Nov 12, 2019
League partners with Cleveland Clinic
4 min read
I’m a serial entrepreneur — with the help of great people, I’ve started, built and sold successful ventures in cloud storage, consumer technology and collaboration software. I can safely say though, building a health operating system at League is the most important work of my career. While the impact of cloud products or consumer electronics can be major for businesses and individuals, healthcare literally deals with matters of life and death. Although our mission to transform healthcare is daunting, the opportunity to make an important impact is just as sizable.
To say that healthcare is broken is an understatement — it is hard to understand for the people it is meant to serve; it is fragmented and thus, often ineffective and wasteful; and it is expensive for everyone involved. Our vision while building League’s health operating system was to up-end the status quo in employee healthcare, and bring it back to what it should have been in the first place: preventive, personalized and accessible to all. To use an oft-quoted sports analogy, we didn’t just want to skate to where the puck was going; we wanted to give the puck directly to employees.
But disrupting a $3.3 trillion industry, especially one that is so fragmented, requires some help and collaboration. Which is why, today, I’m excited to unveil a pretty big collaboration with none other than Cleveland Clinic — a global health pioneer that needs no introduction (they’ve done many incredible things, but their invention of the artificial heart remains at the top of my list).
Cleveland Clinic and League share a customer-centric, preventive vision of improving health outcomes for real people — from patients living with chronic conditions to healthy folks looking to remain healthy, and everyone else in between — by democratizing access to health information and services. In a society where almost half of Americans get their healthcare from an employer, we have a massive opportunity to make a significant impact.
By bringing together our world-class technology with Cleveland Clinic’s leading clinical care, we are creating a partnership that will empower employers to tackle their healthcare problems head on. Starting today, Cleveland Clinic will serve as League’s Chief Medical Director, providing medical oversight and advisory support our Health/OS and the enterprise customers we serve. In the short run, that will help us make our health recommendations even more personalized — members deserve and need counsel tailored to their specific health issues. By leveling up the clinical expertise on our platform, and combining it with world- class medical research from Cleveland Clinic, we will be able to provide members with unprecedented access to the medical information needed to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Our collective work will also help our employer partners gauge ROI on their health spends, so that their dollars can be spent in ways that are actually having a beneficial impact on workforce health. (Alarming fact: nearly 60% of employers currently fail to address wasteful healthcare spending, a huge blind spot in employee healthcare today.) And there is far more in the works, which we will announce in the coming months.
I may be biased, but this is a significant collaboration — and an important development for employer-based healthcare — any way you look at it. There is a lot of talk around how every company is a tech company these days; I would argue that every company is also a healthcare company. If you’re not looking for ways to improve the health of your employees, no matter what that looks like, you’re going to lose a critical competitive advantage in today’s tight workforce economy. A partnership like ours is designed specifically to help progressive employers like Uber, Lush and Shopify solve for the healthcare crisis on their own scale, and I hope more businesses will join them to give their employees a first-of-its-kind health experience.