Aurora, Colo., June 13, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- UCHealth’s innovation team will soon move into the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation building in Denver’s River North District (RiNo) as one of the facility’s largest tenants. UCHealth will develop an innovation hub in the first-of-its-kind center that will leverage brilliant minds both inside and outside the health system – to help transform health care delivery of the future.
“Artificial intelligence, big data, decision support, virtual health and wearables are rapidly disrupting health care as we know it,” said Dr. Richard Zane, UCHealth chief innovation officer. “We are committed to being at the forefront of this change and partnering with other innovators to improve the quality, experience and safety of health care while helping control costs.”
Catalyst HTI is a novel real estate development that brings together stakeholders from across health, wellness and health care industries to collaborate and incubate innovative ideas, fundamentally transforming health care as it has been known. The site will bring together more than 70 organizations that will all work together in a space focused on collaboration to foster new ideas. UCHealth IT experts and members of the organization’s creative team also will have space within the facility.
“Health-tech innovation has the potential to significantly improve medical outcomes, and health care is not going to be re-imagined just through established health care organizations or startups – we have to do it together,” said Mike Biselli, health-tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Catalyst HTI. “Our industry integrator concept allows UCHealth to be plugged in at the point of innovation by physically housing a health care innovation ecosystem in a single location – allowing entrepreneurs, technologists and clinicians to collaborate through the entire process of innovation.”
UCHealth plans to build an innovation lab at the location with a “hospital room of the future,” a space to test equipment and devices and actually create a new type of clinical setting. It might not even be in a hospital – it could be in your own home, said Steve Hess, UCHealth chief information officer. By experimenting with virtual health options, wearable monitors and the electronic health record, health care organizations might be able to transform a patient’s bedroom into a space where medicine is delivered in a novel way that is both convenient and comforting to the patient while also lowering costs.
“We are now in the dawn of a new era of medicine, one in which the electronic medical record and artificial intelligence work hand in hand with medical providers to support and inform clinical decisions,” said Hess. “By working together with some of the brightest minds from other health care companies, we will accelerate innovation and develop novel ways of healing patients and keeping the public healthy.”
UCHealth is already partnering with more than a dozen innovative companies, and together, products have been developed to improve the efficiency of operating rooms, boost the accuracy of medication prescribing, inject the latest research and protocols into the electronic medical record, and to utilize wearable devices to constantly monitor the vital signs of patients. Many more innovations are currently in development.
“The most exciting part of innovation and the Catalyst location is that we can only anticipate what’s next. We don’t know yet what ideas and innovations will be inspired and developed here – and we can’t wait to expand the work we’ve already started,” said Dr. Jennifer Wiler, founder and executive director of the UCHealth CARE Innovation Center.
Catalyst is being developed by Denver-based Koelbel and Company, the longest-operating family-owned real estate development firm in the region.
“Denver has undergone a dramatic transformation since we began developing here in 1952,” said Buz Koelbel, president at Koelbel and Company. “We are at the confluence of an exciting time both in the City of Denver and in health care innovation, and it is incredibly gratifying to be bringing the Catalyst concept to fruition, with UCHealth's involvement, to support the vision of Colorado as one of the nation’s premier health technology innovation hubs."
About UCHealth
UCHealth is an innovative, nonprofit health system that delivers the highest quality medical care with an excellent patient experience. UCHealth combines Longs Peak Hospital, Memorial Hospital, Poudre Valley Hospital, Medical Center of the Rockies, UCHealth Medical Group, Broomfield Hospital, Grandview Hospital, Yampa Valley Medical Center, Pikes Peak Regional Hospital and University of Colorado Hospital into an organization dedicated to health and providing unmatched patient care in the Rocky Mountain West. With more than 150 clinic locations, UCHealth pushes the boundaries of medicine, providing advanced treatments and clinical trials and improving health through innovation.
About Catalyst HTI
Located in Denver, Colo.’s River North District (RiNo), Catalyst HTI is a 180,000-square-foot industry integrator designed to bring health-tech startups and established entities together under one roof. The building will cover an entire block, located on the west side of Brighton Boulevard between 35th and 36th streets. Catalyst HTI’s goal is to bring together private enterprise (startups to Fortune 20), government, academic and non-profit organizations with healthcare providers and payers to accelerate innovation and drive real, lasting change. For more information visit www.catalysthealthtech.com.
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