UH Ventures: Disrupting Traditional Health Care Methodologies

The rapidity of change elevates the importance of innovation. Focusing solely on inpatient or outpatient strategies is no longer sufficient. Accordingly, UH has established UH Ventures to cultivate innovation and entrepreneurship.

This team is charged with diversifying revenue, supporting innovation and enabling transformation within the system. UH Ventures develops new business models that leverage and expand existing UH capabilities to pursue innovative opportunities that will drive definitive, sustainable and scalable value to the way we care for our patients.

UH Ventures executes on this charge through a two-pronged approach:

• Business development and operations platform includes the management and potentialization of existing UH entities and verticals as well as new adjacent businesses. Examples include UH Meds, our outpatient and ambulatory pharmacy business; post-acute care, such as home care and hospice; and laboratory services.
• Ventures and innovations platform creates, develops and invests in a variety of opportunities that can play a vital role in the overall future of healthcare. This is championed by evaluating clinical tools, business services, infrastructure, population health and consumer-centric care.

This approach, combined with its diverse team of innovative operators, its comprehensive process and toolkit, and its wide-ranging capabilities, enables UH Ventures to take the steps needed to deliver value for our hospitals, our patients and our community.

UH Ventures manages the commercialization of an “inside-out” portfolio of homegrown UH technologies and inventions, as well as an “outside-in” portfolio, where it opportunistically brings external solutions and partners into our system to collaborate in co-creating.

UH Ventures has made progress on many fronts, with recent noteworthy accomplishments including:

• Formalizing a “founding anchor” partnership with Plug and Play Cleveland, a Silicon Valley-based innovation and venture capital platform
• Forming a post-acute care joint venture with Hospice of the Western Reserve to enhance palliative and end-of-life care for UH patients
• Joining with leading health systems across the U.S. to participate in the Medicaid Transformation Project, a national effort to transform healthcare and related social needs for the nearly 75 million Americans who rely on Medicaid for healthcare
• Joining AVIA, a health innovation network, to advance UH consumer strategies, gaining subject matter expertise, market research, process tools and implementation knowledge from AVIA and its member systems
• Deploying the UH Innovates crowdsourcing smartphone application and the UH Ventures website (UHhospitals.org/Ventures) to solicit ideas internally and externally to improve our care delivery and the health of our community
• Earning recognition from the Ohio Opioid Technology Challenge with a $200,000 award for launching UH Care Continues, an innovative technology enabled discharge planning platform designed to prevent opioid misuse and abuse.