MATTER launches #healthtogether

Join our digital conversation about businesses working together to advance care and improve lives.

MATTER was founded with a thesis: Collaboration between businesses is the best way to improve healthcare.

On the surface this premise sounds straightforward, but in practice working together can be extraordinarily complicated. Nowhere is collaboration more complicated than in healthcare, where companies build products in an environment known for convoluted payment models, red tape, long sales cycles, shifting incentive structures and a diversity of customers and stakeholders with varying definitions of value.

Health, as a good, is complex in its own right. It is a staple of human flourishing and a key ingredient for living into our full potential as inventors, artists, thinkers, builders, parents, community members and citizens. Yet our health is at the whim of a wide range of factors, including genetics, individual behavior, social and environmental contexts, and access to quality care.

In short, the challenges we face in trying to advance care and improve lives are many and complex.

But it is because of these challenges that collaboration is more important in healthcare than in any other industry — and more important now than ever before. Complex challenges cannot be solved in silos so we cannot afford to work alone.

MATTER exists to break down silos and help startups, corporations, universities, hospitals, health systems and associations work together to improve health and care for every patient.

We don’t mean to say that collaboration is a panacea. Working together is hard — really hard. Successful collaborations require a shared vision, mutually beneficial business models and effective communication between organizations.

Over the past three years, we’ve built a platform for healthcare innovators — whether they’re building a startup from the ground up or creating change within an established institution — to learn, connect and collaborate with each other to solve healthcare’s most pressing challenges. (Read about the MATTER community’s success in 2017.)

MATTER’s place at the center of the healthcare ecosystem gives us a unique vantage point: We are able to observe and learn from promising new collaboration models and see areas where companies could benefit from working together.

At MATTER we are focused on translating these insights into strategic programs that actively identify, facilitate and support purposeful collaborations between businesses — collaborations with the greatest promise to accelerate innovation, advance care and improve lives.

Today we are launching a digital conversation to engage voices from across the industry in a dialogue about what it means to work together to create heroic change in healthcare. Over the next year, we’ll share untapped opportunities and promising new healthcare collaboration models, and we’ll explore what makes some collaborations work while others fail.

We invite you to join the conversation.

What novel collaboration models are working? Where are there new opportunities to work together? To share your insights and follow the discussion, join this LinkedIn group, sign up for our mailing list and post to Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin using #healthtogether.