Cedars-Sinai and Redesign Health Launch Innovative Digital Health Venture Platform

Cedars-Sinai, a prominent nonprofit health system, has partnered with startup builder Redesign Health to create a groundbreaking "sustainable innovation center" aimed at scaling up digital-first healthcare ventures. The collaboration, known as the Digital Innovation Platform, seeks to address the mounting challenges in healthcare delivery, including escalating costs, workforce shortages, administrative inefficiencies, and increasingly complex care needs.

A New Approach to Healthcare Innovation

Unlike traditional accelerator programs or venture capital arms, the Digital Innovation Platform takes a comprehensive approach to nurturing healthcare startups. Bardia Nabet, Cedars-Sinai's Associate Director of Digital Strategy and Business Development, emphasized the platform's unique focus on building companies from inception to launch.

"We're focused on building companies from idea to launch: identifying core systemic problems, validating solutions internally and building companies where Cedars-Sinai is the first funder, customer and pilot site," Nabet explained. This strategy allows for early risk mitigation and ensures that solutions are designed for real-world scalability from the outset.

Leveraging Data and Expertise

A key differentiator of the Digital Innovation Platform is its access to Cedars-Sinai's extensive enterprise data. The health system is developing an integrated platform of large, de-identified, secure, and synthetic data sets, which will be made available to founders. This wealth of information, combined with AI and other cutting-edge technologies, will guide product design throughout the company growth cycle, focusing on clinical effectiveness, operational scalability, and financial sustainability.

Neil Patel, Redesign's head of ventures, highlighted the synergy between Redesign Health's expertise in building enterprises and Cedars-Sinai's clinical excellence and data resources. "Redesign Health has spent years perfecting our approach to healthcare company building," Patel stated. "Now, we're bringing this methodology to Cedars-Sinai, creating a first-of-its-kind innovation platform that combines our healthcare venture-building expertise with their clinical excellence."

Future Prospects and Expectations

While the platform is still in its early stages, with the partners currently focused on building supportive infrastructure and assembling a core team, expectations are high. Nabet indicated that Cedars-Sinai and Redesign "expect to launch a few companies over the next few years."

Peter L. Slavin, M.D., president and CEO of Cedars-Sinai, expressed confidence in the initiative's potential: "Cedars-Sinai is uniquely positioned to develop new and innovative ways to fix some of the most pressing problems in healthcare today thanks to our focus on translational medicine and our ability to bring together leading-edge clinical care, research, AI and strategic industry relationships to benefit our patients."

As the healthcare industry continues to grapple with significant challenges, initiatives like the Digital Innovation Platform represent a promising approach to fostering innovation and driving meaningful improvements in care delivery and patient outcomes.