A $150,000 check from Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine doesn’t buy a startup much more than a foot in the door. Getting further — to an actual pilot inside one of the country’s largest academic health systems — requires clearing three specific tests, according to the executives who run its accelerator program.
Northwestern Medicine handed that check to each of six European companies that presented Aug. 26 at Matter, a startup incubator in Chicago, the first cohort of its international accelerator with London-based venture studio Founders Factory.
The founders were in part selected on the bet that their startups working under Europe’s tighter data-access rules would arrive with sharper, more portable fixes for U.S. healthcare problems.
The showcase came a week after Northwestern Medicine executives spent time at Epic’s User Group Meeting, underscoring a dual-track strategy: Northwestern remains, in the words of chief digital and information officer Doug King, “absolutely a platform-based health system,” with the EHR giant as a key strategic partner.
But that platform commitment runs alongside a separate, growing pipeline for outside startups, Mr. King told Becker’s.
“Working with startups is something we need to do as CIOs because there are a lot of problems in healthcare that can be solved with technology,” he said. “It’s not a should-do; it’s a must-do. It’s part of our duty of being a leader of technology to continue to try to work with companies that are solving problems for our healthcare industry, our institutions and our society.”
The first test is whether a startup is duplicating something Northwestern already gets from its core systems.
“I think we were looking for organizations solving problems that weren’t necessarily being solved by Epic or other core system platforms,” said Hannah Koczka, vice president of NM Ventures and Innovation. “We weren’t really looking to compete.”
The second is whether a technology creates value across more than one part of the operation — clinical, financial and administrative — rather than solving a single, narrow problem. Mr. King pointed to Uncovr, a startup building ambient AI tools that generate surgical operative reports and coding directly from procedure videos, as an example of the kind of multipronged fit Northwestern looks for.
“That is going to help the health system. It’s going to help the coder. It’s going to help with revenue, but it’s also going to help the [surgeon] get time back,” he said. “So it’s not checking one box.”
The third is viability. A startup can clear both earlier tests and still not be positioned to deploy across a system the size of Northwestern’s, which spans 11 hospitals and more than 200 outpatient and diagnostic sites.
“It depends on if they’re ready for the scale of Northwestern,” Mr. King said. “So we need to get the clinical champion, and then we need to make sure that they’re ready to scale. And if not, that’s OK. We’ll continue to help them, or they have other sites, and then as they grow, we will continue to have conversations with them.”
Passing those tests doesn’t guarantee a contract. The accelerator itself is structured to de-risk any eventual pilot rather than promise one.
“We take them through a lot of our standard vendor onboarding at Northwestern,” Ms. Koczka said. “That’s part of the program to teach them how to negotiate a contract with the health system, what are the cybersecurity controls you need, and so forth.”
Northwestern runs a separate, U.S.-focused accelerator with Techstars — now recruiting its third class — that follows a similar model, and Ms. Koczka said the results there offer a data point for the broader approach: a roughly 95% post-program engagement rate among companies that have gone through it. Whether the six Founders Factory startups reach a pilot at Northwestern will be decided after the program concludes with a second showcase in London in mid-October, when Northwestern’s clinical subject-matter experts weigh in on readiness.
Mr. King said the model isn’t about Northwestern chasing an international footprint of its own. The health system’s approach to working across borders, he said, runs through partnerships — with Founders Factory, the London Clinic and, potentially, others — rather than establishing a physical presence overseas.
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