Q&A: UH Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer David Sylvan on Removing Barriers to Access

It’s not exactly a stretch to say that the American healthcare system is flawed, with seemingly endless questions to answer and gaps to fill. The good news is that there’s a great deal of interest in solving those problems, largely through technology.

The downside is that not every idea — or startup, for that matter — is ready for primetime. For healthcare leaders, the challenge is in identifying the solutions that “drive definitive, sustainable, and scalable value to the way care is delivered.” That’s where programs like UH Ventures, the venture capital arm of University Hospitals, hope to make a mark by “identifying opportunities that can be commercially viable and be worthy of a platform,” said David Sylvan.

There is, however, both an art and a science to that. “We have to be very discerning when it comes to ensuring that the solution has a well-defined problem associated with it,” he noted in an interview with Kate Gamble, Managing Editor at healthsystemCIO. “We need to make sure we’re matching the opportunities we’re looking at with strategic imperatives and it’s not a spaghetti against the wall approach.”

In addition to his role as president of UH Ventures, Sylvan also serves as Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer for University Hospitals, where his team is focused on three core pillars: patient access/experience, transitioning to value-based care, and right-sizing through optimization. During the conversation, Sylvan shared his insights on what it takes to foster innovation; why he must be “joined at the hip” with UH’s CIO; the approach he utilized to become immersed in healthcare; and why outside experience is so important.

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Bold Statements

We can use tools and technologies to identify blank spaces in schedules, but we can’t always just jam every blank space with an appointment. We have to be cognizant of the provider’s needs as well. Threading that needle between the payer and the provider experience is sacrosanct.

We have to be very discerning when it comes to ensuring that the solution has a well-defined and sufficiently audacious problem associated with it. And so, we look to areas of the organization where we solicit problem statements and ask, how might we help you solve them? They fill in the blanks and we source against those.

We have to be prescriptive about what we’re looking to solve for — the milestones to attainment, and the measurement and reporting against those milestones once an initiative has gone live.

Six months came and went, and I fell in love with the mission of what we were trying to achieve: impacting communities and families. It’s a very humbling, powerful opportunity.

If we don’t chip away at these problems with discernment and with aggression, they will create an existential threat for us. We will be disintermediated out of the continuum, so to speak. And so, we have to stay pretty relentlessly focused on being our own change agents.



Q&A with David Sylvan, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, University Hospitals

Gamble:  Hi David, thanks for joining us. I look forward to speaking about some of your core objectives, what you’re doing with UH Ventures, and what it takes to build a culture of innovation. So, for some background information, UH Hospitals is a system with 21 hospitals, including 5 joint ventures and 50 health centers. And you have a big geographic span. Does that cover it?

Sylvan:  Yes. We’re in about 20 counties in Northeast Ohio. We have some offshore affiliations with the likes of the Oxford University in the UK,