Over the last two years, collaboration with external incubators and accelerators such as MATTER, Pulse@MassChallenge and Plug and Play have connected OSF HealthCare to a number of health care solutions we believed had the potential to improve patient outcomes, enhance patient experience and reduce the cost of health care.
But in some cases, they were yet to be tested or established as tools that could work in large health care systems like OSF HealthCare.
That’s why the OSF Innovation Partnerships team came up with a standardized process to ensure new solutions fit our organization’s needs.
This includes having actual end-users test new products to identify usage problems and determine how well they work, as well as helping companies determine what people and processes need to be changed to assess the effectiveness of diagnostic products and treatment regimens.
We perform short-term experiments designed to test logistics, provide value and reveal deficiencies before large-scale execution. We then implement solutions across the Ministry.
Raising successful startups
As we partner with new companies working to make a difference in the health care industry, it’s our role to mentor and help them advance their products and services to a point where they can be easily integrated into our workflow, invested in by our OSF Ventures group or both. It’s in this implementation phase of our partnerships process where we truly set health care solutions free.
We partner with executive sponsors within OSF HealthCare who are responsible for successfully integrating them across the Ministry.
Our team has managed the turnover of nine solutions to executive sponsors over the last year. OSF Ventures has invested in six of them. Five have been scaled across the organization, many of which are being used by our patients, engaging them in their own health.
It’s this standardized partnership process that has established OSF HealthCare as a leader in innovation. We continue to source solutions based on the strategic areas of focus developed by the OSF Innovation team: removing barriers to health care for the most vulnerable individuals, giving older adults the ability to age gracefully at home and fostering health care ideas beyond the hospital setting.
What’s next?
Now that we’ve successfully launched an OSF Innovation Partnerships process that works, we are looking for new ways to make a difference within OSF HealthCare. This year, we are working to develop and manage formal partnerships with large national organizations and create formal co-development co-partnerships with startup companies that support our strategic areas of focus.
We are also researching our capability to bring in more digital tools and are working to partner with a variety of health care organizations across the U.S that are tackling similar issues.
It’s another exciting year for the OSF Innovation Partnerships team. We look forward to highlighting more of these new success stories as they come.
Last Updated: July 27, 2018