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  Today in Health it, the story is where 13 health systems are investing innovation dollars. My name is Bill Russell. I'm a former CIO for a 16 hospital system and creator of this week in Health IT a channel dedicated to keeping health IT staff current. I. And engaged VMware has been committed to our mission of providing relevant content to health IT professionals since the start.

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Dot com slash go slash healthcare. Alright, here's today's story. 13. Health systems are investing in their innovation. Programs, and here's where they're doing this. This is from a Becker's healthcare article and they list 13 health systems. I'm gonna cover a couple of them. The ascension ventures is huge.

I, it's just amazing how big. This is the healthcare venture arm of St. Louis Space Ascension. Closed a $285 million strategic venture capital fund, bringing the firm's total assets to more than $1 billion. The new fund is backed by 13 additional health systems and is Ascension Ventures Fifth Venture Capital Fund.

You gotta love that. Four innovation projects, $1.3 million if we just . Divide that out, that's $300,000 to each one of the innovation partners. So that's really encouraging your employees to get involved in the innovation programs. So I really like that, really exciting way to go. They also are, there's an automated virtual care and communication platform called Conversa, and they increased their series B financing round on January 19th to 20 million.

So Northwell has a lot going on. Mayo Clinic led a $8.2 million funding round for Triple Blind, a digital privacy and data sharing platform, which is interesting. Uh, I think privacy will get a bunch of investment coming up here. Mayo Clinic and Kaiser announced their strategic joint venture investment in medically home a.

Boston based tech services company that powers Hospital at home programs, and we've talked about that on the show as well. Oakland based Kaiser Permanente Ventures participated in a $65 million funding round for Vesta Healthcare, a digital health and clinical provider group platform. So Kaiser has a lot of stuff going on.

Providence Digital Health, spin Out, Dex Care closed a $20 million investment round. Backed by Providence and Kaiser Permanente Ventures. So you see these partnerships are starting to pop up. Mayo and Kaiser, Kaiser and Providence. And so these teams are mitigating some risk by coming together, but they're also expanding the user base.

So these deals are getting more sophisticated. And I think they're very much tied to expanding the use of the product right outta the chute with the investments that are being made. Cleveland Clinic launched a new infectious disease research center through a $500 million innovation collaboration with the city of Cleveland and Jobs Ohio.

That's really interesting. 200 million of those dollars came from Jobs, Ohio. So there you have a public and private partnership, which is fantastic. There's more of those here as well. Ohio State University and Nationwide Children's Hospital, both based in Columbus, joined a new $1 billion innovation district in Columbus focused on.

Virus pathogens, stem cell therapies and cancer research. Ohio State will invest 650 million nationwide. Children's Hospital will invest 350 and Jobs Ohio will invest a hundred million. So keep an eye out for those kinds of partnerships as well. Partnering with state. Local governments on those kinds of programs as well as colleges and universities.

Intermountain purchased classic Air Medical and Air Medical Transport Company to bolster its telehealth and digital services. The acquisition will allow providers to expand their telehealth offerings while making it easier to transport patients in rural locations to medical facilities that are best equipped to meet their needs.

You also had a couple more. Here you have, uh, Miami-based Baptist Health South Florida. I. Launched a new healthcare technology innovation fellowship. You had Little Rock, Arkansas based Baptist and Mercy Fort Smith invested a million dollars in a healthcare science innovation center for students in the Fort Smith Arkansas area.

So a lot of things going on in the investment world. What's my so what on this story? I think it's interesting to look for those kinds of partnerships. The, the public and partnering with the universities I think are key. I think looking for . Across organizational partnerships. When you can get two or three health systems to align behind an investment, it does spur things along and, and make things move a little quicker.

I think one of the things I wanna point out here is when I, when I was CIO, I was part of a small group of people that identified strategic areas of focus. And made investments for the health systems in those areas. We invested in two tech startups, home health organizations, strategic primary care partners, and a couple other things.

You know, my So what on investment strategy is that I. It should not be hard to explain how it relates to the health system strategy. They should be linked and the links should be obvious. Strategy is based on a set of shared beliefs. We believe that access and convenience were going to be significant drivers in the Southern California marketplace.

We believed. That meant that we should place primary care physicians in apartment complex and employers and other places where people lived. We also believe that much of the future of health would be delivered outside the four walls of the health system. So we explored new models for home health as we recently saw with Mayo Kaiser in this article.

We believe that . Interoperability could not be solved by going to a single EHR, but that the problem was bigger than that and required a new way of thinking about data structures as a platform within the healthcare system. So we invested in a company to move us along on that path. We also believed that we needed access to new data methods and algorithms.

So we invested in ai. And ML within healthcare as well. The primary point I'm trying to make is that those beliefs are still true for Southern California, but they may not be true for your market. Your health system has a process for determining strategy, and that strategy should dovetail nicely into the investment strategy of your organization.

When these diverge, I'm often left wondering . Who is steering the ship and so does your staff. That's all for today. If you know someone that might benefit from our channel, please forward them a note. They can subscribe on our website this week, health.com, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Apple, Google, overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, you get the picture.

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