About one year since it became the lead investor in StartUp Health, Wisconsin health system Aurora Health Care is hunting for digital health startups that can plug into its “Population Health Platform.” The goal of the joint program with StartUp Health is to provide customized care to Aurora’s patients and could be applied to patients on Medicaid.
A statement from Aurora highlighted what it’s looking for from interested companies:
Assess: Develop and identify the health landscape of people in the community using multiple data streams, from psychosocial to financial systems
Engage: Intervene and engage with people in the community to collect data on their specific situation and build a comprehensive patient profile outside of using a smartphone or assumed data points/identifiers
Create Pathways: Use analytics to predict an ideal plan, build personalized pathways for the population based on individual patient profiles;
Manage and Prevent: Leverage existing community and hospital programs and connect people to internal and external resources that enable them to live happier, healthier lives;
Sustain: Create pathways to better reflect individual lives and help in the transition to healthier lifestyles by knowing what is working and what is not for patients and people within the community.
Michael Rodgers, director of strategic innovation at Aurora Health Care said in a statement:
“The Aurora and StartUp Health collaboration is supercharging how quickly we are able to bring the best new health technologies to people in our community.We’re looking forward to working with the next generation of Healthcare Transformers to help create the Personalized Population Health Platform of the future.”
The deadline for applications at StartUpHealth.com/Aurora is July 20. Companies selected for the program will be able to take part in StartUp Health Academy’s lifetime coaching program and receive access to Aurora’s internal commercialization, IT and innovation teams, the statement said.
The selected finalists will be chosen this fall and the program will kick off in early 2017.
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.
A few health systems are collaborating with accelerators and the like or going it alone and starting their own. Some of them include Cedars-Sinai and Techstars, Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Texas Medical Center.
