Cedars-Sinai Boosts Innovation Efforts With Redesign Health
For many years, Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai has run an accelerator program that provides health-tech startups with funding and mentorship. Now the health system is taking that effort to a new level with the creation of a Digital Innovation Platform in which entrepreneurs will work in partnership with Cedars-Sinai staff, investors and venture-builder Redesign Health.
In an interview with Healthcare Innovation, Bardia Nabet, M.P.H., the health system’s associate director, digital strategy and business development, explained that the accelerator is focused on companies that already have a solution and are looking to achieve product/market fit or enter a market. Cedars-Sinai also has a venture fund that helps fuel those startups.
He said the Digital Innovation Platform is taking a slightly different approach, starting with the problems seen in healthcare today, not only within Cedars-Sinai, but also across the country and world, and then trying to build solutions to address them internally through this funding mechanism as well as an ideation process, and then partnering with Redesign Health to attract outside founders and other talent to build those companies and solutions.
Cedars-Sinai is seeking to identify solutions for personalized medicine, specialty care access, hospital workflow optimization, clinical decision support, and increased coordination among patients, providers and payers. It says it hopes to leverage the scalable innovation model created by Redesign Health, a venture builder that has launched more than 60 healthcare companies in the past seven years.
“Redesign has gone through their own pitfalls with this process and learned as much from the failures as the successes,” Nabet added. “They’ve been able to take that and really adapt it to our context.
“We're in the trenches right now looking at strategic areas that we want to go after, and then identifying internal capabilities, stakeholders, ideating with them, and looking at what solutions are out there,” Nabet said. “We’re saying, is there a market that we can go after if we invest and build a solution? As much as we're focusing on these big thematic areas right now, I think we're in the process of drilling down a level lower to help get to the first few company ideas. These will also continue to change over time, as new technologies get developed.”
The Digital Innovation Platform will source experienced founders to lead the new companies, and Cedars-Sinai will be their first large-scale customer to validate solutions. In addition to being able to test out solutions in Cedars-Sinai clinical settings, founders will also gain access to an integrated data platform that Cedars-Sinai is developing that uses de-identified, secure and synthetic data—artificial data that mimics real-world patterns. This will provide access to large, diverse data sets and facilitate the use of AI during the design of digital solutions.
Nabet said that one of the core enablers is this data platform, which Cedars-Sinai is continuing to build. “That data access will be valuable in supporting the initial identification of a solution as well as to actually build and train a model, and then to aid in the ability to not only deploy it into workflows internally, but also to validate that It's actually working in clinical settings.”
In a prepared statement, Brett Shaheen, founder and CEO of Redesign Health, said the firm is “pleased to partner with Cedars-Sinai to launch transformative healthcare companies, combining our experience launching healthcare companies with their exceptional clinical expertise and longstanding dedication to driving innovation in healthcare. By harnessing Cedars-Sinai’s groundbreaking medical research, expansive provider network and clinical insights, we’re uniquely positioned to develop transformative businesses that not only address unmet needs but also shape the future of healthcare on a global scale.”
