On Building Better Healthcare Ecosystems

Hashed Health’s journey began in 2016 with a big bet on the power of collaboration in healthcare. We founded and built a company on the idea that by working together as an industry, we can truly innovate. At the time, it was a radical idea that focused on collaboration and trust. Since then the world has changed, and Hashed Health’s role in advancing that idea has grown stronger.

Now, Hashed Health is playing an active role in solving our industry’s biggest shared challenges by creating new startups unlike anything that has come before. These startups are all based on a theory that the traditional “every organization for itself approach” is inadequate for our times. We are supporting brave leaders across healthcare and life sciences who are rethinking what their business is and how it contributes to the value chain in which it sits. This is a defining moment for our industry and Hashed Health.

We Are Driven by Our Common Purpose

A common purpose grounds the Hashed Health community: to improve and empower the health of individuals and communities through innovation.

At Hashed Health, we believe in the fundamental right to quality healthcare. We believe that, as an industry, we are obligated to innovate and evolve to optimize care. Healthcare involves many constituents across many settings who are all contributing to an outcome. So, we believe the greatest opportunities to improve care and reduce costs rest in the creation of radically collaborative businesses that at optimized for trust, transparency, and incentive alignment.

These beliefs are powered by new technologies designed for radical collaboration. New solutions are purpose-built to enable trust, transparency, and incentive alignment at the product level. Using these technologies, Hashed Health introduces novel approaches to solving shared problems across healthcare. Early use cases include provider credentialing, supply chain resiliency, alternative payment models, clinical trials, cooperative therapy development, and healthcare price discovery and transact-ability.

These are challenging problems. Solving them requires us to think differently. Solving them requires us to think at an industry level and requires us to think about the relationship between technology, community and culture.

An early example is Professional Credentials Exchange (“ProCredEx”), which spun out of Hashed last year. ProCredEx takes a refreshing approach to the management of practitioner data (credentialing, enrollment, privileging, provider directory management, and compliance). In place of today’s time-consuming, silo’d, redundant processes, ProCredEx employs an exchange model with incentives to share. Doing so leverages an entire industry’s worth of data for the benefit of each participant. The technology enables organizations to trust each other’s work. By using a distributed ledger, ProCredEx promotes the value created by the community. It’s an elegant solution to a hair-on-fire problem experienced by providers, payers, and physicians across our industry. Furthermore, by digitizing credentials we make them trade-able and composable, which creates a very interesting bridge from traditional “credentialing” concepts to the modern, value-focused world.

Hashed Health is following this community-focused design pattern for other use cases. As the technologies we use continue to mature, the aperture for use cases will widen. This is more than innovation. It is a fundamentally new conversation about the relationship between society and money. In healthcare, it will redefine the relationship between commerce and care for the communities we serve.

Great Vision Without Great Community Is Irrelevant

Hashed Health is a meeting place for the leading minds in the building of collaborative healthcare infrastructure and applications. Our success depends on building community. Our work is their work. The community’s data powers the utilities we create. Our job is to build the infrastructure that connects our community members to their ecosystem and enables them to be rewarded for helping solve shared problems. Value is driven by contribution, not tax collection. That is “radical collaboration.”

Our community includes a large and growing group of enterprise organizations, individuals, investors, co-founders, validators, and other contributors who share our vision. This community, borne out of years of work dating back to 2016, includes some of the biggest brands in healthcare, insurance, technology, and banking.

To accelerate our work, we recently introduced significant new partners to our community.  They represent a unique and powerful combination of experience that will guide Hashed Health’s efforts as we advance our vision. We are profoundly grateful for their support, and we are excited to make these partnerships meaningful.

An Innovative Approach to Company Building

Our venture studio process is as innovative as the startups it produces. As a venture studio, we take ideas and turn them into sustainable, scalable, valuable companies through partnerships with co-founders and enterprises. We fail often when the stakes are low so that we can succeed when the stakes are high. We rely on our community for validation at every step.

In our process, it is important that we simplify things as much as possible. We aim to simplify big problems into “minimally viable problems” that guide the discovery process. Our process then aims to simplify a big solution into a “minimally viable solution” that provides a starting point for a larger product and company vision. Then our delivery team builds a “minimally viable product,” which is the simplest product response to the problem. We go live with the “minimally viable network” of participants needed to realize value.

While Hashed Health’s solutions begin as simply as possible, our vision is ambitious — the creation of industry-wide ecosystems with incentives aligned toward solving the most daunting challenges in healthcare. We partner with enterprises on lower-risk solutions that create shared value, and, in doing so, we create the needed space for addressing increasingly complex and systemic opportunities.

This model also allows Hashed Health to evolve with the market. We are in the early innings of Web 3.0 and its impact on the world is not yet known. Our studio model allows us to learn and evolve, creating new startups that continue to take advantage of the most advanced technical, business, and governance structures possible.

Our Big Hairy Audacious Goal: Five Startups in Two Years

We do know this… Now is the time to move faster. Opportunities for innovation have never been greater. The modern world has created new sources of data and the need for better systems of record. Non-technical drivers of change (value-based payments, shifting benefits structures, consumerism, pricing transparency, direct contracting, virtual provider networks, decentralized clinical trials, etc.) are being felt across healthcare and life sciences. The entire market seems to be evolving in real-time.

In the next two years, we plan to launch five new companies. That’s a goal that would make Jim Collins proud. It is the definition of a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG). It is daunting but possible.

It’s possible because we have a compelling vision. We have a strong community. We have new, differentiating, simplifying technologies. We have experience with the business and technical design patterns that point to early wins. We are already building a series of startups that leverage many of the tools and architectures we have already created. We know we are aligned with the forces of society, technology, and economics. And, most importantly, we are aligned with the consumer.

We work toward this goal every day, knowing that our work can improve the lives of people in our families and yours. We think there’s never been a better or more important time to be an innovator in healthcare. We know Hashed Health has an important role to play.

I look forward to reporting on our progress in the months to come and I hope you will join our community in creating a future for healthcare we can all trust and believe in.