Mike Biselli moves around the seven floor Catalyst HTI campus with a bounce in his step, cordially greeting each of the members as they pass by, just a week after the health care innovator celebrated its first birthday.
“We’re like a family here,” he says, as he quickly continues the tour of Denver’s health care innovation hub.
The former Stanford football player turned innovation leader has carried over the values of teamwork from the locker room to the business world, building what he calls the ‘Disneyland for health care geeks’ in the process.
While Catalyst, an industry integrator that brings Fortune 100 and startup health care companies together, now stands tall as a one-year-old in Denver’s RiNo neighborhood, the vision took years to execute.
Biselli spent the first 10 years of his career in the medical device industry before launching MedPassage, a startup that connected medical device buyers and sellers, in 2011. Two years later, he sold the company and began focusing on Catalyst HTI.
“Through the journey that I had, I noticed the same thing happening over and over again in health care. How completely disconnected we are, how many silos we are on and how we are not working together,” he said. “How the innovators are speaking one language and the incumbents are speaking a completely different language. What was most maddening is that this was happening in the biggest industry in our nation.”
Biselli thought back to his time working with MedPassage out of Galvanize, how game-changing it was for him to have the opportunity to collaborate with other founders and meet some of the industry’s biggest players.
He wanted to create an atmosphere that fostered collaboration in the health care industry, but didn’t think a coworking or accelerator model was the best way to do it.
“I thought, ‘this sounds like much more than a coworking space.’ If we’re all on these massive islands, there’s these giants involved and everyone is moving here, what if we built a campus to bring them all together?” he wondered.
In partnership with real estate firm Koelbel and Company and prominent RiNo property owners the Burgess Family, the Catalyst HTI vision was born.
The team broke ground at the former junkyard site located at 3513 Brighton Blvd. in October 2016 and opened officially on July 9, 2018.
The seven-floor building isn’t what you'd imagine a traditional office space and the industry integrator model Catalyst is building is largely new. Catalyst houses industry giants like UCHealth and Kaiser Permanente, academic institutions like the University of Colorado Boulder and University of Denver, along with a host of startups and nonprofits.
“We’re bringing all aspects of health care under the same roof, at the point of innovation, to reimagine this industry,” Biselli said.
One year in, Catalyst has almost entirely filled out the space, with only a few spare workspaces available. While Biselli said he’s surprised by the pace at which Catalyst has filled up, he’s most proud of the connections the campus has created.
In February, Catalyst tenants Delta Dental of Colorado and CORHIO, a nonprofit digital health organization, struck a partnership that will help identify and intervene when patients getting oral health care in emergency room settings should be getting regular preventive care in a dental setting.
That partnership was spurred by an informal meeting on Catalyst’s campus, which Biselli said is part of the innovation hub’s charm.
“The design of the building is intentional. This is not a traditional office building. We’re sitting in a living room for the whole community," he said, pointing out on a patio that gets a panoramic view of Denver's skyline. "We’re trying to create a physical collision.”
In May, digital urgent-care startup CirrusMD raised a $15 million Series B and announced a new contract Iron Bow Technologies as a subcontractor to the United States Department of Veteran Affairs for improved care access and delivery for the veteran community.
In a statement, CEO Andrew Altorfer said Catalyst’s collaborative environment has helped move the company forward.
“We bought into Mike’s vision for Catalyst very early on, and we are thrilled to be a part of the community. The cross-pollination that occurs with our health care friends and other entrepreneurs creates a lot of opportunities,” he said.
While putting contending health systems and academic institutions together may seem like a bad recipe, Biselli said Catalyst has created a balance of competition and cooperation, or co-opetition as he calls it.
“Our job as an ownership team was to build the best vehicle that we possibly could, get the heck out of the way and throw all those community members the keys to the vehicle and let them drive us into a new future of health for our nation,” he said.
As Catalyst moves into its second year, Biselli is hopeful that despite the lack of space left on the campus, that the innovation hub continues to attract talent to Denver. He’s also looking forward to seeing the next great health care ideas born out of Catalyst.
“I know that the sparks being created here are truly going to move the health of our nation forward,” he said.
