The Cambia Grove, headquartered in downtown Seattle, is a space for cultivating ideas to improve our health care system. Recently, in a speech at Puget Sound Business Journal’s event, “Health Care of the Future,” which seeks to bring together the leading innovative minds in the health care industry, Nicole Bell, Executive Director of the Cambia Grove, asked the audience to imagine Seattle as a city that could kick start the transformation of health care to focus first on people and to lower costs. “We have our own natural advantages in the Pacific Northwest versus other regions but we will need to band together to support becoming a health care economic cluster,” she stated.
By bringing together entrepreneurs, innovators, businesses of all sizes, and community stakeholders who are intent on finding novel solutions for not only the inherent problems in our health care system, the Cambia Grove also aspires to grow the community of young health care businesses.
The Cambia Grove was established as a free, creative space that seeks to support entrepreneurs and encourage them to connect and work with fellow innovators, investors, and customers in order to develop lasting solutions. Stakeholders will gather from across regions and industries in order to identify the shared challenges they’re faced with, and work together to foster not only important discussions, but innovative solutions.
Nicole Bell outlined how the Cambia Grove will engage the Seattle health care community by partnering with Qliance, Regence BlueShield and UW Medicine, as well as hosting work groups, entrepreneurial teams and projects, supporting networking events as well as commercialization of new innovations, creating pilots and concept opportunities, and finally by providing national and local showcases for transformative health care solutions emerging from the Seattle region.
The Cambia Grove also provides a space for long-term investment. By creating a meeting place that links providers, health plans and large regional employers who are concerned about health care costs and benefits young health care companies, the Cambia Grove hopes to help connect innovators not only with capital and investors but with their first customers and pilot projects.
Growing a collaborative health care economic community that promotes advancement in leading health care issues is the primary goal of the Cambia Grove. According to Bell, the Cambia Grove hopes to inspire not only change in the health care services now provided, but also encourage economic growth and leadership throughout the region. The Cambia Grove will officially open on March 13 with a VIP event for industry leaders and elected officials.
