The Venly Fellows Program, which is sponsoring the Roundtable along with local Chambers of Commerce, provides a year long Fellowship to recent graduates and returning veterans to help local businesses grow through social media and strengthen each community. Venly grew out of Benchmarking Partners, a Cambridge, Massachusetts software and strategy firm.

The seeds for Venly were sown when Benchmarking Partners received multi-million dollar funding from the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 1994 to develop an Internet-based, Patient Oriented Management System (POMS) that would connect 500 healthcare ecosystem partners (hospitals, big pharma, insurance, medical equipment, retail/pharmacies, etc.) to integrate their value chains globally around individual patients. The goal was to use the availability of increasingly affordable Internet access to align thousands of healthcare ecosystem partners worldwide down to an individual case the same way Mayo Clinic famously integrates in-patient healthcare at its Rochester, Minnesota campus.

Venly and the Healthcare Roundtable also builds on Benchmarking Partners semester-long business and Internet courses on value networks at MIT, University of Chicago, and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. As part of these courses, graduate students met each week of the semester with innovative leaders to advance peer-to-peer collaboration projects.