Mayo Clinic is providing expertise for a group of Harvard Business School students starting an incubator called Rock Health for people with innovative ideas for improving health-care delivery.
Dr. Michael Matly, who is in charge of business development at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo’s two-year-old Center for Innovation, has a Harvard MBA himself. Officials at the school introduced Matly to Halle Tecco and other soon-to-be Harvard graduates who are launching the San Francisco-based incubator. Read more about their plans here.
Mayo Clinic isn’t providing funding for Rock Health, but Matly and others at the Center for Innovation will help judge which 11 people should be admitted to the incubator’s six-month fellowship program, slated to start in July. Applications open April 1.
Once the fellowship is under way, Matly and others at Mayo will be among those providing advice and mentorship to the fellows. Rock Health will also provide the fellows with stipends. Matly didn’t know how large the stipends will be, but described them as modest.
“There are a lot of great ideas, great technologies and great entrepreneurs who have trouble getting that initial oomph, so to speak,” Matly said.
Matly sees the program as a way for Mayo Clinic to connect at the ground level with some of the best ideas out there for improving health-care delivery.
“We hope some of these technologies will support our own work in the Center for Innovation and some of our mandates in terms of redesigning the outpatient practice, transforming community health and connecting with care at a distance,” Matly said.
If the ideas nurtured take off, Mayo Clinic may do more with the venture in the future. “Building additional partnerships in the future is something we could explore,” Matly said.
