Los Angeles-based Cedars-Sinai is taking a new approach to innovation — one that blends entrepreneurial speed with the clinical rigor of a major health system.
“Our journey really began 18 months ago,” Bardia Nabet, MPH, associate director of digital strategy and business development at Cedars-Sinai, told Becker’s. “We were looking at this new data paradigm with the release of the ChatGPTs of the world and saying, how can we capture more value from our data — both from a commercialization perspective as well as an operations perspective.”
At the same time, Cedars-Sinai found that many startup products, while promising on the surface, lacked a deep understanding of how healthcare truly functions.
“They had super smart people, super engaging products and ideas, but ultimately they missed that health system understanding,” Mr. Nabet said. “So ultimately we looked at the market and said, how can we actually marry these two things together?”
That question led to the launch of Cedars-Sinai’s new Digital Innovation Platform and its venture-building partnership with Redesign Health, which has launched more than 60 healthcare companies since its founding.
“We were looking at the market and sort of seeing this opportunity to accelerate our ambitions,” Mr. Nabet said. “Redesign has been in the market for six-plus years and is very focused on healthcare, and has strong value alignment to understanding healthcare — not simply looking for a financial return.”
Announced May 7, the partnership is focused on building startups that solve real operational pain points inside Cedars-Sinai, using the organization’s own data, clinicians and infrastructure.
“What we’re really trying to do is build that deep understanding and actually spend time in the clinic, on the ground,” Mr. Nabet said. “From day one, validating: is this a patient or provider desirable solution?”
He described the process as a hybrid between the rigor of academic research and the iterative nature of startup development.
“We understand it’s not just one version that we’re going to implement once and forget it,” Mr. Nabet said. “These things need to iterate.”
The initiative also includes an internal entrepreneurship program that invites Cedars-Sinai clinicians and staff to submit unmet needs they encounter on the floor.
“We’ve done a couple of activities, for example, building out an internal form where anyone in the organization can submit an unmet need,” Mr. Nabet said. “We’re taking that as a first step to schedule a conversation with them, hear from them and what they’re facing.”
The program will focus on four core themes: specialty care access and extension, personalization of medicine, workflow intelligence, and care coordination. According to Mr. Nabet, these areas provide a framework to identify opportunities while building a pipeline of ideas — recognizing that it may take “30 good qualified ideas to get down to maybe one company.”
Startups will be developed in close collaboration with Cedars-Sinai, with Mr. Nabet’s team providing data support, implementation guidance and long-term operational partnership.
“We are the first partner for piloting, testing, providing data and then implementing that solution,” Mr. Nabet said. “When it comes to success, we see it as launching and funding those companies, getting them successfully integrated within Cedars-Sinai, and ultimately addressing those operational challenges that we’re facing.”
Beyond the startups themselves, Cedars-Sinai sees this initiative as a long-term investment in internal culture change.
“It’s helped build this innovation muscle in the organization,” Mr. Nabet said. “We’re trying to balance a bit of culture building as well as ultimately building these companies.”
The data platform supporting this work, the Digital Innovation Platform, is still evolving, but it’s designed to power innovation from ideation to deployment.
“We’re trying to basically support the entire life course of a company with our data,” Mr. Nabet said. “From confirming that market opportunity, to providing training data for AI solutions, to ultimately validating that it’s working.”
As more health systems look to bridge the divide between clinical operations and entrepreneurial innovation, Cedars-Sinai aims to serve as a blueprint — one that puts healthcare providers, not just investors, at the center of creation.
