Accelerating Pediatric Healthcare and Virtual Care

In our inaugural episode, we kick off the Accelerate Health Podcast with Omkar Kulkarni, chief innovation officer for Children's Hospital Los Angeles and managing director for KidsX, a pediatric health accelerator. KidsX is a global ecosystem of pediatric innovators, anchored by a consortium of 30 children’s hospitals from North America, Europe and Australia motivated to partner with early stage digital health companies to transform pediatric healthcare. Kulkarni will discuss how this amazing consortium will build, test and deploy software solutions to make pediatric care exceptionally effective, safe, efficient and convenient for children and families.

Pediatric healthcare has lots and lots of opportunities to innovate, and offer digital solutions to solve really important problems. And one way of doing that is to connect the entrepreneurial community, the investor community, and the customers or the provider community together. In order to specifically solve problems that are important to pediatrics, and are anchored around specific solutions that can be delivered through digital means of digital health solutions.

This ecosystem doesn't really exist yet for pediatrics. There's not really a place where innovators and entrepreneurs, investors, technologists, providers and payers can come together to focus on problems around pediatric digital health. And so the first part of KidsX is building that ecosystem.

“There are a lot of efforts to build different programs in the pediatric landscape that have done great work in terms of pediatric innovation broadly, but nothing with the hyper focus on digital health. It's one thing to have any ecosystem that comes together, you know, they meet every quarter, they talk, they share ideas, they learn from each other. That's amazing, that's helpful. And there are great programs like that, that exists in pediatrics and in in overall health care,” shared Kulkarni. “But what I think we're trying to differentiate with KidsX is, let's bring together this ecosystem of hospitals and investors and thought leaders and entrepreneurs, and let's actually try to figure out how to get these solutions into the hands of doctors and patients and families... And ultimately, if we can do that, I think that's a great model to replicate beyond pediatrics, for other folks, maybe even you think about in other parts of healthcare that need that kind of ecosystem.”

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