GuideWell Innovation Center Celebrates Five Years of Advancing Healthy Communities and Serving Entrepreneurs and Innovators

From hosting live pitch events for entrepreneurs from across the country to bringing together top health care industry officials to discuss the future of health care, the GuideWell Innovation Center, located in Orlando’s Lake Nona Medical Center, has grown from a building and a concept into a nationally-recognized hub for health care innovation. Today marks an exciting milestone for GuideWell Innovation Center as it celebrates the five-year anniversary since opening its doors.

GuideWell Mutual Holding Corporation (GuideWell), the parent to a family of forward-thinking companies focused on transforming health care first opened its doors in 2016. The 30,000 square-foot center provides state-of-the-art co-working and meeting space and has become an epicenter of innovation and collaboration. In the last five years, the team has hosted 1,500 events and welcomed 25,000 visitors, including health care industry leaders, government officials, and a host of guest speakers.

“At GuideWell Innovation Center we are dedicated to fueling health care innovation by bringing thought leaders and entrepreneurs together to identify solutions that can help address industry challenges,” said Camille Harrison, executive vice president and chief innovation and experience officer at GuideWell. “We believe health care innovation is a critical tool that can help us advance our mission of improving the health of people and communities.”

The GuideWell Innovation Center team has developed and successfully launched several state and national health innovation challenges, which have drawn interest from 450 applicants. These challenges have helped emerging health-tech companies secure funding and receive guidance and mentoring to scale their businesses ideas. These challenges, along with complimentary well-being forums, are designed to improve the health of our society by bringing together entrepreneurs, thought leaders and stakeholders to identify solutions to our communities most urgent health care challenges, like health equity, mental well-being, the opioid crisis, and food security.

Over the years the GuideWell Innovation Center has also hosted matchmaking summits for entrepreneurs and investors as a way to facilitate partnership opportunities that support the growing digital-health ecosystem.

Though much has changed over the past year, the team remains dutifully committed to transforming our health care system through entrepreneurship and innovation. In 2020 the GuideWell Innovation team launched the COVID-19 Health Innovation Collaborative, a national effort to bring entrepreneurs together to address critical gaps in the pandemic response.

And just as our country was experiencing a new level of racial reckoning, the team hosted a virtual health equity challenge and well-being forum.

“By uniting ideas, we’ve been able to address long-standing issues like access to care and racial and health equity,” said Pete Serio, vice president of enterprise innovation and customer experience at GuideWell. “While none of us could have predicted the events of last year, we were uniquely poised with the right teams, partners, capabilities and resources to tackle some of the biggest issues facing our health care system, and we know that this is exactly what our purpose is — to fast-track solutions that will help us manage and overcome major health industry challenges.”