New York, October 28, 2021: Northwell Health, New York's largest healthcare provider, and Aegis Ventures, a New York-based startup studio, today announced they are forming a joint venture (JV) that will ideate, launch, and scale AI-driven companies to address healthcare's most challenging quality, equity, and cost problems. The JV will assemble leading medical, technology, and business resources to create a first-of-its-kind company creation platform for healthcare innovation. Aegis Ventures intends to invest at least $100 million of seed-stage funds through the platform to catalyze a significant multiple of that amount from the venture capital and investment community.

The JV will work with stakeholders across the Northwell system to create new patient care solutions through collaboration with frontline clinicians, working side-by-side from ideation to implementation, to develop innovations that use AI to predict, diagnose, and manage health conditions. The parties have already started work on solutions related to improving maternal health outcomes and chronic disease prediction. Alongside this disease focus, the JV will use AI to identify and eliminate operational inefficiencies in healthcare delivery. All technologies and tools will be identified, developed, and validated within the secure Northwell Health environment to maximize data integrity and privacy. Ultimately, the aim of the JV will be to accelerate the speed with which new lifesaving AI solutions reach the patient's bedside.

"New York was at the epicenter of the COVID-19 crisis, and today's announcement places it at the epicenter of innovation that will tackle healthcare's most pressing problems," said Michael Dowling, President and CEO of Northwell Health. "This joint venture will leverage data from Northwell's patient population, one of the most diverse in the world, along with Northwell's intellectual capital in AI technology. Working together, Northwell and Aegis will create companies that bring higher quality, lower cost healthcare to those who need it most."
Northwell has a track record of success in AI research, including the development of a landmark algorithm that predicts patients' overnight stability to reduce the need to wake them for vital sign checks. Developed using 26 million measurements from 2.3 million patient visits, the algorithm helps reduce nighttime disturbances to speed patients' recovery and discharge. In addition, Northwell serves one of the most diverse patient populations in the United States. Caring for more than 2 million people annually across 23 hospitals and hundreds of other facilities provides the health system's clinicians and researchers with a unique vantage point into the health and wellbeing of traditionally underserved communities. This perspective will be a key aspect of the Northwell-Aegis JV, which will prioritize innovation to reduce racial and socioeconomic biases that drive health inequities and have impaired existing AI solutions.

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