Hank Capps, MD, Information Director and Digital for Wellstar’s health system, based in Georgia, and the president of Catalyst Innovation and Venture ARM of the system, recently sat down with Health innovation Discuss Wellstar’s participation in a new risk study in New York headquarters called Terrario, which aims to incubate up to 10 companies in the next three years.
It also joined the Mark Rosenblum conversation, CEO of Terrario and partner of Company Ventures, who launched terrarium in association with Cactus, an advice firm that works with large health systems.
Health innovation: Mark, I understand that he previously worked in networksign Health. Could you talk about your transition from that company to Terrario?
Rosenblum: I joined networksign Health in his early days. I was the twenty -employed there. I saw him climb for four years about 250 employees. Incubé to seven companies along the way. Towards the end, we had climbed so fast that, in many ways, I lost connection with vision and strategy. It was then that I met with the company’s ventures team, and we had this shared vision of a health -centered risk study that was very focused on the founder, which was low volume, high tangle, and that is really what we built in terrarium. Company Ventures has existed for about 10 years. They invest in medical care, but also business software and Fintech. The initial stage investments were made in Maven, centivo, attracted and octave, to name a few.
HCI: Hank, I am interested in listening to how wellstar thinks of working with new companies, because some health systems tell us that it can be a challenge, while others really do it an emphasis point.
CAPPS: Actually, we launched a subsidiary company called Catalyst by Wellstar, which is both an innovation company and a risk fund, and I am the president of ESO. It has all the capacities to do everything, from building companies and turning them to concepts of concepts and pilots and working with the broader medical care business around what are the biggest problems that must be solved. And he has a risk fund at the early stage along with that.
We have a thesis that not all medical care problems are solved with medical care solutions, so that leads us to be a multisectoral risk fund. We invest in medical and unhealthy care companies, and on the early early, so less one to 00, to one, series A as well. With all that in mind, the terrarium is something that we are incredibly excited. When you are gathering some of the main founders of startups and experts in medical care as cactus, which contributes the perspective of design and consumer, has this incredible recipe to create solutions that will affect the industry as a whole. Terrarium is really special because it has all those elements as part of how it will build companies. When adding the support of the company and all incredible things that the adventure company brings to the table, we are excited about the potential impact to be done. And the first company that has been launched, broken Health, is something that we are very interested in seeing and potentially bring to our ecosystem.
HCI: Wellstar is imagining as a place to try some of these solutions and discover what it works and what does not?
CAPPS: Safely We have a process in which we bring these companies at a very early stage. We finance the first pilot for them and assign innovation resources to help them navigate the health system. Then, while they work in that concept of concept or pilot, the business will say, this has value and we must continue to do so, or we will have a set of learning of that to harvest and help the startup know how to be better in the future, if they are not ready to expand their footprint within the health system. And we have succeeded in doing that. We have 16 direct investments now that they have gone through that same process, and as a Terrario partner, we imagine that same process for these companies that Mark is building with these founders.
HCI: Hank mentioned that the first company announced is broken Health. Mark, could you talk about what is your approach?
Rosenblum: They are a platform for integration of medical care data … Rota developed a technology that uses AI to ingest data at two ends of a connection. That could be Wellstar hospital system at one end and a supplier with which they are working on the other. Both companies would upload their data standards. The AI agent reads them, suggests a semantic coincidence and then writes the python code to unify them in real time. This is a process that took weeks or months, and we are very excited about the implications of the ability to connect data at low cost and in almost real time. His team is built, they are financed and are now in conversations to obtain their first two contracts.
HCI: From the point of view of the media, they bombard us with releases in which suppliers have added to all their solutions. But whether they implement or not, you still have to identify weak points or aspects of friction in medical care so that these new companies are concentrated, right?
CAPPS: In Wellstar, we have an approach that we want to solve problems, and AI is just a way in which it solves problems. So, all those news communications that are obtaining about the AI should not really be about AI. They must be about problems. It is a fascinating time in time where people have focused on a capacity; It’s like saying that Internet will solve problems. I think we have been very disciplined, both in Wellstar and Catalyst by Wellstar, in terms of identifying the big problems that must be solved. How are we going to make a difference and an impact for our patients and our communities? And then, as we identify those problems, how do you deepen the research to understand them in such a way that you can start solving them? AI could be one of the ways in which this problem solves.
Rosenblum: We have four central themes that we believe will help shape medical care in the next 10 years. One of them is medical care data and AI. Others include care based on specialized value and medicine, management solutions of the workforce in medical care and the financial medical care system, which has billions of dollars of payments that flow through the costs of IT and transactions that are really high in relation to other industries.
HCI: Mark, you mentioned having a real approach to founding talent. I read that you have a data owner talent platform. Can you talk about that? And is you interested in the founders with clinical history too?
Rosenblum: A common thing that you hear in the adventure of the initial stage is that it is the founder, but often people really do not quantify what makes a great founder. We are obsessed with that. We have studied all academic literature; We build some custom data sets, and what we decided to do is build a factor model, so we are ingesting professional stories of tens of thousands of possible founders, classifying them and noting them and then forming relationships with the people with the greatest score. An example of a factor would be that it has more than one set of functional skills. Therefore, Clinic would be an example, but because if it is going to be a startup at an early stage of three people, we believe it is better if you are clinical and have made sales.
