Creating a Digital Health System Coalition

Healthcare is too big and complicated for one company to solve. A whole ecosystem of best-in-class companies must come together, all focusing on their one slice of the problem, and figure out the best way to work as a team—as a true Digital Health System—to streamline healthcare, make healthcare easy for people and companies, and grow their businesses. To that end, Union Square Ventures and I are co-hosting an inaugural one day workshop for digital health companies to meet, define a shared vision, understand aligned incentives, and work as a coalition to advance our companies. This is an intimate workshop producing actionable next steps. This isn’t a conference.

Today, all of our companies are independently working on our one tiny slice of the big healthcare morass.

And it’s ridiculously hard working within a deeply entrenched industry that fights anything but the status quo. There are companies trying to tackle things like:

• Convenient, streamlined access to doctors

• Reducing the cost/personalizing medications

• Reducing the cost/increasing the quality of predictable procedures

• Reducing the cost/increasing access to tests and their results

• Reducing the cost and increasing the quality of a company’s healthcare spend

• Helping people manage their chronic health issues

• Helping people pay/manage their healthcare spend

• Helping companies navigate their options

• Creating standardized health data

We’ve all got our own vision, our own sales team, our own technology, and our own growth strategy. We’re all passionately giving our precious time and energy to fight the same fight. We’ve all learned a ton— what works, what doesn’t, and who are the best partners to help us grow. We believe that by coming together and forming a coalition with a joint vision, and identifying opportunities to jointly execute, while preserving our own independence and success, we, as a coalition, can maximize our effects and build bigger, stronger businesses. By forming a coalition and formalizing a unified vision, we all win.

Creating a true System means learning about other companies solving other slices of the problem and identifying opportunities to support one another and work together as seamlessly as possible.

To that end, Union Square Ventures and I are organizing an inaugural one day workshop here in NYC to define a vision for the future of affordable, accessible, effective, and efficient healthcare.

Goals for Workshop #1

• Get leaders from all of these digital health companies in one room to meet and learn about each other

• Collectively design and define the ideal patient experience we’d like to see exist as a System and codify this vision

• Identify initial opportunities to collaborate

• Agree on a private member communication channel (slack, email list, etc.)

• Decide the date for Workshop #2

Goals for the future

• Identify opportunities to integrate technology and/or share resources

• Brainstorm opportunities to expand the market for all partners

• Identify opportunities to upsell and/or cross-market

• Identify shared best practices

Who

The event will be co-hosted by Andy Weissman from USV and Dr. Jay Parkinson from Sherpaa. Over the last few months, we’ve identified ~30 exceptional companies we believe should attend this initial gathering. Attendees will be builders— CEOs and/or strategic/operational executives from these exceptional companies. This event will be a combination of invitations and applications to attend. Submit your application here.

Rules

• Your company must be an established company that’s solving a hard healthcare problem with widespread need.

• We assume, if you’re attending, that everyone knows why healthcare is broken. We will ban all talk about that topic so we can strictly focus on our solutions, rather than problems.

• This is a private event. There will be no press and no sponsors.

When

December 8, 2017 from 9:00 am to 5:00pm.

Where

Union Square Ventures

915 Broadway

19th Floor

New York, NY 10010