New York-based Northwell Health has formed a joint venture with Aegis Ventures to launch and scale artificial intelligence-driven companies to address healthcare issues.
Northwell Health is New York State’s largest healthcare provider with 23 hospitals, 830 outpatient facilities and more than 16,600 affiliated physicians. New York-based Aegis Ventures is a “startup studio” that partners with entrepreneurs and industry leaders to originate, launch, and scale transformative companies.
The organizations said they would assemble medical, technology, and business resources to create a company creation platform for healthcare innovation. Aegis Ventures said it plans to invest at least $100 million of seed-stage funds through the platform to catalyze a significant multiple of that amount from the venture capital and investment community.
The joint venture will work with stakeholders across the Northwell system to create new patient care solutions that use AI to predict, diagnose, and manage health conditions. The parties have already started work on solutions related to improving maternal health outcomes and chronic disease prediction, they said. Alongside this disease focus, the joint venture will use AI to identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies in healthcare delivery. Ultimately, the aim of the venture will be to accelerate the speed with which new AI solutions reach the patient’s bedside.
“New York was at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, and today’s announcement places it at the epicenter of innovation that will tackle healthcare’s most pressing problems,” said Michael Dowling, president and CEO of Northwell Health, in a statement. “This joint venture will leverage data from Northwell’s patient population, one of the most diverse in the world, along with Northwell’s intellectual capital in AI technology. Working together, Northwell and Aegis will create companies that bring higher quality, lower cost healthcare to those who need it most.”
That diverse patient population is crucial, Northwell noted. Caring for more than 2 million people annually across hundreds of facilities provides the health system’s clinicians and researchers with a valuable vantage point into the health and well-being of traditionally underserved communities. This perspective will be a key aspect of the Northwell-Aegis joint venture, which will prioritize innovation to reduce racial and socioeconomic biases that drive health inequities and have impaired existing AI solutions.
Northwell also pointed to its previous success in AI research, including the development of an algorithm that predicts patients’ overnight stability to reduce the need to wake them for vital sign checks. Developed using 26 million measurements from 2.3 million patient visits, the algorithm helps reduce nighttime disturbances to speed patients’ recovery and discharge.
“Our mission is to catalyze a new Moore’s Law in healthcare where, as we continually improve access, we continually reduce cost,” said Tom Manning, chairman of the Northwell-Aegis JV and former chairman & CEO of Dun & Bradstreet, a global provider of corporate information and data analytics, in a statement. “This new effort promises to transform the model for innovation in healthcare and improve outcomes for everyone, but particularly for people who may be lost in the shuffle and most need our help.”
