Cedar Sinai Success Story

Key Results:

• Awareness of 2x as many potential accelerator participants since using CB Insights

• Ability to move with confidence when selecting 10 companies for accelerator

CB Insights Products Mentioned:

• Market Maps →
• Collections →
• Research →

Nothing in healthcare is static.

Whether it’s new regulations, changing patient needs or even a global pandemic, the world of healthcare is complex and difficult to navigate — not ideal for the growth of an early-stage startup. 

This is where the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator program comes in. Our mission is to advance the practice of medicine by helping healthcare entrepreneurs bring their products to market.

Twice a year, we work with ten early-stage companies for three months, giving them access to more than 300 leading clinicians here at Cedars-Sinai, as well as a broad network of entrepreneurs and investors in the healthcare space. Since 2015, we’ve helped dozens of companies transform healthcare delivery and patient care.

I know how valuable the support of the accelerator can be because I started my journey with the Cedars-Sinai Accelerator first as a mentor, drawing on my decades of experiences in healthcare tech as an entrepreneur and chief product officer. After my startup exited in 2018, I joined the accelerator full time as its managing director.

The access to our mentors – invaluable for an early-stage startup – raises the stakes for our program. If we’re taking clinicians away from patient bedsides to mentor companies, we can’t question if these companies are worth it. We need to know, without a doubt, that every company in our program justifies the investment in both time and money our clinicians and healthcare system makes.

And with CB Insights, we have that confidence.

Understanding the Healthcare Tech Market

Type in “healthcare tech” in many of the other startup research tools available today and you’ll get a list of thousands of companies. But when you’re specifically looking for early-stage ventures that sell to hospital providers, that level of granularity can be difficult to get to.

This is why our research process starts with CB Insights, a tech insights platform with real-time data, expert insights and work management tools. Using the CB Insights platform, we can search and filter by our narrow requirements and know that we have a comprehensive overview of the spaces we care about.

We review twice as many companies now with the confidence that we have a full view of the market.

The granular, in-depth research from CB Insights clues us into the “white spaces” to explore and helps us identify the companies in those spaces that we need to meet.

Once we identify a company, our first step is to look at their Market Map. Who are their competitors? Is there a better fit? We need the confidence that we’re reviewing every company in the space before we move forward. Before CB Insights, we worried that we missed companies because we didn’t have the single source of truth on the market.

Going from 400 Applicants to 10 Winners

We select 10 companies out of (typically) 400 applications. How? Through 1:1 interviews, application reviews, and executive panels with our stakeholders, we gather as much information as we can about these companies, guided by these core questions:

At each stage, we’re asking: do we know that we’ve done a full landscape of the space and these are truly the best fit for the program? Will they be worth the investment from our clinicians and healthcare system leaders? With CB Insights, we’re confident that we have the right answers for these questions.

Pushing the Healthcare System Forward

As our CEO likes to say, innovation is an obligation. And it’s on our team to educate and inform the system on the innovation happening in the market.

When we’re not managing early-stage companies within the accelerator, we work directly with our clinicians and executives to keep them up-to-date on the latest innovations. We’ve even started a webinar series to connect leading external experts with our clinicians using CB Insights Research.

We get a perspective on healthcare tech that we can’t get anywhere else from CB Insights research.

One of the questions we get asked by our healthcare system: how are our alumni companies doing? We’re able to quickly build a CB Insights Collection of the companies we’ve worked with and track them in real time. It helps us to evangelize the value of our work with a view of our alumni companies’ progress right at our fingertips.

When I think about our value, it ties back to the mission of Cedars-Sinai as a whole: advance the practice of medicine. While our researchers develop cutting-edge therapies in the lab and our clinicians handle patient care on the front lines, our team looks outside the hospital walls for the next breakthrough.

And because of CB Insights, we know we’re looking in the right spaces and at the right companies for the next breakthrough in healthcare delivery and patient care.