The six-hospital system brought on Jordan Harmon, formerly of New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery, as senior vice president and chief innovation and products officer to oversee that strategy.
“One of the things I’m most interested in doing is figuring out how we can leverage not just technology — because everybody talks about technology — but a lot of our external partnerships and figure out how to turn those into nontraditional revenue streams,” Mr. Harmon told Becker’s at the HIMSS conference in Las Vegas. “There are a number of ways we can do that: leveraging our assets, our people and our data.”
He said health systems give away “so much opportunity” in vendor relationships that aren’t mutually beneficial. “As the payer mix continues to shift, as we have volume issues and gaps in margin and gaps in budget, we need to fill those with nontraditional revenue,” he said.
Catholic Health’s potential innovation approaches include strategic partnerships with corporate entities, building a commercialization arm to protect its intellectual property through licensing models and spinoffs, and teaming up with employers and payers on value-based care.
“Instead of just talking about AI and just focusing on the administrative side, we have to understand where we can specifically meet needs on the clinical side as well,” Mr. Harmon said. “To me, that’s the most exciting part.”
After walking the exhibit hall at HIMSS, Mr. Harmon concluded there are “too many” companies with AI in their names. “I just hope many of them are investing wisely and they’re going to be around in five years,” he said. “Because you have to acquire customers.”
Mr. Harmon worked at Hospital for Special Surgery for nearly a decade, most recently serving as chief innovation and commercialization officer, before joining Catholic Health in 2025.
“At HSS, one of our partnerships was developing a relationship with Zimmer Biomet on a wearable solution utilizing the Apple watch called myMobility, which allowed us to test the idea of ingesting step count and gait information,” he said. “In addition, we signed a relationship to develop the first center for AI in robotic surgery with Zimmer.”
