Friday, September 03
Is our region ripe for development of a healthcare information technology cluster? And does “the region” need to develop a strategy around such?
BioEnterprise has been working with a consultant over the past few months, trying to make a determination on that. The trigger for the evaluation has been stimulus funding around electronic medical records. To that end, BioE hosted a discussion this week around the topic and invited a cross-section of entrepreneurs, CIOs, tech transfer folks and myself (representing the broader IT community) to discuss and help them come to a conclusion on viability.
According to BIoE’s consultant, Carol Kovac (former head of life sciences at IBM), it looked like their might be opportunities in a couple of areas: “managing chronic disease” and “managing clinical involvement”. These two areas were narrowed down from a handful of different options including software, systems integration, hardware and so forth. According to Carol, while overall VC funding has been down for the last couple of years, VCs are expressing high interest in funding companies in the healthcare IT space.
However, a limiting factor identified by BioE is a lack of CEO depth currently in the region. That is, we don’t have a large pool of serial CEOs (much less serial entrepreneurs) to run companies funded under some kind of regional model.
I think another interesting take though is, where do the ideas come from for HIT companies? And further, what can a “regional strategy” do to support innovative, creative, entrepreneurial ideas? It feels to me that either those elements exist in a region or they don’t, I’m not sure they can be created.
That being said, if the focus is on creating an environment that puts a spark to the tinder of ideas, resulting in a flare up of early stage companies, then there might be some potential. Such an environment would need to tie together funding, CEO recruitment and the local healthcare community, not to mention colleges and universities. But especially the healthcare community, that’s where the ideas would be born, from the data/patient management problems experienced in healthcare. And entrepreneurs solve problems.
Finally, it was very interesting that of the tech CEOs at the table, none was the founding CEO; each was brought in by the company founders or funders to run the business. Maybe that proves the point though that if we can ignite good ideas, we can find CEOs to run and advance those companies.
And what was the consensus from the discussion, should the CLE pursue a regional strategy to foster healthcare IT companies? Decidedly non-committal was the result. So while the direction may not be perfectly clear at present, BIoE is committed to further investigation. I’m looking forward to follow on discussions.
Posted by:Brad Nellis