Healthcare Convergence Initiative

Mission

The Global Centre for Healthcare Convergence incubates, accelerates, and finances businesses that scale the best possible population health outcomes.

Background – the need to pivot towards population health

The 20th century saw medicine extend life and ease suffering, resulting in a surge in longevity. Yet, it also left us grappling with chronic diseases and rising costs. To overcome these challenges, medicine needs to pivot towards enhancing health-related quality of life, productivity, and well-being, with an emphasis on preventing and managing chronic conditions that impair individuals and harm workforce productivity. Our existing healthcare infrastructure, centred around hospitals and primary care clinics, is ill-equipped for this task, and efforts to integrate these goals have largely been unsuccessful. With a growing focus on population health management from governments and payers, the absence of a robust delivery system for population health at scale is evident. Addressing this gap is the core mission of the Global Centre for Healthcare Convergence.

The challenges – fragmentation and scalability

Patients, payers and innovators in healthcare face a multitude of challenges. Patients with chronic diseases often find themselves in a fragmented system, shuttling from one provider to another without clear guidance. The quality of care is highly variable, heavily dependent on the specific healthcare professional encountered. The journey through healthcare lacks a unified approach, with services siloed and disconnected. A significant divide also exists between medical and non-medical interventions, leading to compartmentalised care. This fragmentation fosters patient passivity, where patients have little agency and play a subordinate role in their care pathways.

In the realm of technology, there is a notable lack of synergy, with numerous innovations being developed, evaluated and operated independently rather than in harmony. Furthermore, scalability is a persistent issue. While healthcare is not short on promising concepts, their growth often stalls at the local level. There is a critical need for these ideas to evolve into systems capable of expanding their benefits to broader populations, thereby extending the reach of effective treatments. In a nutshell, we need to develop new delivery vehicles for population health that integrate fragmented components within a structure that can scale rapidly.

The vision – Precision Population Health Solutions

Precision Population Health Solutions represent a transformative shift in the healthcare paradigm, emulating the business model convergence pioneered by tech giants like Apple and Dell. These companies transformed the fragmented computing sector by integrating components into complete systems tailored to consumer needs, making computing universally accessible. Similarly, Precision Population Health Solutions are population-specific turn-key solutions to healthcare challenges, focused on delivering health outcomes for their target populations. Precision Population Health Solutions consolidate therapies, diagnostics, sensors, and digital technology into a seamless operation. They are rigorously evaluated, to demonstrate effectiveness and replicability, and are scaled through a ‘clinical franchise’ system.

Partnership

The Global Centre for Healthcare Convergence, a joint initiative by the Centre for Health Leadership and Enterprise at the University of Cambridge and Excite Ventures, partners with preeminent academic entities across the US, Europe and Asia, as well as leading technology providers and payers, to forge a pioneering research institute. This institute’s core mission is to catalyse the shift in medicine towards population health. As a ‘think-do tank’, its distinctive edge lies in fostering enterprise creation — incubating and scaling innovative ventures that embody the principles of healthcare convergence, while also influencing global health policy through its research, which guides payers, governments, and regulators on the sector’s evolving landscape.

Download our white paper on Precision Population Health Solutions (PDF)