Last week, something remarkable occurred. On the evening of Tuesday, August 23rd, 47 members of our health innovation ecosystem, including physicians, entrepreneurs, technologists, executives, administrators, and investors, gathered at INDUSTRY to judge the applicants of the 2016 Prime Health Challenge. It was the single largest gathering of judges in the Challenge’s three-year history.

Now, let me be clear. We did not hire these judges. They were volunteers. And while they came from different parts of the ecosystem – with some representing the payer organizations, and others representing the healthcare providers, and still others representing the innovation community – they had all agreed to be judges in this year’s Challenge for the same reason.

They understand that our healthcare system is in dire straits. They recognize that something needs to be done. And they believe that the process we’ve developed for evaluating health-tech startups can ensure that necessary innovations are integrated into the healthcare system sooner rather than later.

Before gathering on Tuesday, the judges spent a week evaluating the startups that had applied for the Challenge. We tasked each judge with the assessment of up to five companies, which we matched them to according to their areas of expertise. With the help of our online evaluation platform, Prime Health Qualify, the judges analyzed their startups according to several key metrics, including industry attractiveness, technology validation, and potential market size.

By Tuesday, the judges had all reached their own conclusions about the readiness of the startups to be integrated into the healthcare system. They had entered their evaluations into Prime Health Qualify, which had aggregated them, generating a composite score for each company. Importantly, the Prime Health Qualify platform had also identified areas of disagreement between the judges.

Those areas of disagreement became the focus of our discussion on Tuesday.

Objective, Repeatable, Scalable

We’ve known for years now that the digital transformation of the healthcare industry is going to be a slow process. Prime Health Qualify is an attempt to accelerate that process.

By enlisting the members of our health innovation ecosystem in the evaluation of new technologies, we’re developing as comprehensive an assessment as possible. By using our platform to then aggregate those evaluations, we’re trying to reach a level of accuracy and objectivity that an individual judge wouldn’t be able to achieve on their own.

And by giving our judges a chance to discuss areas where their assessments diverged, we’re ensuring that nothing is overlooked in our evaluations.

This last point is critical. Every insight our judges can bring to the evaluation of these companies matters, because what we’re doing has never been done before. Prime Health Qualify represents something entirely new to health innovation: a standardized, repeatable, and scalable means of evaluating new digital health technologies.

After two hours of discussion on Tuesday, we completed our first round of evaluations for the 2016 Prime Health Challenge. Of the more than forty companies that had applied, fifteen were chosen to advance to the semi-finals round. Those companies were:

Admetsys
Bear Systems
bosWell
dBMEDx
Doctor Speak
Lung Direct
Medical Simulation Corporation
Nymbl Science
Orderly Health
Preventative Technology Solutions
Quantant Technology
Sleep Shepherd
StandLogix
Symbia Allergy
TOMR2 Development

Though all of those who applied for the 2016 Prime Health Challenge will be able to use their evaluations to improve their presentations, this year’s semi-finalists will enjoy the added advantage of doing so within the Prime Health Qualify process.

They will be matched with mentors who will help them sharpen their pitches, demonstrate clinical efficacy, and refine their understanding of the healthcare market. Those who reach the finals round of the Prime Health Challenge will be able to meet with healthcare providers and payers interested in piloting their solutions. And they will have the chance to pitch their innovations to those providers and payers in front of an audience of hundreds on October 19th.

Most importantly, they will join the ranks of those companies that have already been evaluated using Prime Health Qualify. In the past two years, the companies we’ve assessed have collectively raised $34 million. We expect the startups in this year’s Challenge to experience the same benefits.

And it all begins with our judges.

Jeffrey Nathanson
President & CEO
Prime Health

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (2/29/16)

HIMSS BREAKING NEWS: Prime Health Joins Catalyst HTI. Tweet this #HIMSS16 #digitalhealth

DENVER, CO – Prime Health, Colorado’s digital health ecosystem, announced today its intention to move its headquarters into the upcoming healthcare innovation hub Catalyst HTI when the building opens in early 2018. Prime Health’s digital health ecosystem has spawned a wellspring of activity in health innovation and was part of the impetus for the Catalyst innovation hub. With this announcement, Prime Health joins other healthcare organizations that have also decided to join the ecosystem and reserve spaces in Catalyst HTI, among them the Boomtown Health-Tech Accelerator and Medical Group Management Association (MGMA).

When completed, Catalyst HTI will cover an entire city block in Denver’s trendy River North District and contain the offices of Fortune 20 healthcare corporations, the members of which will work alongside employees from the fifty-plus digital health startups that will also call the building home. As the organization primarily responsible for bringing together Colorado’s thriving healthcare innovation scene, Prime Health will play a unique role within Catalyst HTI, fostering a sense of community among the individuals and companies located within the building through its events and soon-to-be-released online collaboration platform.

The potential of digital health technology to fundamentally transform how healthcare is delivered around the world has been apparent for some time now, but the highly complex, heavily regulated US healthcare system has made large-scale innovation difficult to achieve for many startups. Since its founding in 2012, Prime Health has been dedicated to bringing together clinicians, entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and policy makers to accelerate the adoption of innovations that possess the ability to improve the health of patients while enhancing the quality of care they receive and lowering the cost of that care.

“Prime Health will be essential to helping digital health startups grow and gain traction inside the very difficult landscape that is the healthcare industry,” said Mike Biselli, the President of Catalyst HTI and a board member of Prime Health. “Catalyst HTI is honored to have such an incredibly important organization as a member of our community.”

For its part, Prime Health sees its decision to join Catalyst HTI as a strategic move that reflects the rapid maturation of digital health technology, which applies information and communications technologies — telemedicine, mobile apps, wearable tech, genomics, business intelligence, data analytics, among others — to enhance healthcare.

“We believe this is a key next step in the building of our ecosystem, bringing together all of the major components of the care continuum in one place,” Jeffrey Nathanson, the President and CEO of Prime Health, admitted while explaining his organization’s decision to join Catalyst HTI. “We think that having a physical location concentrating innovation will enhance the development of this ecosystem and improve our outreach to other ecosystems.”

The agreement to move its offices into Catalyst HTI comes soon after Prime Health’s decision to begin collaborating with digital health ecosystems around the nation. These regional ecosystems – which are innovation clusters composed of digital health startups, established healthcare companies, and healthcare providers of all kinds – have been the main drivers of healthcare innovation up to now. But a growing trend of regional clusters working together is appearing, and Prime Health, with its upcoming online collaboration platform, is positioning itself to become the driving force connecting these ecosystems together.

“We think of Prime Health as the digital health ecosystem software to the hardware of Catalyst HTI’s health tech campus,” said Nathanson. “We’re currently attempting to connect ecosystems at a national level so that healthcare payors, providers, and consumers can more quickly gain access to qualified, vetted and curated new innovations to deliver easy to access, quality healthcare at a lower cost.”

Prime Health’s announcement that it will be a tenant of Catalyst HTI suggests that it views the massive digital health hub as an excellent base from which to convene the regional digital health ecosystem while simultaneously reaching out to ecosystems far beyond the borders of Colorado.

About Prime Health

Prime Health is a business ecosystem of healthcare administrators, providers, entrepreneurs, investors, technologists and academics acting as an integrator of qualified and tested health innovation to enhance healthcare. Our mission is to make Colorado the healthiest state in the U.S. and the leading health innovation hub. (Learn more here.)

About Catalyst HTI

Located in Denver, Colorado’s River North District (RiNo), Catalyst HTI is bringing together private enterprise (startups to Fortune 20), government, academic and non-profit organizations with healthcare providers and payors to accelerate innovation and drive real, lasting change. (Learn more here.)

Contact Information:
Leslie Reed, Prime Health: (347) 277-7336; leslie@primehealthco.com
Mike Biselli, Catalyst HTI: (303) 638-5348; info@catalysthealthtech.com