Healthcare Leadership
Healthcare innovators run the gauntlet at HFMA’s Western Region Symposium
Published
4 hours ago
When a general session fell through during the planning process for the HFMA Western Region Symposium in Las Vegas in January, a Shark Tank-inspired event not only filled the empty slot but also ended up drawing a standing-room-only crowd of nearly 1,000 attendees.
Three lesser-known healthcare innovation companies, with solutions that had the potential to transform healthcare revenue cycle and financial operations, were chosen to participate in the Innovation Gauntlet, according to Ramona C. Hernandez, CRCR, a 30-year HFMA member and Northern California Chapter Board Member. She is also the person who suggested the gauntlet as a replacement session.
“The whole idea was to see how the audience was going to react to this experience,” said Hernandez, chief revenue officer at Boolient. “The contestants had to put themselves out there — presenting their use case in 15 minutes without doing a sales pitch.”
Judging and results
The gauntlet’s six judges were all executives from provider organizations that could potentially work with the innovations presented. They had five minutes to ask questions of each contestant, evaluating ideas in real time, using criteria such as relevance, creativity, scalability and anticipated impact.
The winner was Lindsay Joseph, CPA, the co-founder and CEO of Ann Arbor-Michigan based BedConnect, which offers real-time patient placement through a platform to transition patients from discharge to post-acute admission more efficiently. Given the success of the inaugural Innovation Gauntlet, plans are already underway to scale the event in the future.
“We received a lot of positive feedback and interest in how [symposium attendees] can participate during the next event,” said Hernandez. “Moving forward, we’re requesting submissions that we’ll de-identify to ensure neutrality and gauge their staying power in the marketplace.”
Tips for hosting an innovation gauntlet
For other HFMA chapters or regions that are considering hosting an event based on the example of the Western Region Symposium’s Innovation Gauntlet, the pilot event’s planners offer the following two lessons learned from planning and implementing their event:
- Establish alignment across event stakeholders, including the planning committee and chapter leadership, on the model used to accept and select submissions.
- Host focus groups to workshop different ideas before confirming the selection process.
