Healthbox and Intermountain Healthcare’s partnership looks like it’s deepening. Earlier this year, Intermountain invested in Healthbox Global Partners, the accelerator’s parent company. Now Healthbox is working with Intermountain to support hospital employees with entrepreneurial ideas and help bring outside ideas into the health system.
The announcement listed three areas where Healthbox is collaborating with Intermountain. Healthbox will work with the Intermountain Foundry, which helps employee ideas with a lot of potential become businesses. The Innovation at Intermountain website has two application processes: one for employees and one for collaborators. It will also work with the health system on strategic investments to source companies from the broader healthcare ecosystem and develop partnerships that include investment and potential customer relationships, according to a statement.
Healthbox CEO Nina Nashif said that the company has launched a foundry program inside Intermountain to support a broader innovation initiative.
The foundry model is a structured process to capture internal ideas, evaluate them, and determine which ones have commercial merit.
“Traditionally offices of invention management have helped clinicians seek patents, but they haven’t focused on building a commercialization structure to spin out an idea or to use it better internally,” Nashif said. “We are bringing that capability to them, an external validation perspective.”
She said that entrepreneurs inside and outside the health system were having the same frustrating experience: it would take 9 months to get to a no.
“Intermountain has always a leader in innovation, but they wanted to bring all their resources together and create a place to support internal ideas and bring in outside ones,” she said.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Intermountain Healthcare’s Chief Financial Officer Bert Zimmerli said in the statement: “Collaborating with Healthbox provides us not only with the foundation to expand the impact of their solutions but the means to form relationships with entrepreneurs and their technologies that will improve quality and reduce the cost of care for our patients.”
A partnership with a health system that has culture, resources and contacts to help an accelerator’s portfolio companies with studies, healthcare insights and knowledge are like oxygen to startups.
Lots of accelerators collaborate with health systems. Blueprint Health works with several in New York, DreamIt Health counts Penn Medicine as a partner. But although those relationships were initially driven by the accelerators, hospitals are becoming more closely aligned on their end. New York Presbyterian Hospital added a center for innovation in Blueprint Health’s offices. Two groups from Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, including Haystack, are working with DreamIt Ventures through the Open Canvas@CHOP program.
I look forward to following Healthbox’s collaboration with Intermountain and what comes out of it.
