About this Session:
While federal funding dries up and health systems slash innovation budgets, Charlotte, North Carolina is placing a massive bet on a completely different approach to innovation. Introducing The Pearl, a bold new ecosystem spearheaded by Advocate Health to bring together health, learning, and community in ways that could redefine how healthcare innovation actually gets funded, developed, and scaled in service of patients and communities. At the heart of The Pearl is the new Charlotte campus of Wake Forest's medical school, the nation's first net-zero medical school and a testbed where innovation, AI, and emerging technologies are embedded directly into clinical education. Just steps away, IRCAD North America serves as the global destination hub for surgical training in minimally invasive, robotic-assisted procedures, creating innovative pathways for clinical excellence and improved outcomes. These anchors, along with a growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at The Pearl, are tightly connected to the “living laboratory” of Advocate Health, one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the U.S., providing the clinical environment, data infrastructure, and patient access needed to scale real-world innovation. The model is attracting serious industry attention, with major collaborators who see The Pearl as a new way to drive innovation through public-private partnerships rather than relying solely on traditional venture capital or federal grants. The Pearl represents a fundamental shift from the scattered, capital-intensive innovation models that have dominated healthcare toward an integrated ecosystem where education, research, and venture creation happen under one roof with shared infrastructure and aligned incentives. Sustainable healthcare innovation requires rethinking not just what we build, but how we fund, educate, and collaborate in an industry that's running out of patience with expensive experiments that don't scale.