FIRESIDE CHAT 2026 | Build, Buy, or Co-create: How Founders, Investors, and Health Systems Choose an Innovation Model — Fitting the Right Context

Join Ash Goel, MD, MBA, SVP, CIO Bronson Healthcare, Farzad Soleimani, MD, MBA, FAAEM, Healthcare Partner at 1984 Ventures and Justin Ho, CEO & Co-Founder Sage Care.

Most healthcare innovation partnerships don’t fail because the technology was wrong. They fail because the model was wrong — the wrong structure for the problem, the wrong structure for the stage, or a structure that quietly ignored what each stakeholder actually needed in order to succeed and sustain.

There is no single model for healthcare innovation. There is a spectrum, running from clean and transactional to fully entangled:

1. Arm’s-length vendor. The startup builds, the system procures, and a long procurement cycle that kills most startups before they ever reach scale.
2. Design partner / co-development. The system co-builds in exchange for early access, product influence, and sometimes preferential pricing,  but the system absorbs the integration cost and risks funding a one-off it can never resell.
3. Strategic equity / provider venture. The system takes an ownership position and aligns itself to the upside. It also blurs a basic question — a customer or a vendor — and a conflict of interest.
4. Incubation / venture studio. Companies built with, or inside, the system. The highest control available to a provider, at the highest effort, competing directly for the system’s scarcest resource: mindshare and capital.
5. Vertical integration. The investor acquires substantial interest in the delivery of the service – and an admission that none of the other models can scale.

In this fireside chat, founders, investors, and health system executives work the same question from three different perspectives: which model fits which problem — and what does each party have to give up to make it work? We will review specifics rather than the abstractions: where each model breaks, what the giving-up actually costs, and how to build the right structure before the first pilot rather than after the third one.

“Key Take Aways”

• A practical map of the partnership models — and the failure risks that lives inside each one
• How to identify the model fit by problem type, company stage, and incentive alignment, before an idea is pursued
• What founders, investors, and providers each have to concede for a model to succeed
• What helps alignment — and what creates a conflict that nobody names