A funded path to innovation for rural hospitals

Inneo and the Healthcare Development & Innovation Group (HDIG) have formed a joint venture that helps rural hospitals build innovation programs they can fund and sustain.

Rural hospitals face real margin and workforce pressures, with little room to experiment. They still need to innovate to improve margins, ease workforce strain, adopt better technology, and create new revenue streams. The barrier is usually infrastructure: funding, an internal team, and the expertise required to run an innovation program or venture arm. For most rural hospitals, building that capability alone is not feasible.

The partnership closes that gap by combining two capabilities that are usually separate.

Inneo brings operational expertise. Its work in cost reduction and performance improvement frees up margin, which becomes the engine for funding innovation. Through InneoLab, it also brings direct experience turning clinician ideas into products and companies.

HDIG brings diligence expertise: business development, innovation vetting, partner identification, and commercialization research. This work helps a hospital determine which technologies, vendors, intellectual property, and pilots are worth pursuing before it commits capital or staff time.

Together, they give rural hospitals a way to participate in innovation without carrying all the risk or building the full infrastructure themselves. A hospital can identify near-term savings, direct those savings toward a defined innovation path, get support for investment decisions, and share in the products and companies that emerge from Inneo Lab.

A lower-risk, savings-funded model is what makes this work in rural settings, where capital for innovation rarely exists on its own.

Because Inneo is owned by nonprofit health systems, its incentives align with the hospitals it serves rather than with outside investors seeking an exit. Accountability is built into the ownership model.

If you lead a rural hospital or network and are weighing how to innovate without overextending, this partnership is built for that conversation. Get in touch.

Inneo (formerly The Innovation Institute) is owned and managed by a nationwide group of nonprofit health systems. We run innovation programs for our members across clinical innovation and business services, embedding with their teams at no charge. Inneo identifies the partners best aligned with each system’s priorities, negotiates terms on their behalf, and reinvests the resulting vendor fees into the program. That flywheel sustains the innovation lab without additional capital calls on members. We are your ally. We are Inneo Alliance.