To better serve its patient base in Illinois and Michigan, OSF collaborates with innovators across the country. Our OSF Innovation Partnerships team externally seeks solutions that can improve patient outcomes, enhance patient experience and reduce the cost of health care. This work is done through partnerships with incubators, accelerators, corporations and universities that are connecting us to technology, products and services we haven’t considered before. These partnerships have led to the successful execution of more than a dozen contracts with digital solution providers in less than two years.
Our Partners
- This month, OSF Innovation announced a partnership with MassChallenge, a start-up accelerator located in Boston, Massachusetts that helps young companies succeed through monetary awards and mentorship from its various sponsors. OSF Innovation recently signed a one-year agreement to be a Platinum Sponsor of PULSE@ MassChallenge, a program that specifically focuses on identifying and accelerating promising digital health businesses. More than 500 startups applied to be part of this year’s second PULSE cohort with about 90 matched to OSF HealthCare. The OSF Innovation Partnerships team will interview 10 companies and pick one or two to mentor and further develop their products soon after.
- In January 2017, OSF Innovation partnered with Plug and Play, the world’s largest start-up platform headquartered in Silicon Valley that connects startups to corporations and invests in more than 100 companies a year. OSF Ventures recently signed a three-year agreement to be a corporate sponsor of Plug and Play’s program for Health and Wellness to help identify progressive technologies that could benefit the health care industry. PayPal, Dropbox, Soundhound and Lending Club are among the many companies that are part of Plug and Play’s portfolio.
- In 2014, OSF HealthCare became a founding member of MATTER, a Chicago-based incubator for medical innovation, with the goal of putting us on the front lines of health care technology development. In just three short years of this relationship, our partnership has produced hundreds of introductions and dozens of relationships with startup companies focused on solving health care’s most complex problems.
Choosing the Best Startups
Partnering with external companies to get first-hand knowledge of up and coming technology and devices has introduced us to hundreds of startups—all with great ideas that could make an impact in the health care industry. With guidance from the entire OSF Innovation team and leaders within OSF, we deliberately seek solutions to defined areas we know will positively impact a majority of the patients we serve.
- Aging in Place: We want to keep our entire community healthy and active. For older adults, that means giving them the opportunity to age gracefully at home and be contributors to society by offering more health care options.
- More for Those With Less: Core to the Mission of OSF, we want to remove barriers to health care for disadvantaged individuals. We are working to find new ways to engage our most challenged individuals through new business models, care delivery and/or preventive care.
- Radical Access to Care: We want to develop a number of ways to empower our patients and build communities that foster health care beyond the hospital, making a healthy community everyone’s priority. The solution requires thinking differently about how we, as a health care system, deploy health care and wellness programs.
How External Collaboration Benefits Our Patients
We have a unique opportunity to expose these startups not only to our health care system, clinicians and subject matter experts but to our smaller communities as well. Many startups are designing solutions for larger metropolitan areas that may not translate well into rural spaces.
If we get the chance to mentor them while they are still developing their technology, products and services, we can ensure we are implementing ideas that address the needs we care about most.
Last Updated: January 27, 2022