Cedars-Sinai has partnered with startup builder Redesign Health to launch a “sustainable innovation center” that will scale up digital-first healthcare ventures with day one clinical guidance from the nonprofit health system.
The Digital Innovation Platform, broadly speaking, looks to solve the escalating costs, sparse workforce, administrative inefficiencies and increasingly complex care needs that are weighing down care delivery across the country, Cedars-Sinai Associate Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development Bardia Nabet told Fierce Healthcare.
The health system already has a three-month accelerator program for external startups. However, it sees additional value in fostering early entrepreneurship among its in-house clinicians and staff and then nurturing them with growth opportunities and outside experts—business strategists, engineers and data scientists to guide and develop the companies as well as “experienced founders” to help lead them.
“Many health systems have accelerators, licensing teams or venture capital arms—but they’re often fragmented or focused on external startups,” Nabet said while calling out internal-external strategy at Sheba Medical Center’s ARC Innovation Center as one of the better approaches.
“We’re focused on building companies from idea to launch: identifying core systemic problems, validating solutions internally and building companies where Cedars-Sinai is the first funder, customer and pilot site. This gives us a unique ability to de-risk solutions early and build for real-world scale from day one," Nabet said.
Another differentiator is Cedars-Sinai’s enterprise data. The system said it's developing and will give founders access to an integrated platform of large, de-identified, secure and synthetic (artificial, but real world-like) data sets. Combined with AI and other novel technologies, the data will help guide product design “at every stage of company growth” to achieve the core goals of clinical effectiveness, operational scalability and financial sustainability. The fledgling companies will then be able to “fine tune” their digital tools across Cedars-Sinai’s network of care sites.
“Cedars-Sinai is uniquely positioned to develop new and innovative ways to fix some of the most pressing problems in healthcare today thanks to our focus on translational medicine and our ability to bring together leading-edge clinical care, research, AI and strategic industry relationships to benefit our patients,” Peter L. Slavin, M.D., president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai, said in a release on the Digital Innovation Platform.
Backstopping the system’s approach is Redesign Health. Founded in 2018 by CEO Brett Shaheen—formerly an investor at Goldman Sachs, then a private equity investor at Carlyle and hedge fund Lone Pine Capital—the healthcare venture builder has incubated more than five dozen companies such as Scriptology, UpLift, Vivid Health and Baton that have collectively generated more than $1 billion in revenue.
Neil Patel, Redesign’s head of ventures, told Fierce Healthcare that his company’s hands-on expertise building enterprises and Cedars-Sinai’s “clinical excellence and vast data resources” are fertile soil for new startups tackling major healthcare challenges.
"Redesign Health has spent years perfecting our approach to healthcare company building—identifying critical gaps in the market, assembling exceptional founding teams and providing the strategic support needed to scale,” Patel said. “Now, we're bringing this methodology to Cedars-Sinai, creating a first-of-its-kind innovation platform that combines our healthcare venture-building expertise with their clinical excellence.”
Nabet said the partners are currently working on the platform’s foundation—building out the supportive infrastructure for early validation and real-world testing, sourcing outside founders and standing up a “core team” alongside Redesign. He said the system will have more to share once in makes progress on those initial tasks but that Cedars-Sinai and Redesign “expect to a launch a few companies over the next few years.”