MedStartr.NYC - a Healthcare Innovation Community

This meetup group is where the global healthcare innovation community called MedStartr began. It has always been dedicated to advancing innovations that focus on improving patient care with the active involvement of Patients, Physicians, Nurses, Administrators, Executives, Staff, Designers, Inventors, Engineers, and all stakeholders in healthcare.  If your interest is in improving the practice and performance of medicine, then this is the meetup for you.

A Little History
Eugene Borukovich started this group, the first of its kind, in 2008.  Not long after, he affiliated with the Health 2.0 Conference and became the first local Health 2.0 chapter, naming it Health 2.0 NYC. In 2010 Eugene asked me (Alex Fair) to run a few events while he was gone for the summer. That was 15 years ago and we have run over 1,200 events in 41 cities around the world. We also inspired hundreds more similar groups, helping many get started. In 2012 we launched a crowdfunding site for the community at MedStartr.com. HIMSS bought the Health 2.0 conference and the 218 chapters we helped build and train, but not this one. Most of the Health 2.0 chapters have since gone dark or renamed, but we resisted renaming for years. Now, in addition to events in our hometown, we travel the world, training new leaders to create healthcare innovation communities that we know will help improve healthcare. In 2025 we are finally changing the name and we hope no one minds much. We don't even have clear rights to the Health 2.0 name, and everything else we do is called MedStartr, so it was time.

So today, Jan 21, 2025, we finally decided to change the name to MedStartr.nyc as we roll out the MedStartr local community platform on MedStartr.com (check out Global, NYC, JPM/SF, Miami, New Orleans, Columbia, Charleston,... or request your own here.)

So, What is MedStartr?
MedStartr, first and foremost, is a global community of healthcare innovation activists, inventors, supporters, founders, investors and customers. Online, at local events and giant conferences, we help people like you Connect, Collaborate, and Create the future of healthcare together. We also created a supportive infrastructure for the innovators with classes, accelerator programs, local communities, national scale contests and challenges, a vast mentor network, investment funds and even rapid turnaround programs for startups. As an agency we also created some of the city-wide and even national programs you have seen that we can't mention here, but won some awards for economic development and one is even the largest physician innovation network around today.

Our community and MedStartr Mentor network not only invests time with the startups in the community, but also helps them get contracts and often invests. We also ask our community to recommend teams for our MedStartr funds and then collect all the data to predict which companies are ready for which level of funding, accelerator, or even a turnaround program. Last, but not least, we have helped several members of teh community start their own funds, mentoring a network of other fund managers that all are like-minded about improving how healthcare works. Impact and IRR, not just IRR.

As a result, our investment funds have done well, and are attracting more capital - which is great because we want to be able to help more startups help improve healthcare. That's the goal that our community was founded on and we are all working towards.

What types of Healthcare Innovations are we talking about?
We really don't care what area of healthcare you are in, if an idea helps provide better care at reduced cost, makes giving care easier, helps increase equity and transparency, addresses social determinants of health, is a new drug or treatment protocol,... we are interested. And by "we" we mean the community, not just our funds, all of us.

Thousands of investments, partnerships and collaborations have come from our events, hackathons, contests, and our crowdfunding/ crowd-validation platform, MedStartr.com.  A few of the companies that have presented before they made it anywhere: Medable, UniteUs, CityMD, Abilto, PillPack, Phreesia, ZocDoc, HelloHealth, Medivo (now Prognos.ai), Avado (bought by WebMD), YourNurseIsOn (acquired), DrChrono, EpionHealth, Healthrageous (acquired), WellApps (acquired), Misfit (acquired), DocGraph/CareSet, Twiage (acquired), Care+Wear, Mymee, DirectShifts, Register Patient (acquired), and over five hundred more as well as StartupHealth and six other accelerators.  We have hosted world leaders like Susannah Fox, Todd Park, Bryan Sivak, Regina Holliday, Esther Dyson, Daniel Kraft, Rasu Shretha, Stephen Konya, Rich Park and representatives from every major Healthcare Venture Capital and Angel group in the Northeast.  Our events and challenges have been supported by over 167 companies like GE, Aetna, HP, Verizon, VNSNY, NYU, Columbia, Rockafeller U, The AMA, AHA, AMIA, Takeda, Pfizer and more. The net result is a community of health innovators, accelerators, venture capitalists, hospitals, doctors, patients, programmers, and more with a can do attitude that is changing healthcare every day.

We continue to organize this group as our way of saying thanks for helping us launch [MedStartr.com](http://www.medstartr.com) in 2012 and MedStartr.vc, our venture fund, in 2017 ...but this isn't about us, it is what our thousands of members, creators and adopters of healthcare innovation can do for healthcare.

Who presents here?

- Patients who have defined issues to be addressed and / or designed apps to improve their health and the health of others
- Physicians who create innovative care models, develop solutions, or simply are looking for new ways to address the problems they see
- Entrepreneurs who create new innovative healthcare solutions
- Engineers who invent new ideas powered by AI, AR, VR, MR, and many other acronyms.
- Hospital Executives driving development and adoption of new ideas
- Nurses who reinvent nursing management or point of care solutions
- Investors, Angels, and VCs looking for the next big thing
- Pharma, Insurance, and Diagnostics companies that look for new technologies and companies to work with
- Pharmacists who design better medication management, adherence, distribution or other systems
- Game Designers who make patient education fun
- Wearable Device designers that help people self-monitor and collect massive amounts of data
- Engineers, Programmers, and Hackers that invent and enable new care paradigms
- Designers who love to design Killer Apps for Healthy Living
- Innovative Government leaders seeking positive change
- Reporters and Bloggers who want to see the cutting edge before it happens and spread the word

• Health Policy and Regulatory Experts that want to help us get our ideas to market faster
• Researchers and Scientists with new ideas and clinical efficacy evidence

• and so many more amazing people and companies all with the same vision of healthcare working better for all.

 
By putting us all together in one place, we are creating the future of healthcare and made New York the healthcare innovation capital of the world.

Here is what has happened in the early years when we started this group (see chart):  The middle bar is NYC and it shows how much funding has gone into health tech innovations in Boston, NYC, and Silicon Valley starting in 2012.  It was even worse in 2008 when we started, not even a tenth of Silicon Valley.  By 2016 we led by 49%.  and every year since then the gap is widening with gigantic deals that dwarf the 2016 numbers.  Is it due to this meetup group?  Partially, we would say. We also designed the original HealthTech Pilot Program for Mayor Bloomberg, so that helped too. The fact is that when people get together, new ideas happen, businesses form or get customers, and great stuff happens.  We also decided early on to be hyper-collaborative and have helped scores of other groups get started.  Now there are a dozen healthcare innovation meetup groups in NYC and hundreds more around the world and it only adds to the momentum.


Here is EDC's take on it (not just HealthTech:)  https://www.nycedc.com/sites/default/files/filemanager/Industries/Media_EmergTech/NYC_TechStats.pdf
And the original article on CBinsights is here: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/digital-health-silicon-valley-new-york-boston/

STARTUPS: We are always looking for start-ups and individuals to present the ideas or products they are passionate about. Please be welcome to join the conversation, propose a topic, or suggest an alternative format. We are a largely user-driven group, so suggest a topic and we will do the most popular event. Email us here, Apply to be a speaker through your user profile on MedStartr.com, or Apply to pitch on the MedMo World Tour at bit.ly/MedMoWT - not just in NYC! 

We also enable more established companies to get their message out to the healthcare innovation community through sponsorship and speaking.  So if there is an event, challenge, or product release you would like to talk about, please contact us.
Thanks for visiting, we hope to see you soon!
Yours Truly,
-Alex Fair (@alexbfair), Donna Cusano (@deetelecare), Lois Drapin (@Drapin), Deanna Dammers and our awesome volunteers and event organizers!
Join us on Linkedin, Facebook or Twitter: @MedStartr or @H2NYC
MedStartr (@MedStartr) - Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation Programs and Investing
Call: 530.MEDSTAR (530.633.7827) or email us here.