How Public / Private Accelerators are Fostering eHealth Innovation

It is no surprise that a growing number of healthcare institutions are seeking partnerships to fund and nourish innovative startups. Massachusetts and New York are at the forefront of fostering such relationships.

This article appeared in the April 2016 issue of HealthLeaders magazine and was based on Scott Mace's online column from January 26.

Earlier this month, I attended CES 2016 (formerly known as the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas, walking aisle upon aisle of digital health technology offerings. I do this every couple of years to take the pulse of a consumer phenomenon that continues to attract millions in venture capital funding: mobile health and wellness trackers, sensors, monitors, appliances, and personal medical devices.

I'm mindful that every time I attend, there will be plenty of new startups, but scant clinical evidence to support the worthiness of their efforts, and often not a trace of the promising startups that made the trek to Vegas just two years prior.

In short, CES is the noise, and healthcare leaders continues to look for the digital health signal.

It is no surprise that a growing number of healthcare institutions are seeking to join forces to apply filters to the noise to tease out the truly innovative startups and nourish them.

When the provider is a large academic medical center, the resources to do this are not difficult to find. But smaller systems are not similarly blessed. While CES was going on (Jan. 6–9), Massachusetts became the latest state to launch an initiative, the Massachusetts eHealth Cluster, to help the smaller healthcare systems and hospitals join forces to get some of that large system innovation mojo.

One CIO who applauds the move is Joel Vengco, vice president and CIO of Baystate Health, nearly a two-hour drive west of Boston. Baystate already operates its own innovation hub, known as TechSpring.

"TechSpring was initially capitalized by the $1B life sciences initiative founded by former Governor Deval Patrick (D)," Vengco told me in an email exchange. "From there, TechSpring set out to connect with private corporations like Dell, IBM, and Cerner. With the support of Baystate Health's administration and clinical staff, we were able to take that public funding and successfully grow it into a broader set of partnerships as well as a technology innovation center within which private, public, and start-up organizations can collaborate.

"The state did ask for our involvement, as they liked our model of connecting with private organizations. But innovation takes seed money and operating dollars to succeed."

Vengco "loves this idea" of a digital health innovation hub for all of Massachusetts. He wrote:

Filling the Gaps the Private Sector Can't Fill
The Massachusetts statewide initiative announcement, made at Boston Children's Hospital, included present Governor Charlie Baker (R), Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh (D), Speaker of the House Robert A. DeLeo (D) and corporate support from the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, a consortium of large employers in the state.

The following day, I spoke with Laurence Stuntz, director of the Massachusetts eHealth Institute at MassTech (MeHI), another of the initiative's sponsors, about the Massachusetts eHealth Cluster. "the goal here in Massachusetts, at least from the public side, is to fill in the gaps that the private sector isn't currently filling," Stuntz says.

"TechSpring was created precisely to solve healthcare problems using digital solutions through a 'crowd-sourcing' innovation framework. Baystate Health is a health system that is representative of many health systems in the U.S. So if it works here, it will likely work at a majority of the health systems in the country. Ultimately, my hope is to enable others beyond Baystate Health to benefit from the tech and analytic innovations that TechSpring delivers in collaboration with its innovation partners and members."

Created by the legislature nearly nine years ago, MeHI is a "quasi-state" agency in that its funding is mostly from the Massachusetts legislature, but it does not report directly to the state administration. MeHI also acted as the federal regional extension center for the state during the push to get healthcare to adopt electronic medical records.

"There are a lot of startup companies out there," Stuntz says. "One of the things that they struggle with a lot is getting opportunities to quickly prove their worth and prove that they've got a clinically valid solution."

The eHealth Cluster will play matchmaker between such startups and health systems, hospitals, payers and public health agencies, but also help such institutions work with entrepreneurs at a time when "they just don't have the bandwidth."

New York's Initiative
Asked to cite examples where this model has worked in the past, Stuntz pointed me to the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeHC), which four years ago created the New York Digital Health Accelerator program, in partnership with the Partnership Fund for New York City, an effort by the city's largest companies to expand business growth and jobs in the city.

NYeHC operates the Statewide Health Information Exchange of New York (SHIN-NY). "Beyond just moving healthcare data around the state, SHIN-NY now represents a lot of relationships," says Anuj Desai, vice president of market development at NYeHC. "Our board is made up of the CEOs of hospitals, health plans, large employers, and the eight RHIOs around the state."

The New York Digital Health Accelerator is focused on New York state's "massive transformation from fee-for-service to value-based care, and to reduce readmissions by 25% in five years," Desai says.

"What providers around the SHINY table are telling us, [is that] their EHR vendors don't have all the capabilities required to allow them to meet the needs of value-based care," Desai says. They're looking for new solutions primarily in the areas of care coordination, analytics, and patient engagement. Meanwhile, in the New York state ecosystem, there's a number of health tech firms—startups, entrepreneurs, tech companies—that are in the city and around New York state, that are looking to solve these issues."

With providers being called by hundreds of such startups every week, the New York Digital Health Accelerator helps funds the most worthy innovators and match them up with providers and payers for innovative pilots. So far, it has launched 47 pilots over three years within New York state.

Subsequent to being in the program, venture capitalists have funded such startups to the tune of $68 million, and two of the 21 companies have been acquired, Desai says. In addition, these companies have created about 150 jobs in New York.

Questions remain about the effectiveness of such programs. At the Massachusetts announcement, sponsors committed $250,000 to the eHealth Cluster effort, a fairly small amount. And in New York state, Desai as yet has no data on how many of the 47 pilots are now implemented in the workflow of providers and payers.

Still, given the amount of noise in digital health, it is good to see some concerted efforts to create new pathways to connect the most-worthy innovations with the healthcare organizations that need them most. Over time, expect to see such hubs in place widely throughout the country.