The American Medical Association (AMA) is investing $15 million to help found an "innovation studio" designed to develop and commercialize technologies that enhance the practice of health care.

A stand-alone, for-profit company based in San Francisco, Health2047 is a multidisciplinary effort in which physicians will collaborate with engineers, applied researchers, technology providers and venture capitalists to "rapidly" research and develop products—or reject them and move on.

The company says that its relationship with the AMA will help it drive system-level change. Image credit: Morguefile.“We created Health2047 because the American healthcare system has a serious need for purposeful disruption that yields system-level innovation as quickly as possible,” says Dr. Douglass Given, Health2047’s chief executive. “Our new ‘co-laboratory’ model will partner with established companies to optimize their business entries in the healthcare economy, co-develop products with rapidly growing companies and originate early-stage ideas."

The company says that its relationship with the AMA will help it drive system-level change.

"By ensuring that the physician perspective is represented in all major innovation cycles—gathering physician input at project onset, incorporating physician testing during prototype development and leveraging the physician channel to accelerate market adoption of transformative healthcare solutions—Health2047 is greatly increasing the likelihood of substantive positive changes in U.S. healthcare,” says James L. Madara, M.D., CEO of the AMA and chairman of Health2047.

Each project will touch on a need important to the healthcare economy. Projects already under way include system-level solutions to chronic care; value-based healthcare and payments; connected health solutions; and collaboration models for physicians, providers, payers and patients.

According to Health2047, teams are allotted 30 days to determine whether a project's potential is "transformative,"after which either another 60 days is invested or the project is shelved.