Our Vision for Inflect Health — And the Future of Innovation in Healthcare
By Dr. Rick Newell, Andrew Smith & Lindsay Kriger
Inflect Health’s vision for driving innovation in healthcare is built on our decades of combined experience working in the industry. And while we launched Inflect 2 years ago, it is a project we started germinating many years before that.
It began as an internal program within our parent company, Vituity, a physician-owned and led acute care network, where we worked together to conceive and launch programs in telemedicine, data analytics, acute psychiatry, and clinical quality improvement. These were all key to support Vituity’s response to a broader market trend of health organizations under increasing pressure to improve quality of care, decrease costs, and innovate within the industry.
The challenge we knew then, and still face today, is innovating within the US healthcare system that’s been set in place for over 50 years, with structures that make it difficult for front line providers to be the drivers of change. Innovation in our industry must address the needs and expectations of the many stakeholders within it, from patients and their families, to their doctors and nurses, to hospitals, to pharmaceutical companies, to medical supply companies. And looming above all of that, there’s the additional stakeholders of government agencies and health insurance companies to consider.
All of these parties have their own agendas, which are often in conflict. Innovation in healthcare, in a word, is incredibly difficult — vastly more so, perhaps, than any other sector of the economy. We saw this most acutely during the height of the COVID pandemic, when outdated systems and processes faced the health crisis of our lives.
From Frontline Experience to Early-Stage Investments
As far back as 2015, we saw the need for a separate place where innovation could be cultivated and driven from the people on the frontlines of healthcare — the physicians, other healthcare providers, and business leaders who are in the trenches together every day.
Each of us has our own story on why we entered this field many years before that. Most people say it’s a “calling” but we all have the lived experience of understanding the shortcomings of the system, turning that into passion and drive. From the lack of mental healthcare for our loved ones, to the complex birthing of our own children, to the exorbitant cost of end-of-life care and everything in between, experiences like these have helped instill in us an obsession with providing quality care to everyone, no matter a person’s background — and a realization that our health system, in many ways, has fundamental friction points which impede that ideal.
So we founded Inflect Health to incubate companies conceived to overcome those barriers — and elevate care to new heights.
Here is our vision, expressed in three categories of innovation:
I. Frontline Innovation
To solve local problems, seek guidance from local physicians and other healthcare providers. This adage is core to our innovation philosophy, and reflects Rick’s first-hand experience as a practicing physician. While health innovation does sometimes come top down, from developers working far outside the traditional care system, we find that frontline care providers are just as likely to see opportunities to improve the lives of patients and providers.
To leverage this insight, we run an annual innovation grant that’s open to everyone working at Vituity. Every year, we have about 75 applications from local providers, and have so far funded numerous great ideas. They range from making systematic blood culture programs safer for our patients, to projects using 3-D printing for continuing education, to projects that enlisted the community to help with hospital beautification initiatives. We’ve funded providers who wanted to pilot new communication tools, and providers wanting to create better educational material for their patients.
One of these grants sought to address a challenge that Rick and other providers have noticed with their own patients: Barriers in a patient’s health journey, such as a lack of affordable transportation, often undermined their treatment. The led directly to the founding of Healthful, Inflect’s first incubated startup, which incorporates machine learning to identify patients most likely to benefit from concierge-level care navigation.
II. Adjacent Innovation
This is where the cultivation of programs and practices that function alongside the traditional healthcare system are categorized. The telehealth program we conceived at Vituity originally fell into this focus, as it was designed to work as an adjunct to the traditional healthcare journey.
In more recent years, our portfolio startups such as Sparta Science have launched highly promising programs in this adjacent innovation category, such as health coaching and care coordination. We are equally excited by the work of our portfolio members Alertive (subsequently acquired by Carbon Health), Ansible Health, Curve Health, Decoded Health, and SiPhox, who are driving adjacent innovation in the field of remote patient monitoring
III. Transformational Innovation
Our third focus is on breakthrough innovations which can reshape the industry’s approach to healthcare. We see this happening both in early stage healthtech startups, and with highly successful, well-known tech companies that haven’t traditionally been associated with our industry, but are looking to do more in health.
Within our portfolio, examples of transformational companies include TRIPP, which is developing experiences that improve mental and emotional wellbeing through VR, and HealthRhythms, which helps care workers measure and improve a patient’s mental and behavioral health.
Cultivating Startups, Connecting Them to a Health Network
These three categories of innovation summarize our vision, and all the startups in our portfolio. We are proud to say that Inflect Health is one of the few (if not only) physician-owned venture hubs to support early stage investments like this.
Often, these startups directly align with the needs of Vituity’s patients in acute need of support, services, and tools that are not readily available elsewhere. When a portfolio company is addressing an issue that clinics are having, we work to integrate these company’s into Vituity’s services.
In every case, we offer our portfolio investments advice on folding their offerings into the health industry’s workflow. A startup might have the best product or the best service on the market, but if it doesn’t fit within the acceptable workflow for patients or doctors, it’s simply not going to be adopted.
Our industry’s resilience through COVID proved to all of us that even though innovation is difficult, it can be done. We all felt the power of that moment, and it contributed to the choosing of our innovation hub’s name. Prior to COVID, we saw healthcare at an inflection point; the coming of COVID confirmed that the inflection point had indeed arrived.
Over the next few years to a decade, we expect to see advancements in human health and wellness that we haven’t seen for hundreds of years before it. We see Inflect Health at the forefront, helping drive that change and creating meaningful impact for patients and providers and our communities.
