A New Model for Collaborating with an Academic Medical Center

The digital transformation impacting other industries is making headway in healthcare and it is creating new expectations around convenience, access, and cost. At the same time, the path to commercialization for digital innovation utilized in the clinical setting (i.e., digital patient workflow solutions) is typically more rigorous than for wellness or consumer health applications.

Digital patient workflow solutions typically have the added go-to-market challenges of:

• Engaging the clinical expertise required to ensure the solution addresses a problem in a way that is not disruptive to delivering care

• Enhancing adoption by accessing relevant clinical data, including real-world measures of outcomes, to demonstrate the solution effectiveness

• Demonstrating the rigor of digital patient workflow solutions to regulatory agencies

Combined, these challenges result in significant, if not terminal, impediments to adoption and, ultimately, negatively impact the return on investment.

The capabilities to address these challenges typically reside within an academic medical center (AMC), which can be challenging to work with for early stage companies. As AMCs embrace digitally enabled solutions, they must modify their approach to collaborating with early stage companies to overcome historical barriers that have slowed testing and adoption including:

• Lack of patient-centered design thinking and capabilities, including product development resulting in the AMC and early stage company experiencing potential conflicts due to differing expectations around timeline, process, and deliverables

• Lengthy contracting process with extended intellectual property negotiations that are costly (in terms of time and money) for capital-efficient early stage companies

• Access to privacy protected data, including de-identified data, requires time and money that many early stage companies do not have due to their typically tight commercial timelines

• Identification of principal investigators (PI) who are interested in testing digital solutions can be a hit or miss endeavor

As healthcare evolves into the digital age, the Center for Digital Health Innovation (CDHI) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and WeHealthTM Digital Medicine recently published a model that supports timely and rigorous testing of early stage digital patient workflow solutions based on their experience of working together. The resulting white paper “Accelerating Early Stage Digital Patient Workflow Innovation” describes guidelines for partnership and explains six components that can lead to successful collaboration in bringing solutions to market. This model can serve as a blueprint for early stage companies, mid to large size companies, and academic medical centers exploring how best to work together.

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