In an effort to profit from new technologies, Partners HealthCare is looking to put its genetic software program on the market.
The computer program, GeneInsight, took the Boston-based health system about a decade to create, according to a report from the Boston Globe.
Now that new tool is ready for primetime, Partners wants to sell it to hospitals and labs worldwide, the Globe reports. The program works through a patient's blood sample; the software analyzes the blood for specific genes, looks for abnormalities and crunches all that data into one report stored in the patient's electronic health record.
"This is the type of tool that changes the game," Calum MacRae, M.D., chief of cardiovascular medicine at Partners-owned Brigham and Women's Hospital, tells the Globe. "Partners is beginning to take a more outward approach to novel technologies. That will change the revenue streams that we're so dependent on."
The tool currently is helping MacRae examine the genetic factors that lead to heart issues for his patients.
Partners will sell GeneInsight to tech company Sunquest Information Systems Inc., which then will market the tool. Partners will earn royalties from the sale.
Baltimore's MedStar Health and Cleveland Clinic also are developing and selling technology to supplement their overall revenue, FierceHealthIT previously reported.
At a MedStar office in Washington, which houses the healthcare facility's Institute for Innovation, employees take ideas for new technologies thought up by hospital staff and turn them into realities that can sell for profit.
Innovation centers also are popping up to help grow new technologies and inventions within healthcare.
In healthcare, the odds of someone going alone and being able to take their idea to the market are very small, Paul Nagy, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Medical Innovation Center, said last month at the Connected Health Conference. Innovation, he said, needs design, technical and business perspectives.
To learn more:
- here's the Globe article