Neil Patel, Healthbox President and COO
One month after former Healthbox CEO Nina Nashif stepped down, Neil Patel has been named her successor as president and chief operations officer. He shared a vision for a restructured Chicago-based Healthbox in a phone interview with MedCity News.
The group now bills itself as an innovation consulting firm and venture capital investment manager.
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Nick Rosa, chairman of Healthbox Global Partners’ board of directors said in a statement: “Since joining Healthbox last year, Neil has had an immeasurable impact on the Healthbox product offering and culture, and the entire team is thrilled to have him at the helm. Under Neil’s leadership, we will continue to pursue our vision of empowering healthcare organizations to effectively foster innovation.”
The Healthbox Studio program will be scaled back in favor of collaborations with healthcare partners. These partnerships are exemplified by Healthbox’s Foundry program with Intermountain Healthcare — a structured eight week curriculum to help commercialize the best ideas coming out of the health system. Healthbox will continue to manage the $35 million Intermountain Innovation Fund, said Patel.
So far the fund has made three investments: Tute Genomics, in which Intermountain participated in the seed and Series A rounds; Zebra Medical Vision the fund took part in the Israeli company’s Series B round as well as the Series C round for Syapse in Palo Alto.
“Our mission is to be an innovation platform, to provide a way to help health systems and other healthcare organizations achieve their innovation goals,” Patel said.
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He added that Healthbox is moving into market research and would soon launch Horizon Scanning, quarterly reports on topics highlighting the kinds of challenges the healthcare industry is wrestling with and how specific companies are addressing those challenges. They will reflect the organization’s knowledge base from evaluating 2,500 companies. The goal is to filter out the noise and hype surrounding various technologies and focus attention on how particular startups are tackling those challenges.
At the end of the day, a health system or a payer is looking to develop a customer relationship with a startup. This approach of providing distilled information could hopefully lead to a shorter sales cycle. Patel said Healthbox expects to launch Horizon Scanning next year.
A podcast is also under development.
Although Healthbox Studio will still play a role in the company’s vision, it will be more as a vehicle for healthcare companies interested in engaging with startups and collaborating with each other. Patel highlighted the recent Healthbox Studio program with UCLA Health, University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine and Henry Mayo Newhall Hospital as an example of that.
Patel acknowledged that the changes not only at Healthbox, but at other accelerators and have come about partly due to the challenge of managing a large portfolio of companies, and models will continue to shift. “Accelerators have become foundational to the startup ecosystem,” he said.
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