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 Welcome to this Week in Health, it influence where we discuss the influence of technology on health with the people who are making it happen. My name is Bill Russell. We're covering healthcare, CIO, and creator of this week in Health. it a set of podcasts and videos dedicated to developing the next generation of health IT leaders.

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If you are going to be there, please stop by. I'd love to see you. We caught up with Anne Wellington, the managing director at the Cedar-Sinai Accelerator at the Health 2.0 conference to talk about how entrepreneurs find . The front door to the health system that their solution would solve the problem. To have a listen, hope you enjoy another session from Health 2.0.

And I'm with Anne Wellington with Cedar-Sinai, how you doing? Good. How are you doing? Just got off the panel and I ran up and . Got you. Of course I didn't get you fast enough 'cause they had to do the TV interview first. It, uh, I feel very in demand to do a TV interview, a podcast interview. Uh, this is what it's like to be famous, but this is the pinnacle, you know, , this is the really, the height.

Um, if you look at the guests that have been on this show, the, they're the. The upper echelon of, uh, of the industry. So, uh, uh, your role at Cedars is I am the managing director of the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator. The accelerator? Yes. Okay. Well, let's start there. I mean, 'cause part of the, part of the panel discussion was on the accelerator.

I. So every health system has their own way of doing things. You guys chose to go with the accelerator. Why? Why did Cedars choose to go the accelerator route as opposed to the incubator or DC route? You know, I think when we looked at the stage of companies that we wanted to engage with and sort of where there were gaps in how we could connect with them, we have

A long history of sort of innovation internally at the very earliest stages focused on research. We've done work with larger and established companies to help them on new and innovative ideas, but there was a little bit of a gap of there's early stage companies, they're ready to bring their products to market.

They might have a customer or two. We'd like to work with them, but we know that they need additional support to really create a product that we can use at Cedars and that can, uh, be successful at scale. And so really when we were thinking about where are we targeting companies, the accelerator program was the model that made the most sense of taking some ideas that aren't brand new.

They've got some structure behind them, a product in the market, but really could benefit from . Spending a few months deeply embedded at a health system to iterate rapidly and improve on what they're creating in, in Southern California, in fact. So it is kind of a, a nice place, although it, it is pretty, it's a pretty grueling process, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, it's three, it's three. It's an accelerator, so it accelerates things. Three months, three months, three fairly intensive months. Um, I think the, the program itself, we're connecting people with a lot of mentors. Uh, we bring in both mentors from Cedar-Sinai, external mentors. They're all giving feedback on these companies.

They're trying to absorb that feedback, iterate on it, incorporate it. And at the same time, kind of by definition, they're all running their own companies. So there's a lot of balls to keep in the air that all of these founders are juggling. But we think that they all sort of emerge from the other side amazed at what they've accomplished in three months.

But because you have such a keen sense of work-life balance, you do take them out to the beach at some point and get, let them see the ocean. I mean, I wouldn't say we take them there. I'd say they like make a break for it. But yes, especially when we have companies from Minnesota. Soda or Michigan, they do find themselves at the Beach

But you guys have had some success stories. So we were talking to the CEO of, uh, giant. Of Giant, yeah. G-Y-A-N-T-G-Y-A-N-T. Yeah. It was great. I was just catching up with Pascal from Giant and he was sharing how they're, uh, rolling out at the Cleveland Clinic. They're working with Mayo, they're working with a lot of these great health systems, and they were part of our third class.

Um, we just wrapped up our fifth class. We've had 47 companies now sort of complete the program, and of those 83% are either still active or have been acquired. So we've seen a pretty good track record of those companies continuing to grow and, and gain more customers. I love that. Well, we, we got right where they're setting up for dinner, , so we get all the additional noise.

We thought it was going to be quiet and it's turned out, and actually it might be, 'cause I'm using my new recorder here. So, , um, the, the thing I thought was interesting about the conversation with Giant, um, I'm sorry, the gentleman's name was, uh, Pascal. Pascal. Pascal was, you know, he was heading in a direction, a completely different direction.

And then after the coaching over those three months, he said, and, and the coaching that you guys gave him. They, uh, they pivoted the company now. He said it hasn't been an easy pivot, but it has been a, uh, a. A a, a successful? Yeah. Well, I think one thing we see for a lot of the companies coming in, and that would be an example, he said, oh, we were thinking of going direct to consumer.

But we, uh, after hearing a lot of this feedback, we decided to sell to health systems. It is interesting as we bring companies in. Them understanding sort of truly who their customer is. So at the highest level, are they selling to health systems or is their customer actually the payer? Is it actually the patient?

And then once they've answered that question, . Within any of those groups, if you're selling into a health system, who is the actual person who is signing the check for that? It's probably one of the most opaque processes for early stage companies to figure out who's the decision maker. And so we can give them sort of a behind the scenes glimpse of here's how we make these decisions.

Here's all of the different people who might weigh in and here's actually the person whose whose budget this is coming out of. It was interesting 'cause on your panel that was. . Um, one of the questions was how do we engage you? How do we know what problems you're trying to solve? And, uh, I, to be honest, I think it was one of the weakest set of answers across the board , because it was sort of like, uh, it was indicative of what's going on in healthcare.

There's so many problems. Yeah. Uh, Aaron Martin was up there and he said, you know, we've identified the a hundred problems. And he wasn't talking about like a hundred little problems. He was saying, these are a hundred problems that are gonna move the needle. Yeah. I mean, so these are serious problems. Um, and then when, you know, how do we engage with you, he is like, well, we're gonna eventually, we're gonna publish our problems once we publish our problems.

If you have a solution to that, let us know. But then everybody had a little different answer. It is kind of a trek for these startups to figure out how to, how to get in. Yeah, I and I, I think my answer to the person who asked that was probably maybe a little harsh, but also reality is I said, I don't think any of us are gonna give you the answer that you wanna hear of, oh, here's the place that you go and find out who all the list of health systems, who wants to buy your solution.

Um. The, the recommendation I was able to give is a lot of organizations have sort of that front door that they've created for Cedars, for early stage companies. At least it's the accelerator you heard from other people who were at innovation studios and labs and incubators like that. Those can be a good front door for health.

Systems that don't have sort of that front door structure, it can be tough to figure out the right way in. Um, and I think is a reason that the sales cycles are often really, really long at the beginning. But what they're going to do, invariably what they're gonna do is find whatever person they can get to.

Uh, a lot of times they sell directly to the physicians. Mm-Hmm. clinicians. Uh, that happens. I mean, that's ACIO it happened to me all the time. Yeah. Uh, not that it was bad. I mean, it's good to. It's good to know that they're looking for, I mean, typically they come to me with a solution and say, this is what we wanna buy

I'm like, okay, I didn't know you had a problem. Let's talk about the problem first. It's like, no, but we found a solution. Yeah. Um, but that's what they will do. They will sort of find the nooks and crannies of the organization and get in there. Um, is your organization, have you been doing this enough that they like

Now redirect people back through the funnel. We're getting there. Yeah. I would say we're definitely hearing more and more from people who get this understanding that it's really hard to do sort of the grassroots thing of I get one physician and then I get two and soon I have them all. Even the physicians have learned that's a frustrating way to try to get a product implemented if they really want it to be something that is adopted more widely.

Sending it over to the accelerator program is a much quicker way. To get it at an enterprise level and not try and do this, oh, well, we'll just sort of go one clinic at a time. That's, that's almost impossible to do in an enterprise system. So you guys have summation ventures, which is really your, um, . A VC more than private equity.

And then, uh, do you have something for like seed kind of companies, or are you, you're more looking for A and B? They've been doing it a little bit. They've been doing it for a while. Most of the companies that come into the accelerator would be at a seed, maybe series A, but typically right around that same time.

So you're looking really early. We're looking pretty early. I've the, so you can mold them, you can direct them. Yeah. The class we just wrapped up, um, the range was, we had a really wide range of company stages in this class. The very earliest we were the first money in, so. Um, they'd created essentially an MVP bootstrapped that, and we started working with them.

So that was the very earliest. At the latest. We have a couple companies that were established actually in the uk, have successful, significant, uh, footprints in the UK and use the program to sort of do a foray into the United States. And they were at a post series, a sort of, uh, status. Will you guys publish your problems to, to anyone who's coming into the accelerator?

You know, that was a, that was, that was an interesting concept. I, I can't imagine too many. It's a bold move. It's, it's a courageous move actually. I think for me, the challenge of sort of publishing a list of problems and saying companies who are solving these should apply. Is what we have seen is yes, there's, there's the sort of known problems, but then there's those unknown unknowns of, oh, I didn't even think there could be a better way to do this, or a more efficient way to do this.

Or even if I'd thought it, I didn't put it on my list until a company comes and says, look, I can save you this much time. I can save you this much money. We, we've figured out the solution and so I wouldn't want to constrain what we're looking at to . Our predefined list when there's so much good stuff happening out there we might not know about.

Yeah, there's opportunities. It, it was also interesting talking about the challenges that people were looking at and it was inefficiency, waste and quote unquote stupid stuff, that goes on within healthcare. Um, and, uh, you know, that doesn't necessarily speak to technology, to be honest with you. Yeah. It speaks to, uh, significant and hard operational projects.

So do you ever have companies come in and you look at 'em and you're like, you know what? Three months is not nearly enough time for you to engage? Yeah. Um, I mean, honestly for many of them, the three months, the many of the companies we work with three months is just step one of figuring out, okay, is this something we want to continue to engage with long term?

Uh, because . There are very, very few problems in healthcare that you can start and finish, solve, solve in three months. In three months. Yeah. I, it's not what I was trying to say. It's like, but yeah, it's more along the lines of, you know, we have the accelerator to say, okay, this is some intensive time for on both sides, us to confirm, yes, this is the problem we both wanna solve.

We wanna work on this together. We're the right customer, you're the right company. Let's go from there. But I hear a startup who says essentially, Hey, we're gonna bring your, uh, your clinical data with your PBX data, with your, I mean, I, I hear that kind of stuff, and I go, . Oh my gosh. What, what could you possibly do with them in three months by the time they get done talking to it, talking to marketing and talking to whatever it you're done?

I mean, like the three months is over. Um, I mean, we do, we do try to, um, accelerate some of those conversations so we don't . Operate on the same timeline as it takes a month to get the first conversation in six weeks to get the second one. Um, but I think that when we can connect them with mentors who can say, okay, even theoretically, we still have to figure out if this, if all these plugs actually work together.

Um, if we can at least sort of confirm that in theory we wanna keep working on this, then we'll figure out a way to continue to engage with them past three months. What's your favorite part of the job? Ooh. You know, it's gonna sound really cheesy, but I genuinely, I tell my team like this isn't unless you can be genuinely happy for other people's success.

This isn't a great role to be in. I'm someone who I can be genuinely happy when other people succeed. And so getting to work with, uh, these companies that do go on to have some exciting successes and get to hear about all of these companies that say, I signed this customer. We're working with this group.

We've seen this outcome. I find it great. It's so fun to feel like your impact is being multiplied across all these companies, but you get how many apply . We get about 400 applications per class. Four, five. Are you the person who has to say no? ? I I, in most cases I am. Yes. It's, it's, that's the worst part of the job is we get to say yes to 10 companies and no to 390.

So that's lot of no's to hand out. Yes. . That is, uh, that's hard. And some of 'em don't take it well. Um, most people are pretty gracious about it. Yeah. Well, and plus you've had people not make it one year. Mm-Hmm. and then come back and be a part of it. Oh yeah. We've had, we've had companies apply three or four times before they get accepted.

Wow. And, you know, I, this the entrepreneur, I mean, I see people, a lot of people walking around in the conference with, uh, you know, co-founder or founder. And, uh, you know, when I was growing up and even, even recently, I mean, just a couple years ago, I would've looked at that and thought, that is so cool, . And now I've talked to enough of 'em and I realize

That's one of the hardest jobs in the world. Mm-Hmm. . I mean, they are working night and day. They are accounting, cash flow. They are, um, marketing. They are, uh, chief technology officer. They're, I mean, it's, it's a hard, unless you get that big infusion of cash right outta the ch you're doing a lot of, uh, your work on it.

I think one of the amazing things that I don't think we realized when the Accelerator program was created, but has become one of the biggest benefits to the companies we work with and the founders we work with, is they get to be part of this very specific little community of not only healthcare entrepreneurs, but healthcare entrepreneurs that are trying to sell into health systems, and it's

Incredibly hard. It's very daunting to say, I'm gonna start this company. It's gonna have, at its best, it's gonna have a nine to 12 month sales cycle. But realistically, for startups, you're looking at 12 to 15 or more to get those early customers on. And so having that community of other people who are going through the ringer at the same time you are, and saying, look, here's 47 CEOs who know the challenge of this and know how hard it is.

Is really a unique community to be part of and you know, it can really help. A lot of them are part of other entrepreneurial communities, but there's a big difference between having a consumer facing app that you can launch it and have a hundred thousand downloads within a few months versus a healthcare startup that within the first few months of launching.

You might feel like you haven't really made any progress at all. And do you, do you ever like, refer some of them over to a different incubator or a different program? Sure. Yeah, definitely. I think there's, there's so many good programs out there and everyone is targeting something slightly different. A couple shout outs.

So other programs I know down in Houston, there's one I can't, there's uh, so TMC has TM cx right? And they . Um, engage with a lot of companies. They have sort of large classes that they're able to bring them onto the TMC campus, so that's, that's and expose them to a lot of different health systems. That's sim similar to what you Yeah, pretty similar.

I think we, um, because we're sort of affiliated, not even affiliated, we're part of Cedar-Sinai single organization. We're very deeply embedded there. Right. Um, the TMC groups, . They have, uh, affiliations with all of the, uh, hospitals there and are able to make more connections. Um, maybe not at the same level of sort of mentorship that we give.

Um, and what other programs do you, uh, Techstars has just announced or just kicked off their newest program with UnitedHealthcare? And so I mentioned earlier, oftentimes companies aren't actually sure who they're selling to. And so when we get companies in that really should be selling to a payer, we'll say, you know, United, uh, healthcare and Techstars are working together, that might be a good fit payer provider.

Do we know what United is this way? Well, I think their program might be a better fit than, uh, than our program for those companies. Um. And, uh, oh, and med tech innovator, um, down south of us a little bit, especially, they're much more device focused than we are. And we have about a quarter of the companies that have come through our program, um, have been devices, but they can provide a lot of additional sort of focus on the more biotech device type realm than we can.

Are you mostly clinical, clinical quality or is there some experience? I, I, there was a. No, I mean there was the, uh, Amazon Alexa voice thing, so there is some experience stuff sprinkled in there, but how much of it is clinical mostly? You know, actually I would say, um, maybe about a third to half of it is, is heavily clinical.

Depends a little bit on the class, but we do a lot of the healthcare It. Either patient experience, backend systems, we really will look at anything that a health system might be the purchaser for. And, and that includes the truly clinical stuff, but also a lot more administrative, uh, software as well.

Great. And thank you for your time. Thank you. Safe travels. Thank you. It was great to catch up with Anne and I always look forward to seeing what the new class from the Cedar-Sinai Accelerator is going to bring to market. It's always an exciting time. Please come back every Friday for more great interviews with influencers.

And don't forget, every Tuesday we take a look at the news, which is impacting health. It, uh, keep your feedback coming, bill at this week, health it.com. It's all really helpful, good, bad or indifferent. It helps us to make a better show for you. Uh, this shows a production of this week in Health It. For more great content, you can check out our website at this week, health.com or the YouTube channel this week, health.com.

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