Today I was fortunate enough to be part of Demo Day for Blueprint Health’s “First Class”. In my mind this will surely go down as a historic day in the annals of NYC digital health. I can’t imagine how many successful companies are being built/going to be built by people who were in attendance today. Our ecosystem is blowing up!
All of the Blueprint Teams delivered consistently impressive presentations. We’ve gotten to know all the guys (and one girl – holla, Jessica!) here over the last few months and it was really wonderful to see them wow the audience with their pitches. If you want to know how to present your idea, make sure you watch the videos when they’re posted.
I was also very impressed by all the luminaries who turned out for the event. Approximately 300 of the brightest minds in digital health from all over the country packed the house today. Everywhere I looked I saw big name investors, entrepreneurs, and innovators networking with the Blueprint teams. The outstanding turnout is a great validation of the Blueprint concept.
Finally, we had the pleasure of watching deals being made and checks being cut throughout the day. I don’t know what the final tally will be, but I’m sure many of the teams will close their investment rounds in the very short term. I really wish I had an opportunity like this when I was raising money for my first start-up, Healogica.
Congratulations to Brad and Mat on a truly outstanding event! As I’ve said before, something big is happening here. Looking forward to how things unfold over the next weeks, months, and years.
I was invited to participate in an excellent panel titled “Alternative Sources of Funding for Healthcare Innovation” at Social Media Week in NYC. Recipients and donors of alternative (and non-dilutive) sources of capital talked about how to raise money outside of the traditional venture capital and angel channels.
There was a lot of interest in challenges as a funding mechanism and I got to learn more about funding opportunities from the federal government and large foundations. The panel was followed by a highly productive matchmaking session that connected established stakeholders, like payors and pharmas, to start-up and other innovative companies.
Kudos to Charles Huang on organizing an outstanding event!
On Thursday night the members of Team Health 2.0 NYC (Edbury, Kyle, Austin and yours truly) had a blast at the Blueprint Health launch party at their new 12,000 sf facility in the heart of Soho. The event attracted a great crowd and included many, many familiar faces from the NYC healthtech scene. As an added bonus we got to hear pitches from all the teams in the inaugural Blueprint class as well as chat with them later on. Kudos to Brad and Mathew on the launch!
Kyle and I saw the space about a month ago and it’s amazing to see what the guys were able to do with it in just a few short weeks. In fact, we like the new space so much that Team Health 2.0 NYC will be leaving our current digs in TriBeCa and moving in with the “blueprinters” (???) later on this month. Co-locating with all these exciting start-ups is a unique opportunity and I think the cross-pollination across organizations will be a huge boost to the committee as a whole.
On a final note, it was hard to watch the NYC internet boom of the late 90s pass me by as I was working as a medical resident at Columbia Presbyterian, and I always felt like I missed something big. I have the feeling now that something REALLY BIG is happening in the healthtech space in general, and in NYC in particular, and I consider myself to be fortunate to be right in the middle of it. Don’t know where this is all heading but looking forward to an exciting journey.
Last week I attended the Startup Health New York Roundtable at the offices of Edelman, the global PR firm located right up the block from Health 2.0′s NYC digs.
The meeting was titled “Bridging The Gap Between Health Entrepreneurs and Government” and was attended by 2 really important change agents thinking about health care in the government: Todd Park and Joe McCannon. As most of you know Todd is the “Chief Technology Officer” at the Department of Health and Human Services (actually more an entrepreneur-in-residence than anything else) and Joe is Group Director of Learning and Diffusion in the Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
Overall I thought this was one of the best health events I’ve attended in a while and I think Steve (Krein) and Unity (Stoakes) deserve a big shout out for organizing a great meeting. The reason I think this event was so good was I got to hear key government people talk frankly about what’s going on behind the scenes and why that’s going to be important for the private sector. (Networking was also top notch with a lot of familiar faces in the room including: @edshin, @pjmachado, @chcosts, @sarahkrug1, @sladenyc, among others.)
From what I heard there are 2 big things are going on:
First, payment reform is finally here. Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) is finally empowered to change the way the government pays for health care. Prior to ACA we were stuck in a fee-for-service paradigm that encourages more health care rather than better health care. Joe talked about how CMS is implementing new models (bundled payments, shared savings, etc.) that encourage “health maximization” over “volume maximization” and create incentives for providers and health institutions to embrace health information technologies. CMS is the biggest health payor and reforms made by the government are very likely to diffuse into the private sector and the rest of the market.
Second, big data is just getting started. Todd talked again about all the work that the government is doing to liberate health data that is being collected by a wide range of agencies. What made this discussion different, however, was how detailed he was in discussing these efforts. He talked about the pending release of Medicare physician quality data and the creation of a “Physician Compare” to launch in 2013, and he also talked about the Blue Button initiative and how it had helped answer key questions about patient access to their data under HIPAA. Todd mentioned that we should expect even more data to come from government sources soon.
The most important take-away from the talk, however, was the revelation that leaders at provider and payor organizations are now very interested in new digital health technologies as they pursue ways to provide health more efficiently and effectively. Todd and Joe mentioned that they have spoken with countless health system and payor CEOs who are looking for ways to exploit these new technologies. Moderator, Thomas Goetz (Executive Editor at Wired), asked whether these big stakeholders were willing to even talk with small technology companies and the answer to that question was an emphatic “yes”.
In the past I think starting a Health 2.0-type company was a crap shoot because there simply weren’t enough customers to support a new and disruptive ecosystem of companies. I think that’s changing (and quickly!) and I think this new reality creates huge opportunities for entrepreneurs in the space. Todd said that there has never been a better time to be a health care entrepreneur and I very much agree.
Interested in learning more about about innovation competitions? Interested in starting up a “challenge”? Interested in any of the following questions:
What is the Health 2.0 Developer Challenge?
Why sponsor and innovation competition?
Why participate in an innovation competition?
What are some best practices?
If so, this video from my lunch time session at the Health 2.0 Fall Conference is for you. Apologies for the poor quality video but you can understand most of what I’m saying.
If you’d like to learn more please feel free to hit me up at jl@health2challenge.org.
This past weekend the Team Health 2.0 was in Cambridge, MA for the “Hacking Medicine” Code-a-Thon at MIT. Health 2.0 partnered with the Hacking Medicine team (Zen Chu – EIR at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, Elliot Cohen – MBA candidate at MIT Sloan, and Allen Cheng – MD/PhD candidate at Harvard and MIT) to produce the two-day event which took place at the legendary MIT Media Lab and attracted over 100 participants representing a range of disciplines including computer science, business, and medicine.
The morning of Day 1 focused on presentations from leading digital health thought leaders including:
Jaime Heywood (PatientsLikeMe)
Sutha Kamal (Massive Health)
Sridhar Iyengar (AgaMatrix)
Bob Nix (athenahealth)
Zen Chu (MIT Entrepreneurship Center)
Joe Smith (West Wireless Health)
Craig Lipset (Pfizer)
William Shih (Harvard Medical School)
Joshua Rosenthal (Eliza)
In the afternoon participants pitched their best ideas with teams forming around the most compelling concepts. The teams worked together throughout the rest of the day (and into the night) to develop their concepts. On Day 2 there were more than a dozen team pitches with six $1,000 prizes awarded to the best presentations.
The winning teams were Podimetrics, UpDoc, Home Team Therapy, Inc., Open Image, CUE and Group Diagnostics. Each team received $1,000.
Podimetrics presented an idea for a shoe insole that has a foot sensor to measure changes in pressure for diabetics
UpDoc presented on project management for patient-provider interaction
Home Team Therapy presented a Kinect-based home rehab
Open Image created a social networking platform to evaluate medical images
Cue presented an idea on a patient inventory and relationship management system using RFID
Group Diagnosis presented an idea that providers to contribute/communicate to evaluate patients and game dynamics to rank providers
It was a pleasure to work with the Hacking Medicine team on their first event and we share their belief that there are many hackable areas in medicine that hold the promise for the birth of disruptive healthcare companies.
Last night I attended the demo day presentations for the Data, Design Diabetes Innovation Challenge organized by our friends at Luminary Labs and sponsored by Sanofi Aventis (#DDDemoDay). The event, held at AOL HQ downtown near the NYU campus, showcased the submissions of the 5 semi-finalists in the competition including: Ginger.io, HopeUnwounded, MySideKick, Chewable, and Wirefra.me.
I’ve worked at a number of event-related businesses and I must say the production was top notch. Excellent choice of location, great crowd, excellent program, and tight presentations. Kudos to Sara Holoubek (@sarita), Kat Karimi (@katkarimi), and the rest of the Luminary Labs team on a job well done.
3 big observations for me from the event:
Innovation Competitions Work – Sanofi got 100 entries and 5 really solid semi-finalists for their challenge. It’s going to cost them ~$150k in prize bucks plus the amount paid to organize the challenge to find 2 really solid finalists (my votes are for Ginger.io and Wirefra.me) who are going to deliver great tools for patients taking Sanofi products. How much would it have cost them, all in, to do something like this if they had gone through traditional procurement channels to develop these prototypes? A lot more than what they spent for this project. How many teams would they have been able to find using traditional channels? Probably not many. How long would it have taken? Don’t ask. Innovation competitions are a powerful tool to solve real problems, find great talent, and draw attention to an issue.
Lack of Business Models Continues To Be A Problem: It’s no secret that big exits in the Health 2.0 space have been few and far between. The main problem most start-ups have in the space is finding scaleable and repeatable (h/t Steve Blank) business models to drive growth. Anyone who has started a company in the space can tell you about the tremendous pain associated with dealing with the bureaucracies of any of the big stakeholders – Payors, Employers, Provider Institutions, and Pharma/Biotech/Device Cos. Although all the prototypes were intriguing I think it’s still a long road ahead for most of these companies as they try to commercialize what they’ve built. Hopefully the $100k winner’s purse and promotional support from one of the world’s largest companies can jump start a business for the winners.
They’re Coming Out Of The Woodwork: – One thing that’s been really remarkable to me in the last few weeks and months is the number of “non-health” people coming out of the woodwork to pursue healthtech start-ups. I can’t tell you many people I’ve met at meetups and conferences who are migrating from other industries (finance, media, tech, medicine, etc.) to pursue opportunities in the healthtech space. I think this is happening because this time it really is different – I think the health system in this country is going to change in a radical way over the next few years because IT HAS TO CHANGE. As any good entrepreneur knows change creates opportunity – especially when you’re talking about an industry that accounts for more than $2 TRILLION in spend. Our friend Farzad Mostashari, head of the ONC, likes to say that there has never been a better time to be in the health technology space and I agree with him whole-heartedly.
I’m looking forward to the final submissions for the DDD Innovation Challenge and looking forward to more big companies embracing this kind of innovation.
As a follow-up to our announcement earlier this week regarding the launch of the Investing in Innovation (i2) Initiative we’re very excited to share an interview with Farzad Mostashari, National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.
In the interview, hosted by our very own Indu Subaiya, Farzad talks about the goals of the i2 program and about the exciting things going on in health IT more broadly. It’s a very engaging 9 minutes and provides additional insight into the work that Health 2.0 is doing with the federal government on behalf of the American people.
We’d like to thank Farzad for his time and his relentless support for innovation in the health space.
Today Health 2.0 and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) are happy to officially launch the Investing in Innovation (i2) Initiative. The i2 initiative is a bold new program created by the ONC to spur innovation in health IT through the prizes, competitions, and community development.
Learn everything you need to know about the ONC’s Investing in Innovation (i2) Initiative in this short video filmed for the The Doctor’s Channel.
Thanks to David, Mike and the great team at Doctor’s Channel for pulling this video together so quickly. Guys, I promise to embed from your site as soon as you guys launch your revised site later this year.
