Some U.S. hospitals and health systems have turned their successful in-house work in health IT into commercial offerings that other hospitals and health systems can benefit from. This work is typically done in what is called an innovation lab.
This is not necessarily an easy task. First one must have the talent to come up with great IT. Then the IT must be proven. Then the IT must be packaged as a product. And then the package must be commercialized and marketed to turn the healthcare organization’s IT operations into a profit center.
Some healthcare organizations have been very successful in these efforts. Two include: Sinai AppLab at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Health System in New York; and UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization and innovation arm of UPMC in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Executives at these two organizations offer advice to C-suite executives at healthcare provider organizations considering commercializing in-house health IT.
Right from the start
Provider organizations have to set up teams and technology efforts in ways that will make them most successful at making sure that in addition to producing excellent technology they also are keeping successful commercialization in mind.
“Innovation centers in healthcare can try to implement various technologies or can focus on one set of problems in particular,” said Dr. Ashish Atreja, associate professor and chief innovation officer, medicine, at Sinai AppLab. “Our AppLab digital medicine innovation center has been focused the last five years on building and integrating digital medicine technologies for value-based healthcare.”
This has allowed Sinai AppLab to see the technologies from a unique lens, prioritize them, and align them with business value over a period of time, he said. ROI for the innovation center is generated through one of the following three ways, he explained.
First, scalable implementation in the health system – decreasing revenue leaks and penalties, and increasing revenue through better access and value-based incentives. For example, Sinai AppLab implemented a pre-post patient empowerment platform for patients in joint replacement bundles to optimize them before surgery (pre-rehab), decrease 7-day and 30-day readmissions, and increase their functional outcomes. The health system directly reaps the benefit from this technology as soon as it is implemented – no delays related to licensing and testing or approving new technologies, Atreja said.
Second, licensing of different technologies and intellectual property.
“We have worked closely with Mount Sinai Innovation Partner to identify and license technologies from Medical School and Health Systems, especially around digital medicine – apps, analytics, remote monitoring, etc.,” Atreja said. “Licensing models in health IT are very different than devices or drugs and my previous experience in licensing virtual paging technology from Cleveland Clinic has helped us capitalize this revenue stream.”
Launching spin-offs
And third, creating spin-off entities. While spin-offs are very lucrative, the technology has to be addressing a real problem, very novel in its approach and mature for scalability, before it can stand on its own legs in a startup, he stated.
“We spent over three years iterative building and testing a digital medicine platform, RxUniverse, that curates best evidence-based apps and solutions, prescribes them at the point of care to individual patients’ smartphone or to populations at large as customizable links, and collates data back from multiple sources to dashboards linked to EHRs,” he explained.
The problem Sinai AppLab tried to solve was that neither patients nor providers have time or resources to identify which solutions are evidence-based out of more than 350,000 apps available.
“Innovation done half right cannot support scalable transformation.”
Dr. Ashish Atreja, Sinai AppLab
“We saw only 7 percent adoption if patients were just informed about an app since they often forget the exact name, misspell the name, or get lost among many apps with the same name or lost their unique code,” he said. “By enabling a digital prescription which comes as a text link on their phone, we have seen adoption increasing to 92 percent.”
Tal Heppenstall, president of UPMC Enterprises, said the focus on commercialization needs to be part of the mission of any such innovation center from the very start if one wants to create technologies and solutions that can make a difference in healthcare at scale.
“While some of our ideas and products are ultimately used only to improve operations at UPMC, which is still a win, we always start with the broader market in mind and measure the success of UPMC Enterprises on that basis,” he said. “It’s important to quickly get at least one other customer besides your own health system to validate your assumptions about the market and the technology.”
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