It’s a bit surreal to go to a science fair at a hospital. But the group of health IT companies from DreamIt Venture’s accelerator coupled with demonstrations of technology from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Pennsylvania helped set the scene for a new initiative by DreamIt that’s starting at CHOP. The program is designed to help companies and institutions develop enterprise software and commercially viable companies.
DreamIt Ventures’ Open Canvas@CHOP is a one-year program at the pediatric hospital to help it further develop its reputation for pediatric innovation but in enterprise software. The program will also see two teams from the institution take part in DreamIt Health’s next accelerator class in Philadelphia this summer.
“The Science Fair is to open people’s minds and see some of these ideas in their infancy,” said Steven Welch, a founding partner with DreamIt Ventures. He told MedCity News that the Open Canvas program fits in with a broader trend of companies wanting to do a better job of using their employees’ innovative ideas to improve their business. It piloted the program in Austin with Korean company SK and plans to expand the Open Canvas program to companies in other locations where DreamIt has a presence, such as New York, Tel Aviv and, most recently, Baltimore.
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At first glance it seems like a reversal of the classic technology accelerator where collaboration partners are sought and paired with startups that seem like a good fit. The Open Canvas model might very well be a good fit for health systems, where the people best disposed to understanding the complexities of a hospital’s clinical workflows and regulatory framework tend to be the ones who work in that industry. Otherwise the barrier to entry can be a tough for a startup to surmount.
CHOP CMIO Bimal Desai told MedCity News, “We have a long tradition of research innovation, but we would like to know how to expand that to entrepreneurial software in healthcare IT. Our partnership with DreamIt allows us to take the best ideas from CHOP and improve clinical care.”
Desai pointed to the hospital’s Center for Biomedical Informatics as a source of some of those applications. Jeffrey Miller, a lead analyst and programmer with that department, demonstrated an iPad app with the working name Proband. It uses those symbols that you might recall from a high school biology class segment on genetics. It’s designed to help genetic counselors record a patient’s family history using diagrams that can encode phenotypes and diagnoses using ICD-10 and free text and make it easier to share with other clinicians.
Boston Children’s Hospital initiated a program to develop clinical IT solutions inhouse through its Innovation Acceleration program with the idea that ideas developed in-house can be more easily advanced because of firsthand knowledge of the clinical experience coupled with a fuller understanding of regulatory requirements.
