Renamed West Health Institute Names CEO, Creates Health Tech Incubator

San Diego’s renamed West Health Institute has hired a new CEO and is unveiling some organizational changes today, reflecting its continuing shift away from an exclusive focus on wireless health to a broader mission that studies ways to lower healthcare costs

The organization that began more than three years ago as the “West Wireless Health Institute” was initially billed as one the world’s first medical research organizations created to advance health and well-being through the use of wireless technologies. Gary and Mary West, the philanthropists who founded the nonprofit, have pledged $100 million to get the center going. But the institute began re-casting itself early last year, eliminating some commercial initiatives and severing some industry ties—notably with San Diego-based Qualcomm (NASDAQ: [[ticker:QCOM]])—as it began emphasizing its role as an independent institute providing its expertise in a variety of ways to help lower health care costs.

The shift seems to be set against a broader conflict between mobile device makers and federal health regulators.

Nicholas Valeriani

In a statement this morning, the West Health Institute named former Johnson & Johnson executive Nicholas J. Valeriani as its new CEO. Valeriani, a vice president for strategy and growth at J&J headquarters in New Brunswick, NJ, succeeds Don Casey, a former J&J executive who left the institute in March, after about two years as the institute’s CEO.

While Casey’s resignation was a huge disappointment for many in San Diego, there’s a logic to the institute’s shift away from a tech-centric focus, says Rob McCray of the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance, a San Diego nonprofit industry group.

The institute also announced the creation of a new business incubator, with about 10,000 square feet of space, for early stage health care companies developing innovative technologies. In addition to providing the space and infrastructure for new companies, the West Health Incubator will provide strategic guidance and access to corporate partners. Companies seeking admittance to the incubator must first receive an investment commitment from the West Health Investment Fund.

The investment fund was created

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.