Last month, I joined a small group of HealthTech founders at LG Electronics NOVA’s INNOSummit 2025 for a session facilitated by Rock Health titled Weaving Order from Chaos: Building the HealthTech Tapestry. It wasn’t about hype or headlines. It was an honest conversation about a problem we all feel: hospitals are swimming in point solutions, startups are struggling to integrate, and fragmentation is slowing our progress. The breakthroughs ahead will not come from adding more standalone tools. They will come from the convergence of health systems working with solution partners that are truly co-owners of their problems.
Working in partnership with more than 20 health systems at Abundant Venture Partners, I see the same paradox every day. Health systems are under intense pressure to innovate, yet buried under layers of technology. We already have solutions that could save lives, protect margins, and move us from sick care to true healthcare. But health systems were never built to reinvent themselves every six months. They are deeply human, heavily regulated, and constrained by financial and operational realities. That complexity is not resistance. It is responsibility. And it is the environment innovation must adapt to.
This is why health systems do not want vendors. They want co-owners of their most pressing problems. At Abundant, we believe systems should not simply procure innovation. They should co-own it. Momentum shifts the moment a vendor stops selling to a health system and starts growing their solution with it.
A recent example is Auxira Health, a virtual cardiology company co-developed through the Abundant Platform in partnership with MedStar Health. Together, we identified a growing gap in access to cardiovascular care, one that technology alone couldn’t solve. By pairing MedStar Health’s model of care with Auxira’s tele-cardiology providers, the collaboration created a scalable model for hospitals to expand specialty coverage and reduce provider burden without adding their own staff. The result wasn’t a vendor-client relationship. It was a shared innovation built to meet the real operational and clinical demands of the health system. That is the kind of partnership our industry needs more of.
It is also why I have grown to dislike the word “pilot.” Pilots validate implementation, not adoption. They remind me of gym memberships in January. The card gets swiped, the intentions are high, maybe one or two visits. You can prove your membership card works. But true value is measured by what happens in March, if going has become a routine that fits in your life. Adoption is not about whether something works. It is about whether it fits.
And when it comes time to scale, do not drop a thousand-piece platform on the table. Health systems will look at it and ask, “Where is the corner piece?” Start with the edge that can fit perfectly into their ecosystem. Solve one urgent, meaningful problem. If you do that, they will not only let you in. They will ask you to stay and grow, piece by piece.
My advice to founders is simple: grow with systems, not around them. Validate adoption, not installation. Reduce complexity, do not relocate it. Health systems are not slow because they lack ambition. They move carefully because they carry lives, communities, and futures in their hands.
If you want to be woven into the future of a health system, do not arrive selling sweaters. Sit down, understand the problems, and partner to build a solution designed to fit and grow with them.