How do we implement the tools of tomorrow successfully today?
That was the question on the mind of Eric Malamud, VP of Healthcare Al at Thinkhat Venture Studios, as he sat on the stage at VIVE, the premier curated event experience for digital health decision-makers focusing on the business of healthcare.
During his participation in the panel, “VALID AI Special Session: From Collaboration to Collective Execution in Generative Al," he discussed the issue of Al adoption across the healthcare spectrum with a variety of industry leaders working at the intersection of technology and healthcare.
So where are the pain points of Al adoption as the industry sees them today, and how are venture studios like Thinkhat working to help solve the problem?
"The core concept is how do you take some of these fantastic, shiny object Al ideas and implement them into an existing clinical setting," Malamud noted. "Healthcare is really struggling with how to go beyond a ten- to fifteen-physician pilot, and really even scaling across whole departments, let alone an entire industry."
As Malamud explained, while many Al developers and innovators are able to develop a small pilot and research study to prove their concept, when it comes to implementing these new healthcare initiatives, they find that their work often dies on the vine. The reason, Malamud muses, is that health systems don't have the kind of infrastructure that is needed to support scaling these solutions.
"Then the problem becomes that when you don't get to scale, it's hard to prove the ROI outright for these solutions," he explains. "So then health systems get frustrated and say, Oh, well, I thought I purchased the solution, but it's not doing what I want it to do. So ultimately we are facing a change-management-process-implementation-type issue, rather than always the technology being the problem."
So how do venture studios fit in?
"There is an argument to be had that we could act as the glue between the many different components of industry to help facilitate overall adoption and implementation in the long term, therefore seeding the success of new Al companies in healthcare," Malamud explains. Indeed, Thinkhat is working to explore and prove his theory now.
"From the Thinkhat vantage point, we know what we're really good at," Malamud continues. "We have capital deployed and ready to deploy. We have a broad team of development resources and a commercialization team spanning customer success and sales. So we need to go to health systems and doctors and nurses, and PAs for that matter, and say, All right, you are the experts, your boots are on the ground and in the trenches actually providing care. How do your workflows work day-to-day? Where do you think this can be disrupted if we start building a solution? How integrated does it need to be with your existing workflows-with the Electronic Health Records (EHR), for example? And in response to those needs, we as a venture studio can bring our expertise and can tie people together to make these solutions more sustainable long term."
This is not just theory-it's being put into practice now. Case in point, the development of Thinkhat's educational platform FORMD, which marries the conversational Al tech seen in Thinkhat's platforms like Noki, and translates it for an educational setting—in this case, to help medical students prepare for the Objective Structured Clinical Examination (OSCE) test.
"We are developing FORMD hand-in-hand with a university that's training nurses, PAs and DOs to develop something that completely revolutionizes how those trainees engage with patient encounter simulations and practice," Malamud says. "Their faculty is providing us with the types of encounters they need their students to learn. We then work with early student testers to understand what they want to see on their end in order to better grasp and retain the information. So that's a good example of how we work hand in hand in the earliest stages of the development of a product."
The venture studio model of healthcare development is, in many ways, a response to, and evolution away from, the old way of doing and thinking about things.
"You can't just throw money at a problem and then expect to be successful," says Malamud. "And that's what the majority of the conversations we have are like; even if a solution is developed internally within a health system, they still can have a really hard time implementing it and getting it commercialized to other health systems or even just patients and doctors more broadly."
Malamud makes the comparison of how older versions of accelerators and incubators used to work: when support was provided for a set period of time.
"In those older systems, a founder would come in (who may or may not be an expert in a field) with an idea they're really passionate about pursuing," he explains. "Then the accelerator will provide them with resources, but the dynamic is more along the lines of: mentorship, guidance, connection, and networking. Some of them might make an investment, but it's more like connecting dots and giving initial guidance. Then companies usually move on from an accelerator in six months to a year to try to make it on their own."
The Thinkhat Venture Studio concept is, while not entirely tangential, considerably more holistic and long-term.
"Our goal is getting the company through the valley of death in terms of scaling a company," he explains. "We want to be able to support them through the most vulnerable stage when many companies fail, through to a Series B fundraising round-not just from a capital perspective, but by helping you find all of the pieces that a company needs to succeed." He continues, "I don't want to make it sound like, Hey, we're going to come in and solve all your problems. I think everything we do needs to be very collaborative because we need our partners just as much as they need us. We're not coming in and saying, We'll partner because we need the data you have. We need their expertise and we want to create a co-building ecosystem with them. We are working hard to truly partner with startups. We are really trying to find the answer to the idea: Maybe venture studios can be the glue we need to reach scale with a lot of these Al projects that we're struggling with right now-especially since everyone's kind of doing it in their own vertical at the moment."
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