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What we’re about

This group is dedicated to advancing innovations that focus on improving patient care with the active involvement of Patients, Physicians, Nurses, Administrators, Engineers, and even Lawyers.  If your interest is in improving the practice and performance of medicine, then this is the meetup for you.

Eugene Borukovich started the New York Health Innovation Group in 2008.  Not long after he affiliated with the Health 2.0 organization and became the first local chapter of the new conference company. Our chapter has since grown to become the largest healthcare innovation-focused meetup in the world, running events that focus basically on nine different areas of medical innovation (Patient-driven, Hospitals, Physician-Driven, Pharma, Medical Devices, Apps, and AI/IoT/VR,...)  We also do events and programs dedicated to Policies, Accelerating Startups and asking our crowd to help select the best new startups.

Thousands of investments, partnerships and collaborations have come from our events, hackathons, contests, and our crowdfunding platform, MedStartr.com.  A few of the companies that have presented before they made it anywhere: Phreesia, Zweena, ZocDoc, HelloHealth, Medivo (now Prognos.ai), Avado (bought by WebMD), YourNurseIsOn (acquired), DrChrono, EpionHealth, Healthrageous (acquired), WellApps (acquired), Misfit (acquired for 260M), DocGraph/CareSet, Twiage, Care+Wear, Mymee, DirectShifts, Register Patient, and over three hundred more as well as StartupHealth and six other accelerators.  We have hosted our own MedStartr Momentum conferences (examples: MedMo 2015, Rise of the Health Machines) and world leaders like Susannah Fox, Todd Park, Bryan Sivak, Regina Holliday, Esther Dyson and representatives from every major Healthcare Venture Capital and Angel group in the Northeast.  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 organize this group as our way of saying thanks for helping us launch 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

    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

    Quantification companies that help people self-monitor (see also Quantified Self meetup)

    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

    and so many more amazing people and companies...

Mostly what we have are the staff and leaders of the NYC healthcare innovation scene.  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 since we started this group actually:  The middle bar is NYC and it shows how much funding has gone into health tech innovations in Boston, NYC, and Silicon Valley over the past few years.  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?  Fractionally we would say.  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 anymore! 

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), Heather DeLeonardis, 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

(A note on our present name / brand confusion:  Health 2.0 is a trademark now owned by HIMSS which has very little to do with the old Health 2.0 Chapter network so far.  We hope this changes in 2020 but we have talked and they have no issue with us changing or keeping the name presently and since everyone already knows us as Health 2.0 NYC, we keep that name up top still.  On the other hand, you will notice a ton of branding associated with MedStartr and our MedStartr Momentum contests - #MedMo for short.  That's because the people who have underwritten and managed this group for ten years started MedStartr and that IS a brand we own and can use as much as we like.  So you may have noticed, for example, that MedStartr.nyc also comes here and we sometimes refer to the site as such.  We would like to be resolved this someday but we and HIMSS haven't really figured out the best way to do that as of Nov 2019.  We will keep you posted :)