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Backing on the way for start-ups

New group of big health, business, and academic players will aim to foster health-care innovation.

A new group - backed by the region's largest health insurer, its top academic medical centers, Comcast Corp., and others - wants to roll out the red carpet for health-care start-ups in the Philadelphia region.

The Health Care Innovation Collaborative grew out of a CEO Council for Growth task force chaired by John Fry, president of Drexel University, and Dan Hilferty, president and chief executive of Independence Blue Cross.

The collaborative is to be announced Wednesday at the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce's annual State of the Region meeting in Center City.

The focus of the collaborative, with $400,000 in initial funding, will be less attracting businesses to the region than "how do we make this an easier place for health-care-oriented innovation companies and entrepreneurs to deal with?" Fry said.

The collaborative's members are Ben Franklin Technology Center of Southeastern Pennsylvania, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, Comcast, Drexel, Independence Blue Cross, Safeguard Scientifics Inc., Jefferson Health, and the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Each of the founders contributed $50,000 to cover start-up costs for the collaborative, which plans to hire a program director.

"There's no doubt about the abundance of resources and talent that these organizations possess, but many of them are not particularly easy to deal with because there's no front door," no way for entrepreneurs to easily navigate them, Fry said.

A key goal of the collaborative is to provide that door - to help big institutions, which in many cases are intense competitors, solve problems by connecting them with start-ups.

For IBC's Hilferty, the collaborative is an extension of the insurer's Center for Health Care Innovation, which has the task of investing $50 million over an unspecified number of years in companies that are trying to change health-care delivery and make it more efficient.

IBC has already worked with the University of Pennsylvania Health System on DreamIT Health, an incubator for health-care start-ups, providing data and other resources to help the fledging firms test their ideas.

"As an organization, Independence is totally committed to this, Hilferty said.

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