For our latest Healthcare Innovation Discussion, director of HealthTech Arkansas Jeff Stinson interviewed Joe Sasson, EVP of Ventures at MedAxiom.
Jeff: HealthTech Arkansas is incredibly excited to begin the HeartX journey with MedAxiom, and we’d love for our readers to learn more about you and your organization. Please tell us about your role there.
Joe: MedAxiom is a membership organization designed to improve the clinical, operational, and financial aspects of cardiovascular care delivery by focusing on shared data and shared expertise. Our mission is to transform cardiovascular care and improve heart health. The MedAxiom organization is divided into three primary business units, 1) Membership, 2) Care Transformation Services and 3) Ventures and Industry Partnerships.
As the leader of the MedAxiom Ventures division, I serve a dedicated team that supports MedAxiom’s relationships with industry partners. Together we set the strategy, identify industry and marketplace needs, and innovate new ways to help our partners accelerate solution adoption for the benefit of cardiovascular programs and cardiovascular patients.
Jeff: How has MedAxiom historically sought to help its member cardiologists and cardiology practices become more innovative?
Joe: Innovation has always been a part of MedAxiom’s DNA. As a 20-year-old company that has never let go of its start-up mentality, MedAxiom continues to support other innovative start-ups on their journey towards expanding their impact on care. MedAxiom offers industry partners several opportunities designed to create relationships, enable the dispersion of education on new and refined technologies, and accelerate the adoption of life- and cost-saving solutions that benefit cardiovascular programs, physicians, and, most importantly patients. MedAxiom has often created low barriers for start-ups to participate in our ecosystem, and we see the HeartX Accelerator as a more formalized pathway to executing that same goal.
Jeff: What attracted you to this collaboration with HealthTech Arkansas, and what does MedAxiom hope to achieve with HeartX?
Joe: Supporting start-ups and innovation through our channels and services has always been a priority for MedAxiom. Collaborating with HealthTech Arkansas provides a more comprehensive strategy with additional structure and support for innovation. HealthTech Arkansas stood out to MedAxiom due to its specific focus on cardiology-related solutions, the quality of the organizations based in Arkansas that partner with HealthTech Arkansas today, and the cultural alignment between the two organizations — which MedAxiom views as critical to the success of any endeavor. Using MedAxiom’s national platform and channels, we can work with the accelerator cohort organizations to tell their story to a national audience outside of the successes they achieve in Arkansas.
Jeff: What are some of the trend lines you see in cardiovascular care overall in our country, and how do you see MedAxiom participating in those trends?
Joe: The national trends in cardiovascular care must transcend innovative products and solutions. Among many other factors, new trends are driven by improvements in care guidelines, payment reform, and technological advancements that typically require ancillary products and solutions to effectuate the needed shifts in cardiovascular care. The more significant trends that have been consuming national attention involve remote patient monitoring (i.e., implantable device monitoring, ambulatory arrhythmia monitoring, and physiologic monitoring); the shift of procedures to ambulatory surgery centers; the utilization of CT to diagnose chest pain; the adoption of whole person wellness via mental and behavioral health as well as cardiac rehabilitation; and a significant focus on cost reduction and improved services for patients with conditions such as heart failure, atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and coronary artery disease. There are other trends affecting the market, yet these are a few in which we see much activity at the current time.
These trends must be supported by technologies and solutions designed to achieve change. MedAxiom has focused its offerings such as peer benchmarking data, conference presentations, publications, webinars, podcasts, and MedAxiom Academy courses, to help cardiovascular programs navigate these trends. MedAxiom anticipates that some of the companies that enter into Heart-X will also support the attainment of optimal performance related to one or more of these trends.