An ability to scale innovations from early stage companies can be a competitive advantage for health care providers and payers. But partnering with startups, who might bring desired and needed innovation, can be challenging for both sides. Navigating and building enterprise-startup partnerships is not easy, but they are worth the time and effort in the hopes of advancing meaningful innovation that benefits patients, providers, and operations. Kaiser Permanente Ventures plays a unique role in supporting the healthcare ecosystem by investing in and helping introduce and spread relevant health care innovation that aligns with Kaiser Permanente’s mission.
On March 5th, Kaiser Permanente Ventures partnered with Rock Health to bring together leaders from Kaiser Permanente and Validic to discuss how Validic has successfully partnered with Kaiser Permanente to support care management via remote monitoring and real-time decision making. Validic Validic is a KPV portfolio company, and has been working with KP since 2015 to integrate patient-generated data into the provider EHR workflow, enabling the care team to monitor and manage patients outside of the acute care setting.
Angie Stevens, Executive Director of Telehealth at Kaiser Permanente, and Brian Carter, SVP of Product at Validic, discussed the partnership, how it came to fruition, and lessons learned along the way. Megan Zweig, Director of Research at Rock Health, gave an overview of digital health market trends—and how startups are positioning themselves for B2B success. Read below for some key takeaways captured in Rock Health’s blog post of the event.
For a successful partnership, both parties should be on the same page when committing to a partnership above and beyond a traditional customer relationship. Validic won the contract for KP’s remote monitoring platform because of its willingness to collaboratively partner with KP as KP helped to inform the product’s growth.
Once implementation was underway, Validic recognized early on that it couldn’t just rely on the enterprise to have a defined process for partnership with external vendors—it would have to bring its own change management and implementation expertise to bear. Working together over the past several years, KP has also built up its muscle memory to scale transformative solutions across its operations and developed a playbook to guide implementation of Validic’s technology across regions.
To learn more about the event, check out Rock Health’s blog post for a recap and podcast recording of the event.