In this episode

In this episode, Tom Luby, chief innovation officer at Texas Medical Center (TMC), discussed the history and future of the largest medical complex in the world. Luby reflected on the role of the TMC in supporting early-stage healthcare innovation and outlined the opportunities and challenges facing health systems and startups alike in 2025. He also shared how his team is helping turn high-risk ideas into real-world solutions by creating the infrastructure, partnerships, and space needed to support long-term success.

• Innovations that will make the biggest impact in the next few years are focused on efficiency.
• Early-stage investment and institutional collaboration remain central to TMC’s long-term strategy.
• The consumer experience is an innovation opportunity for academic medical centers.

“If we can get talented people in the room together and begin to build trust among them, we think great things can happen from that.”

– Tom Luby

Key takeaways

Luby covered the unique role of the Texas Medical Center in uniting many different healthcare institutions and the innovation center on one campus. He discussed some of the recent trends TMC has seen in innovation and the strategic approach to fostering a culture of innovation. Here’s what he covered:

Innovations that will make the biggest impact in the next few years are focused on efficiency.

At TMC, Luby has a front-row seat to the early stages of innovation, from biotech and medtech to digital health. “We work with starting companies, entrepreneurs, and also bring people from different parts of the country,” he said. For example, the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas attracts oncology innovators from around the world, he said. With this front-row seat, he has a wide-ranging perspective on what’s coming, in both the short- and longer term.

Luby said that in 2025, hospitals are still navigating financial constraints and capacity challenges, which shape their priorities when engaging with digital health companies. Many organizations are especially focused on back-office efficiency, patient access, and areas that affect reimbursement or compliance. Especially with AI tools, “Anything that’s not patient-facing and can show relatively good ROI—you’ll get a meeting,” he said. He also noted that medtech and biotech companies are more regulated, so their impact is longer-term compared to the near-term potential of digital health innovations.

He noted that AI is a big area of focus, but that operational use cases are more likely to make an impact in the short term because systems are increasingly scrutinizing generative AI for clinical applications. Health systems are interested in potential time savings, but wary of clinical hallucinations or data security issues. “There’s more urgency with an understanding that those tools can save a significant amount of time, but how do you want your healthcare providers interacting with them?” he said.

Early-stage investment and institutional collaboration remain central to TMC’s long-term strategy.

Luby described the Texas Medical Center as both a clinical destination and an innovation ecosystem. With over 60 institutions and a history of collaboration, TMC supports entrepreneurs through funding, programming, and infrastructure. “The current CEO saw the opportunity eleven years ago that we could think about ways to create collaboration among the different institutions” in Houston, Luby said. “They compete for patients and talent, but there is a spirit of cooperation here at the campus.”

With funding, programming, networking, and physical space, “We’ve created the package that an entrepreneur would need to be successful here,” he said.

TMC Innovation is now in its tenth year and operates a $50 million venture fund focused on seed and Series A rounds. It also provides access to consultants, shared lab and office space, and connections to physician-entrepreneurs across cardiovascular, oncology, and orthopedics specialties. TMC recently hosted its first AI summit and will continue to focus on up-and-coming technology and early-stage companies and research, Luby said.

Luby said the team’s strategy is to help many companies grow and let some scale significantly—what he called the “goldfish strategy.” “In the pond that is the Texas Medical Center, we have a lot of minnows, and we provide them with the things they need to grow. And as those companies get bigger, they start to attract more talent…they attract funding,” he said. “We’re long term, we’re patient,” he said. “We’ll keep feeding minnows and reaping the benefit as they get stronger and larger.”

Innovators and healthcare organizations need trusted forums like TMC to explore new solutions.

Luby said one of the most important things his team does is bring the right people together and build trust, especially when things are moving fast.”If we can get talented people in the room together and begin to build trust among them, we think great things can happen from that,” he said. “We saw that during COVID. We were able to pull together at all the [TMC] institutions, and it’s impressive what happened there. So we’re keeping an eye out for that use case, the opportunity to nucleate around the talent we have.

He discussed how AI and data science is an area TMC is investing to bring together more collaboration, and pointed to the recent AI summit at TMC. “We have all this AI and data science talent. What are the problems you want to focus that talent on, and can you find one where everybody can get behind it and work together?”

“It’s always about the problems,” he said. “What problem are you trying to solve?”