Live from DHIS East: Mass General Brigham CIO, Christopher Coburn

Chris Coburn has been driving health system innovation for
decades. He is currently chief innovation officer at Mass General
Brigham (MGB), the nation’s largest academic research enterprise
with over $16 billion in annual revenue, 1.5 million patient
visits and more than $2.4 billion in research expenditures. MGB
also has a managed care organization, out-patient facilities and
community hospitals. 7,000 of its faculty are appointed at
Harvard Medical School.

As head of innovation, Chris leads a team of nearly 150 people
tasked with the worldwide commercial application of the unique
capabilities and discoveries of Mass General Brigham’s 85,000
employees. His unit’s business development responsibilities
include investing, company creation, international consulting,
innovation management, industry collaborations, and licensing.
Commercialization revenue exceeds $160 million annually and more
than 300 companies have been spun-off from Mass General Brigham
in the last decade.

Prior to joining Mass General Brigham, Chris was founding
director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations and served for 13 years
as its executive leader. During his tenure, Cleveland Clinic spun
off 57 companies that raised more than $700 million in equity
financing. There were none before his arrival.

In this special episode of Healthcare is Hard, recorded live at
the Digital Health Innovation Summit (DHIS) in Boston, Keith
Figlioli led a keynote discussion with Chris about the current
state of healthcare innovation. Some of the topics they discussed
include:



Embracing innovation from inside and outside of MGB.
Chris described how his organization is tasked with supporting
innovation that will help achieve strategic objectives,
regardless of where it originates. With the realization that
most health systems are large organizations not known for their
nimbleness, he shared advice for innovators looking to partner
with or sell to them about how buying decisions are made.


Corporate venture capital in healthcare. With a steady
growth in the number of health systems creating their own
venture arms over the past several years, Chris shared best
practices from being in the space for decades. For example, he
talked about balancing the commitment to both strategic and
financial goals, and how his organization catalogs the unmet
needs of MGB’s leading faculty. For entrepreneurs, he suggests
getting to know the growing number of people in corporate
venture roles, in addition to health system operators.


Getting operators to embrace digital innovation.
Fielding a question from the live audience, Chris discussed
strategies for getting operators to adapt digital health
innovation into established workflows, and how important it is
to create a culture around innovation to achieve that goal. On
one hand, he talked about how part of his organization’s job is
to get doctors to proactively and continuously think about new
ways for how they might optimize their work. On the other hand,
he talked about listening to unmet needs and addressing them
directly as a way to ease adoption from the start.



To hear Chris and Keith discuss these topics and more, listen to
this episode of Healthcare is Hard: A Podcast for Insiders.