MedCity's CONVERGE Summit Gathers U.S. Health And Life Sciences Innovators in Philadelphia

On July 10th, MedCityNews.com hosted their inaugural CONVERGE summit for healthcare innovation in Philadelphia, hosting roughly 200 people from across the health industry, including healthcare providers, insurance and related businesses, biotech, and pharma, mixed with a healthy dose of IT people. As CONVERGE host and MedCity News CEO Chris Seper aptly summed up, "The industry is now chasing the app, not chasing the molecule."

In a wide-ranging keynote talk called "Innovation's Long Summer: The Coming Opportunities and Challenges for Healthcare Innovation," Department of Health and Human Services IT innovation chief Will Yu used a metaphor about scurvy -- how it took over 200 years to adopt the practice of sailors eating lemons after its discovery as a cure for the problem -- to discuss how the path from innovative vision to innovation adoption is long and complex and requires a series of incentives along the way. In his view, HHS is supporting efforts of innovators along this long path. He's also bullish: "There's never been a better time in history to be an innovator."

One of the things helping innovators, according to Yu, is the America Competes Act, which gives agencies like HHS the new ability to conduct public challenges, and also collaborate with external organizations like corporations and universities to innovate. In what areas is such innovation likely to happen? Along the lines of commentary about a data-centric, digital-first 21st century government by other government IT innovation policy leaders, Yu commented that among people working on health innovation, "the clear winner is those dealing with data in healthcare...a close second is those companies who help providers engage healthcare populations."

Keynote speaker Will Yu of HHS

There were many speakers and breakout panels (A full CONVERGE agenda is available here, and more coverage, including product demo videos, is available at MedCity News.) and I won't review them all here. But I'll highlight a couple that I found interesting.

Health IP is different from other kinds of IP

One panel that turned out to be more interesting than I thought walking in was about tech transfer, and the roles of universities and hospitals and their intellectual property (IP) in the entrepreneurship and innovation process. (The panel included: Dr. Don Rose, Director of Carolina Kickstart, University of North Carolina; Dr. Stephen S. Tang, President and CEO, University City Science Center; Dr. Ellen Purpus, Director, Office of Technology Transfer, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia; and Deborah Crawford, Senior Vice Provost for Research, Drexel University)

With healthcare, this seems more complicated than in other industries with different types of IP. The pertinent soundbite came from Stephen Tang: "This is a market where the buyers don't know what they want, and the sellers don't know what they have," which seems only moderately frightening. What he proposes in general, and to a large degree is already doing in the Philadelphia area, is having "information intermediaries" who act as a middleman for biological IP. His organization, the University City Science Center, is a nonprofit which has been doing just that -- trying to bring the buyers and sellers together and help them understand each other -- for about 50 years.

It turns out that the question of What can universities do to market the IP they have to entrepreneurs who can use it? (which was asked by an audience member) isn't as simple as it seems, according to Tang.

The topic of understanding, licensing, and using health IP is one which seems somewhat unique to the industry. Health IP like DNA sequences, and their ultimate value, is relatively difficult to obtain, to understand, and to transform into something which is a marketable product on which revenue can be generated. And the issues are very different than with (say) social media startups, where the initial costs are low, the revenue model typically unknown, and the primary goal to do something interesting that will attract lots of users.

Health startup funding is a lot like other startup funding

In contrast to the above, a different panel -- one about venture capital investing in health industry startups -- caught my attention because of how similar it seemed to many people I've heard discuss funding (say) Web startups. (The panel included: Dr. Gary Kurtzman, Managing Director, SafeGuard Scientifics; Dr. Ted Driscoll, Technology Partner, Claremont Creek Ventures; Steven Krein, Co-founder, StartUp Health; and Karen Griffith Gryga, Managing Director, DreamIt Ventures, and Executive Director, Mid-Atlantic Venture Funds).

Here are some quotes from Steven Krein of Startup Health, a New York-based national program to help health startups become sustainable businesses. "Lets create 1000 new entrepreneurs who can become sustainable businesses," and to find them he looks for a "sparkle in the eye and a fire in the belly." Gryga mentioned that her biggest pet peeve about entrepreneur pitches was, "Not being able to effectively describe what you do... Within a relatively short space, describing what you're trying to achieve....Entrepreneurs need to think about their communications... Do your research! You need to understand the space you're playing in.... You need passion and strong communication, but also need to be able to listen and take advice."

Sound familiar to anyone? Nothing wrong with this -- I just found it interesting that when it comes to picking entrepreneurs in health and in Web tech, and listening to their business plans and pitches, there are simply some basic rules about the kinds of people investors think will be successful, and the kinds who get funding.

Krein mentioned something else I found really interesting, because it relates to the newly launched Reboot America initiative from Startup DC and Startup America (which I advise). He is going to any big company who he can get to engage with him -- for example, Humana, Wellpoint, Aetna, UnitedHealthcare -- and asking what startups can do to help them innovate. If he "hooks" one by matching startup talent he knows about with the big business problem of (say) Aetna, he may then turn around and go to a venture firm with that new info as an incentive for them to fund a new health startup. With Reboot America, we plan to do similar things across numerous industries critical to the Washington, DC regional economy, including biotech out of the Bethesda / Rockville, MD area.

Online collaboration in health is about social media in the workflow

Finally, I will just briefly comment on a third panel which I found very interesting, so interesting in fact that it will make up an entire subsequent post on Publicyte. The panel was called Online Collaboration: Where the Puck is Going, and featured some very engaging and creative speakers. My biggest takeaway from this panel, whose discussion ranged from social media collaboration using Yammer to ordering doctor's appointments via something that looked like OpenTable, is that the future is already here -- it just isn't evenly distributed yet. More specifically, many, many of the innovations necessary to transform healthcare already exist, somewhere. The problem is not so much inventing new things, but rather taking these early inventions and innovations and making them part of the normal "workflow" of every day doctors, nurses, and other health professionals.