Chris Coburn, who runs the Partners Healthcare Innovation Center, delivered what amounted to a sales pitch to emerging life science companies, urging them to work with the vast Partners system. Addressing a meeting of MassMEDIC, the association of the medical device industry, last week, Coburn outlined Partners’ value proposition: come to us with your idea, if we decide to work together we can provide reliable funding, brand recognition, networking, and robust practical information to develop your company with guidance from the Partners staff, and using documented experience of the Partners Hospitals.

Partners has established nine vertical areas, and has assigned a leadership team in each area to foster innovation and identify promising emerging medical technology. He suggests that approaching Partners makes particular sense these days, where funding in the device space has become very difficult and regulatory timelines have continued to lengthen.

(With respect to the latter point, many of the business plans we see here in my firm call for rollouts in Europe and, indeed, I now have one on my desk looking for an initial rollout in India, given the regulatory log jam here in the United States.)

Coburn emphasized fundamental changes taking place in the life science arena: new trends in managing and insuring risk, substantial shifts in the nature of delivery systems. It is not clear what companies are doing which functions, noting that Medtronics is now managing clinical services in European hospitals rather than just being an outside supplier. He also painted two startlingly different futures for the approximately 6,000 hospitals now in the United States; some experts suggest efficiency through substantial consolidation so that in a decade there will be only 600 hospitals; the contrary view is that technology will unbundle delivery of health services and there will be 60,000 hospitals.

Finally, Coburn noted that Partners has both a venture capacity and a substantial portfolio of licenses and additional licensing opportunities, with 190 licenses in place and $1,400,000,000 approximately of sponsored research now in the process. Seems that Partners is big and intends to get bigger, whether or not expansion of its physical hospital network (which has become quite contentious) moves forward.