Becker's Hospital Review

43 INNOVATION How Tampa General is avoiding the AI 'hype cycle' By Noah Schwartz W ith declining funding in the digital health and healthcare artificial intelligence sectors, hospitals are scrambling to make sure they have an adequate investment strategy. To learn more about how hospitals are reacting to this funding environment, Becker's caught up with Rachel Feinman, Tampa (Fla.) General Hospital's vice president of innovation and managing director of TGH InnoVentures, the health system's venture capital arm. Question: What is your investment strategy? Rachel Feinman: When we started up InnoVentures, we were still deep in the COVID-19 pandemic. e funding market was actually still very high. You had a lot of hyperexuberance around telehealth, virtual health solutions due to COVID-19 and valuations were really high. e idea of a recession or an impact on the private markets was still not something anyone was talking about. at's when we started doing this. If anything, I feel like in the health tech space, there's been a bit of a reversion to the mean. So as the investor looking for deals it's a really good time, we can be pretty picky about what we want to invest in where we think there's alignment with Tampa General and with our strategic objectives. ere's plenty of really incredible companies out there, and there are better valuations than there were. From an investment perspective, and for a fund like ours, where we have such meaningful partnerships with health tech focused institutional investors, we think that we're really well positioned to make strong investments. is year, we've already made a few and we want to continue to be really active in the market because there's just so many problems to solve in healthcare. We know that we're going to have to rely heavily on emerging technology and innovative entrepreneurs to partner with us to solve these problems. Q: Does being attached to a health system give you an advantage when making investments? RF: It's a very unique position to be a corporate venture fund that's captive to a health system. We're certainly not alone. We were pretty well organized, in terms of being able to rely on one another for deal flow for guidance and support as we're navigating this crazy world The 'Where's Waldo?' of pharmacy tech By Paige Twenter B esides AI, one emerging technology is snatching the attention of Joe Burczynski, PharmD, which performs tasks in a manner similar to completing a "Where's Waldo?" game with immediate success. Some hospitals are already implementing RFID (radio- frequency identification) technology, including Syracuse, N.Y.-based SUNY Upstate Medical Center, where Dr. Burczynski serves as the executive director of pharmacy services. Hospitals are increasingly buying into the technology, he said, which uses radio waves to track tagged objects, according to a 2018 post from the FDA. At SUNY Upstate Medical Center, doses are given an RFID tag either by the drug manufacturer or by a hospital worker. The technology works similarly to barcode scanning — a common practice in pharmacies used to verify medications — but goes a step further to find mistakes. "It's 'Where's Waldo?' Or, also, if Waldo's missing," Dr. Burczynski said. "In a hospital, we have code carts for emergencies where all the drugs you need are laid out in the same order in all the code carts in the hospital. If a human neglected to put something in its place, that could be bad in an emergency situation. You don't want to go to where the fire extinguisher is supposed to be and it's not there. So, RFID technology can look and see that a small vial is missing from where it should be. That's how we use it today." n Image Credit: Radiology Business

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