and it would make sense to combine our efforts,” is a summary of where Ashish got the idea for the NODE.

BTW: Don’t miss their event in December.

Scalling…?

In the end, the key thing for every startup solution is to hit the market. In the growing competition and growing market saturation, validation and collaboration with healthcare institutions are essential to get hard proof that your concept works. Different institutions collaborate with startups in different ways. Some only help them with pilots and proof of concept, others integrate them actively in their systems. Some have specific venture arms to encourage innovation. But in the end: what is the future bringing and the answer to the question in the beginning? Could the outcome for patients be improved by better collaboration among the big players?(Some) Question addressed in the podcast:

• When will technology stop being a barrier and start making doctors’ work easier?

• How valuable is patient data from apps, since users are the one determining how accurate data gathering is?

• How much and in what way do Stanford Healthcare, UPMC and Mount Sinai Health System collaborate with startups?

• How much do big medical institutions in the USA collaborate among each other? How could that collaboration be accelerated?

• How are apps integrated in healthcare systems?

• How much are US companies trying to reach international markets?