Health:Further Brings Innovation to Traditional Healthcare

Nashville healthcare is about to get a check-up. August 19 and 20 marks the inaugural Health:Further conference presented by Parallon and produced by healthcare innovation generator Jumpstart Foundry and designed to bring nationwide industry leaders and innovators in the medical field together to discuss the industry’s future.

For the past 40 years, Nashville has been the dominant player in health care protocol and management and is home to 350 traditional healthcare companies. Jumpstart’s CEO and founder Vic Gatto predicts that in the next 5-10 years, traditional platforms of the industry will continue to evolve in response to new technology. This will rapidly change the status quo of the healthcare sector.Jumpstart exists to help translate innovation and technology change for big companies and to help empower traditional systems.

Jumpstart has recently transitioned to a single-industry accelerator (I highly recommend you read A New Gameon JSF). Last year, their demo day followed the traditional accelerator model of start-ups presenting to local investors and mentors. The demo day was well received, with over 1000 in attendance, but Gatto noticed the vast majority of attendees had had previous experience with Jumpstart. Here he saw an opportunity to invite more industry players and outside investors.

The Health:Further conference is focused on attracting people passionate about the future of healthcare, not just investors. Gatto sees the conference taking on more of a collaborative nature where participants share thoughts on innovations and over two days, create a product attractive to the national healthcare audience. Jumpstart aims to create a forum for healthcare innovation.

The direction of these innovations are based on major trends Gatto sees the industry taking. The first is the increase of market power for the consumer. Patients are no longer taking uninformed direction from physicians, but are taking more control of their own healthcare and utilizing available technology to educate themselves.

The second and most revolutionary trend Gatto sees is a transition in the reimbursement model from fee-for-service to value based service, or being paid to manage a population regardless of the amount of care needed. The transition is easier for some systems than others, but Jumpstart is working to build innovative tools to help institutions understand and interact with the population.

A revolution in traditional practice this complex and far-reaching deserves educated debate, and that is exactly what Gatto has planned for Health:Further. Two participants will defend volume-based and value-based systems respectively and address difficult issues and questions surrounding the new system.

Gatto enjoys working in an industry that is both incentive and intrinsically motivated. He said everybody wins when innovation is used to save time and resources.

“What I love about healthcare investing and healthcare startups and healthcare innovation is that you’re building really important, life-changing products and services that impact many people’s lives. And yet, at the same time, this is not a charity. We are very clearly out to make obscenely big piles of money. And what I love about healthcare investing is you can do that together, and they are mutually supportive…There’s not a lot of industries where you can have your cake and eat it too like that.”

Health:Further Conference is the ‘flag in the ground’’ for Nashville as a leader of national healthcare innovation, pulling in both entrepreneurs and corporate industries and acting as a mediator to connect the two. To register for the Health:Further Conference August 19 and 20, visit HealthFurther.com. Following the conference, video content will be available on the website. Health:Further is also looking for partners and speakers for next year’s conference including both innovators  and industry participants.

Follow Vic Gatto on Twitter: @vic_gatto. Follow Jumpstart on Twitter: @jsfoundry.

I’ll have my conference pop-up podcast studio on-site at Health:Further capturing audio content (this will be similar style with what I produced around 36|86 Podcast Tennessee Diversity, Support And Women In Entrepreneurship. I’d love to see you at Health:Further! If you’ve not already purchased your ticket, use promo code “ECmember.”