Health Innovation Team, August 2019

For the August meeting of the KC Digital Drive Health Innovation Team, we look forward to hearing about 2 exciting community initiatives. The first deals with understanding population health more deeply, especially from the perspective of people who are commonly missed in service strategies – the lonely and isolated. The second topic deals directly with how we can continue to build the digital health ecosystem in the Kansas City Area – the new LaunchKC Health Accelerator.

Lesley Newton of Humana will discuss a joint project with Maggie Little of the Kansas City YMCA to address social isolation and health days – Whole Person Health: Social Connectedness Screening. Though not a “digital health” program at this point, it provides a solid basis for data acquisition, management, analysis and follow-up, and these are specific areas the partners are seeking to enhance.  At the same time, it fits within a recurring theme of the KC Digital Drive Health Innovation Team – the “Connectable Moment” of reaching people “where they are” as a first step, then identifying ways to respond. As important is the degree to which this effort represents a tangible initiative among payors and community partners to address key social determinants of health and well-being, another recurring theme of our Health Innovation Team deliberations.

Drew Solomon, senior VP at the EDC of KCMO who is supporting the LaunchKC Health Accelerator, will explain this exciting new program for the Kansas City area.This accelerator is the latest addition to the LaunchKC portfolio, as the program continues to shift from a broad grants competition to a vertical-based accelerator program. Local health care venture capital investor, Nueterra Capital of Leawood, is providing the investment capital for the program, which promises to award $50,000 and other benefits to at least 5 qualified start-up companies in health technology. Special areas of interest are consumer-driven care, payment reform, and advanced technology. The eleven-week program is on a fast track, with applications due August 15^th, and a kick-off in September. We expect that selected companies will make presentations to the Health Innovation Team in the subsequent months. LaunchKC is a joint initiative of the Economic Development Corporation of Kansas City, Mo. and and the Downtown Council, and KC Digital Drive is facilitating the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program across verticals to help integrate this important program with existing assets in the innovation ecosystem.