CDL Healthcare Delivery
For founders advancing healthcare delivery by keeping people healthy at home and accelerating healing in hospitals
Healthcare is facing a growing gap between the care people need and the system’s ability to deliver it.
Demand continues to rise due to aging populations, increasing rates of chronic disease, and growing expectations for access, convenience, and personalization. At the same time, healthcare organizations face workforce shortages, operational complexity, administrative burden, and mounting financial pressures.
While tremendous innovation continues to emerge across healthcare, many promising technologies struggle to achieve meaningful adoption within provider organizations. The translation from product to practice remains one of the greatest barriers to healthcare innovation.
The Healthcare Delivery stream supports founders building technologies that improve how care is delivered, coordinated, operated, financed, and experienced across the healthcare continuum.
CDL is a non-profit organization. There are no fees for participation and CDL does not take any equity. Learn more about the CDL program.
The greatest opportunities for value creation exist at the intersection of:
- Clinical care
- Healthcare operations
- Administrative workflows
- Patient experience
- Financial performance
Healthcare Delivery focuses on technologies that expand system capacity, reduce friction, improve decision-making, enhance patient outcomes, and enable new models of care.
Qui doit poser sa candidature ?
The stream welcomes innovations across a broad range of areas, including:
- Clinical Operations: Technologies that improve diagnosis, treatment, clinical decision support, care coordination, patient safety, and clinician productivity.
- Patient Access & Experience: Solutions that improve scheduling, navigation, engagement, communication, adherence, and care delivery beyond the traditional hospital setting.
- Healthcare Operations: Workflow automation, administrative efficiency, workforce enablement, operational intelligence, and technologies that increase organizational productivity and capacity.
- Revenue Cycle & Financial Performance: Solutions addressing documentation, coding, billing, reimbursement, prior authorization, claims management, denial reduction, and other administrative processes essential to sustaining healthcare delivery.
- New Models of Care: Technologies enabling care at home, virtual care, hybrid care models, population health management, and other innovative approaches to delivering care.
The list above is not exhaustive. Contact cdl-cleveland@creativedestructionlab.com to speak to someone about the program.
The Healthcare Delivery stream is designed for pre-seed and seed-stage companies developing scalable technologies for provider organizations, health systems, hospitals, and care delivery networks. Like all CDL streams, participating ventures benefit from objective-based mentorship from experienced founders, operators, investors, and subject matter experts who help accelerate company formation, commercialization, and growth.
The Healthcare Delivery stream adds a unique layer of expertise by connecting founders directly with clinicians, healthcare operators, administrators, revenue cycle leaders, and other stakeholders responsible for delivering care within complex healthcare organizations.
A strong fit for the program typically includes companies that would benefit from:
- Experienced entrepreneurial, operational, and investor mentorship
- Clinical expertise and domain knowledge
- Health system stakeholder feedback
- Workflow validation
- Operational and financial insights
- Access to real-world healthcare environments
- Understanding enterprise adoption pathways
Many companies reach a stage where the primary challenge is no longer building the technology, but understanding how it fits into the realities of healthcare delivery. This stream is designed to help founders refine their products, business models, and adoption strategies through direct engagement with the stakeholders who ultimately influence purchasing, implementation, and scale within healthcare systems.
Why CDL?
Creative Destruction Lab’s objective-based model helps founders accelerate commercialization through structured mentorship from experienced entrepreneurs, operators, investors, and subject matter experts.
The Healthcare Delivery stream brings together leaders from healthcare systems, academia, entrepreneurship, technology, and investment communities to help founders refine products, business models, and adoption strategies.
The program is designed to increase the likelihood that promising healthcare innovations become widely adopted solutions capable of generating meaningful impact at scale.
Nos mentors
CDL Mentors represent a broad cross-section of extraordinary, accomplished entrepreneurs, scientists, active angel and venture investors across industries who employ a global mindset. They are integral to the success of each CDL program and are invested in finding and supporting innovations—and the visionary innovators behind them—to solve critical problems. Mentors provide founders with the business expertise required to commercialize, as well as their time, resources and networks.
Why Cleveland?
Healthcare innovation succeeds when founders can work directly with the people responsible for delivering care.
CDL-Cleveland is uniquely anchored by University Hospitals, making it the first CDL location built around a healthcare system. Through this model, founders can engage directly with clinicians, operators, administrators, and healthcare leaders who understand the realities of healthcare delivery. Beyond mentorship, qualified ventures may gain exposure to stakeholders responsible for evaluating, piloting, and adopting new technologies. The goal is not simply product feedback, but helping founders understand the practical realities of healthcare procurement, implementation, and scale.
In partnership with Case Western Reserve University and a growing network of healthcare organizations, CDL-Cleveland serves as a hub for founders seeking to build solutions that work not only in theory, but in practice.
The result is a healthcare delivery stream focused on one of the most important challenges in healthcare innovation: transforming promising technologies into solutions that can be successfully adopted, implemented, and scaled across provider organizations.