A team of innovators at the Aurora, Colo.-based UCHealth will be developing an innovation hub with the goal “to help transform healthcare delivery of the future,” officials said in an announcement.
The new group will soon move into the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation building in Denver’s River North District (RiNo) as one of the facility’s largest tenants. Catalyst HTI is a real estate development that brings together stakeholders from across health, wellness and healthcare industries to collaborate and incubate innovative ideas. The site will specifically bring together more than 70 organizations that will all work together in a space focused on collaboration to foster new ideas. UCHealth IT leaders and members of the organization’s creative team also will have space within the facility, officials said.
UCHealth will plan to build an innovation lab at the location with a “hospital room of the future,” a space to test equipment and devices and actually create a new type of clinical setting. It might not even be in a hospital—it could be in your own home, said Steve Hess, UCHealth CIO. By experimenting with virtual health options, wearable monitors and the electronic health record (EHR), the idea is that healthcare organizations might be able to transform a patient’s bedroom into a space where medicine is delivered in a way that is both convenient and comforting to the patient while also lowering costs.
“Artificial intelligence, big data, decision support, virtual health and wearables are rapidly disrupting healthcare as we know it,” said Richard Zane, M.D., UCHealth chief innovation officer. “We are committed to being at the forefront of this change and partnering with other innovators to improve the quality, experience and safety of healthcare while helping control costs.”
Hess added, “We are now in the dawn of a new era of medicine, one in which the electronic medical record and artificial intelligence work hand in hand with medical providers to support and inform clinical decisions. By working together with some of the brightest minds from other healthcare companies, we will accelerate innovation and develop novel ways of healing patients and keeping the public healthy.”
Catalyst is being developed by Denver-based Koelbel and Company, one of the longest-operating family-owned real estate development firm in the region.
“Denver has undergone a dramatic transformation since we began developing here in 1952,” said Buz Koelbel, president at Koelbel and Company. “We are at the confluence of an exciting time both in the City of Denver and in healthcare innovation, and it is incredibly gratifying to be bringing the Catalyst concept to fruition, with UCHealth's involvement, to support the vision of Colorado as one of the nation’s premier health technology innovation hubs."
