Cintrifuse launches innovation studio for the healthcare industry

Last week, Cintrifuse announced a new branch to the #StartUpCincy ecosystem. On June 30, they launched Spry Labs, a venture-building studio for healthcare solutions. The project is a collaboration between Cintrifuse and Mercy Health with a number of other partners, including The Health Collaborative and Bethesda, Inc. The idea is to find and commercialize solutions to some of the healthcare industry’s most pressing problems.
 
While accelerators and incubators help entrepreneurs launch and grow the ideas they already have, a venture studio starts with the problems recognized by the industry. Cintrifuse’s healthcare partners will identify problems they and other companies face, and Spry Labs will bring together innovators to come up with and prototype solutions. Then those partners will be the first to test the prototypes.
 
“What we’re going for is digital healthcare solutions,” says Patrick Venturella, Cintrifuse's content marketing specialist. “We’re trying to get these people all in one room to solve these problems that we know we all have.”
 
Venturella points out that Cincinnati is a great place to start a healthcare venture lab because of the strong healthcare industry in the region.
 
Healthcare is the perfect industry for this kind of endeavor because as a whole, it is facing a major disruption. It's in the middle of a revolutionary transformation toward value-driven and patient-centered care, with the goal of reducing costs while also improving outcomes and patient experience.

Of course, this transformation means lots of problems to solve, which means lots of opportunity for Spry Labs. Solutions could be anything, from tools to help patients navigate the healthcare system easily to instruments for tracking community outcomes.
 
“These shifts are happening as we speak, and we want to do our part,” Venturella says. “Now the hard work starts, and we’re hitting the ground running.”
 
Spry Labs is launching right into its first design sprint and will premier what comes out of that process at the end of September at the Healthcare Innovation Xchange.
 
For Cintrifuse, it’s a new frontier, and one that might continue to yield new ventures.
 
“We’re now in the business of building companies,” Venturella says. “We’re starting with healthcare, but there’s nothing stopping us from branching out.”