Creating a Global Ecosystem of Innovators to Scale Healthcare Solutions

In this episode of Friends of Project Healthcare…

Founder and CEO of ScaleHealth, Taylor McPartland, shares with Project Healthcare colleagues Lauren Hatcher and Jeremy Raley what began early on as a passion project has since grown into a global health innovation ecosystem, ensuring access to advanced healthcare solutions.

“It takes a special breed to be a startup founder,” McPartland offers. “And then it takes an even more special breed to want to be a startup founder in a crazy industry like healthcare.”

A self-confessed “serial founder,” McPartland formed his first startup, a data marketing platform, in 2010 after graduating from Whittier College. He led that company for six years, in which time he developed his passion for leveraging innovation to address systemic challenges to healthcare access. 

The result, ScaleHealth, provides innovators and entrepreneurs with strategic resources and partnerships that will help them succeed.

ScaleHealth is building a two-sided marketplace, matching solutions with industry needs by reducing the time frame, costs, and friction associated with typical vendor and technology scouting exercises.

“We wanted to be able to have an entrepreneur sit down with a founder or with an investor, with a government thought leader, with a decision maker or a health system,” McPartland shares, “and we wanted ScaleHealth to really be the table where they could come together and say, we’re all trying to move in the same direction.”

One of the examples he’s proud to share was solving an issue rural hospitals in New Mexico were facing during the height of the pandemic, communicating with elderly patients, often the hearing-impaired, who relied on lip-reading for communicating with their physicians, a task made much more difficult with masks.

“The CEO came to us and said we’re looking for a solution that’s going to take a lot of bandwidth from our existing team. We also don’t have a big budget to allocate to something like this, but we are willing to be a pilot for a seed stage company,” he recalls.

“Our ability to help a company get plugged in, like neither side would’ve known each other existed without us being able to get in the middle,” McPartland shares. “That makes us really proud, both from being able to make that match, but then also from the impact that that’s able to have on the community members there.”

In early 2023, ScaleHealth partnered with CHiME, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, on the unique challenge of patient engagement. They began a search for startups who could help solve the challenges associated with remote patient monitoring, patient billing, length of stay and the creation of a “digital front door”  based on the needs of four health systems from across the country.

The five finalists of the ScaleHealth CHIME Patient Engagement Challenge were announced at this year’s ViVE Healthcare Conference and will be watched closely as they continue to partner up with healthcare systems in need of innovative solutions.

For McPartland, however, the matchmaking continues. “Anytime a health organization, a decision maker, is having a hard time going to bed at night because they have a problem and they don’t know a solution,” he says, “I want us to be that first thing they do in the morning. Come on to ScaleHealth and say, what’s out there that fits this need?”

This conversation was captured at the 2023 ViVE Conference in Nashville. Stay tuned for more exciting interviews from the event.

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