UCHealth’s innovation team, today announced it will develop a healthcare innovation hub in Denver that will leverage brilliant minds both inside and outside the health system – to help transform health care delivery of the future. The new healthcare innovation hub will be housed at the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation building in Denver’s River North District (RiNo) as one of the facility’s largest tenants.
The hub will bring together more than 70 organizations that will all work together in a space focused on collaboration to foster new ideas. UCHealth IT experts and members of the organization’s creative team also will have space within the facility. UCHealth is already partnering with more than a dozen innovative companies, and together, products have been developed to improve the efficiency of operating rooms, boost the accuracy of medication prescribing, inject the latest research and protocols into the electronic medical record, and to utilize wearable devices to constantly monitor the vital signs of patients. Many more innovations are currently in development.
“Health-tech innovation has the potential to significantly improve medical outcomes, and health care is not going to be re-imagined just through established health care organizations or startups – we have to do it together,” said Mike Biselli, health-tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Catalyst HTI. “Our industry integrator concept allows UCHealth to be plugged in at the point of innovation by physically housing a health care innovation ecosystem in a single location – allowing entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians to collaborate through the entire process of innovation.”
UCHealth plans 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 chief information officer. By experimenting with virtual health options, wearable monitors and the electronic health record, health care organizations might be able to transform a patient’s bedroom into a space where medicine is delivered in a novel 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 health care as we know it,” said Dr. Richard Zane, 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 health care while helping control costs.”