Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/1203108
28 INNOVATION How 6 hospitals are spending innovation investment dollars: Partners, Kaiser Permanente & more By Andrea Park S everal hospitals and health systems launched innovation funds and used existing funds to invest in innovative startups in 2019. Here are six healthcare providers that distrib- uted innovation funds in the fall of 2019, list- ed chronologically: 1. Long Beach, Calif.-based MemorialCare's Innovation Fund co-led a $16 million Se- ries A investment in Twistle, a startup of- fering automated communication, informa- tion-gathering and patient education services to healthcare organizations. 2. e venture arm of Peoria, Ill.-based OSF HealthCare participated in a $7.3 million funding round for startup Socially Deter- mined, which uses data analytics to match pa- tients with social services and other resources. 3. Partners HealthCare in Boston funneled $80 million into two new investment funds: a $30 million Artificial Intelligence and Digital Translation Fund and a $50 million Transla- tional Innovation Fund. 4. Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and Renton, Wash.-based Providence Ven- tures both contributed to a $73 million fund- ing round to support the expansion of start- up Omada Health's digital care platform for diabetes and hypertension. 5. Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., joined a $20 million Series B funding round for Eko, a startup developing AI technology for heart disease screening, telehealth and remote pa- tient monitoring. 6. Bothell-based Molina Healthcare of Wash- ington launched the Molina Community Innovation Fund, a three-year, $3 million initiative dedicated to investing in nonprof- it organizations to improve healthcare on a local level. n 90% of US 'innovation sector' growth centered in 5 cities By Andrea Park T he vast majority of high-tech job growth in the U.S. took place in just five metro areas — all but one of them on the West Coast — between 2005 and 2017, according to a De- cember 2019 report. "The case for growth centers: How to spread tech innovation across America" report, from the Brookings Institution and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, describes how more than 90 percent of job growth in 13 of the nation's most advanced in- dustries during that time period was concentrated in Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, San Diego and San Jose, Calif. With that highly concentrated growth, those five regions signifi- cantly increased their share of the country's total innovation em- ployment: from 17.6 percent in 2005 to 22.8 percent in 2017. Meanwhile, the bottom 90 percent of metro areas saw innovation sector jobs decrease, presenting a "grave national problem," since the sector's "diffusion into new places would greatly benefit the na- tion's well-being," according to the report. The solution to this challenge will depend upon the introduction of nation-scaled, place-based interventions; the report recommends the creation of eight to 10 federally funded "growth centers" in ma- jor cities far from existing tech hubs. "Many conventional economists will argue that any push to pro- mote regional equity will come at the expense of efficiency. How- ever, the negative externalities of the current imbalances and the positive ones of catalyzing new growth in new places each suggest that intervention can benefit the nation's total welfare and global competitiveness," the report's authors wrote, concluding, "America should launch this experiment." n U of Texas to offer graduate degree for human-centered healthcare design By Andrea Park B eginning in August 2020, the University of Texas at Austin will offer a master's degree in Design in Health, the first of its kind in the U.S., according to a Dec. 10, 2019, news release. The degree will be a joint offering of the School of Design and Creative Technologies and the Design Institute for Health, the latter of which is housed within the university's Dell Medical School. The one-year program will be led by experts in the fields of human-centered and healthcare design, who will foster collaboration between medical and design students to solve health-related challenges. "This new breed of health leaders will wield a creative, problem-solving mindset and design skills that enable them to not only see the places where the health system is broken, but also to take action to fix it," said Stacey Chang, execu- tive director of the Design Institute for Health. "When they put their design skills to work, the health system of the future will put people first. Our healthcare system is intrinsically flawed, and we need a new generation of care providers and design thinkers who can creatively solve health- care's most wicked problems from the inside." n