AHA Center for Health Innovation Market Scan

The need to improve maternal and child health equity in America while reducing access disparities has become a national focus. As policymakers and provider organizations continue to seek ways to reverse these trends, hospitals and health systems are stepping up with innovative efforts.

Consumer experiences are far from consistent as they use virtual care, symptom checkers, chatbots, provider search apps, online scheduling and myriad other tools and apps.

America’s hospitals and health systems and partners are driving innovation, advancing remote-patient monitoring, spurring artificial intelligence (AI) startups to early success and advancing new care models.

Behavioral health startups that offer virtual care continue to draw strong interest from investors, with pediatric-focused Brightline being the latest example.

It is no accident that so many hospitals and health systems performed at their best under the worst pandemic conditions. Lessons learned years earlier enabled organizations to excel under the stress of the pandemic.

UnitedHealth Group’s Optum is making another significant push into care delivery after its recent $5.4 billion merger agreement with home care company LHC Group. The question now is: What’s next for Optum?

Over the past couple of months, interesting news and insights have surfaced from Walmart and Amazon executives about their strategies and execution goals.

AHA recently provided a second round of funding for startups led by women and people from racial and ethnic minorities. The AHA selected the funds because they finance historically marginalized entrepreneurs who have limited access to the capital needed to develop innovative health care solutions.

Here are three key takeaways that senior health care leaders, venture fund managers and entrepreneurs shared at the recent ViVE conference hosted by HLTH and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME).

At the height of the pandemic and patient surges, New York-based Northwell Health and Utah-based Intermountain Healthcare began collaborating on how to address each system’s staffing shortfalls. Intermountain would soon deploy 48 team members to Northwell, which later returned the favor.