Intellectual Frontiers

From research to real-world impact

Intellectual Frontiers runs its own research programs in healthcare delivery, medical devices, clinical trials, insurance and digital authorization, payments and marketplaces, and education and training. We own what those programs produce, from the published papers through to the patents and the companies built on them.

Find your Native AlphaReview the patent register

What we're researching

All research

Research areas

  • Engineering Care Delivery

    Engineering Care Delivery studies how care itself should be designed when technical capability becomes easier to produce but adoption, patient access, workflow, trust, reimbursement, accountability, and outcomes remain scarce.

  • Alpha to Patent

    Alpha to Patent starts with the advantage a customer values, traces it to the technical or operating constraint that creates the value, tests whether the advantage survives better AI and easier engineering, and then chooses the narrowest useful mix of patents, trade secrets, know-how, data rights, contracts, regulatory position, licensing, publication, and operating control.

  • Precision Education

    Precision Education treats the person, their context, and the evidence as the unit of learning rather than the course.

  • Unbundling Work

    Unbundling Work studies tasks, decisions, handoffs, authority, evidence, risk, and outcomes instead of treating the job title as the unit of analysis.

  • Zero Neo

    Zero Neo asks why a business should buy specialized software for operations when much of the functionality already exists in the platforms it owns, its systems of record, and increasingly capable AI.

All areas

Our patent portfolio

  • Healthcare delivery

    Referrals, care coordination, task and work list scheduling, patient navigation, and risk management. (7 families)

  • Medical devices

    Software inside and around regulated devices, and the data that moves off the device and into a chart. (3 families)

  • Clinical trials and research

    Running a study as software instead of a binder, with evidence produced while the trial runs. (1 family)

  • Insurance and digital authorization

    Self-controlled authorization to records and service delivery evidence. (3 families)

  • Payments, marketplaces, and credentialing

    Payment systems, settling marketplaces, crowdsourced credentialing, and reputation signals. (10 families)

  • Education, training, and system telemetry

    Precision education and training, rewardable content, and traceable operational telemetry. (6 families)

Review the patent registerPatent summaries

How our business units work together to help you

Intellectual Frontiers IP

Find, prove, and protect an invention, then turn it into patent assets, research records, licenses, or investment evidence.

Intellectual Frontiers Press

Put evidence, methods, and operating knowledge into books, fieldbooks, papers, and summaries readers can use directly.

Intellectual Frontiers Network

Identify the specific people, operators, experts, and firms most likely to move a thesis forward, with evidence for each judgment.

Recently published elsewhere

All papers

Bring the problem you already have.

An authorization backlog nobody can explain. Device data that will not make it into the chart. A trial that reconciles for six weeks after the last patient visit. A marketplace that cannot prove what it settled. Describe what is happening and how it was measured, and we will tell you within two weeks whether there is an invention worth testing.

Bring us a worked problem