By Hemali Thakkar
Let’s face it, as a startup in the health care space, it’s not easy to land a first pilot to demonstrate the value your new technology, much less get paid for one. Strict federal regulations, billion dollar EMR implementations, and the fear of privacy leaks have made our nation’s providers very risk averse and extremely cautious about working with early stage health tech companies. Implementing new technologies in hospitals, where there are strict IT guidelines relating to ensuring patient data privacy and heavy bureaucracy, is difficult. Large hospital systems and other health care service organizations simply do not have the bandwidth or resources to guide companies through these challenges and therefore are reluctant to partner with early stage companies.
What results is a problem we are all too familiar with – failure of new technologies to diffuse into the market. Startups face the classic chicken and egg problem. As a startup, you need some traction, or proof of evidence that your technology brings some value to your customer. But in order to show that you bring value, a startup needs to test out the technology in the health care setting. Houston, we have a problem!
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), a non-profit that aims to catalyze economic growth in New York City’s five boroughs, recognized this problem early on and decided to tackle the issue head-on. After many health care stakeholder working groups and other research, NYCEDC launched PILOT Health Tech NYC in collaboration with Health 2.0, Blueprint Health, and Startup Health. PILOT Health Tech NYC matches early-stage health care technology companies (‘innovators’) with key NYC health care service organizations or individuals (‘hosts’), including hospitals, physician clinics, payors, pharma companies, and nursing associations. NYCEDC will fund approximately 10 innovative NYC-based pilot projects with up to $100,000 each. That funding is equity free and acts like a milestone based grant that can be split between the ‘host’ and the ‘innovator’ as they see fit.
And the best part – the program will help facilitate connections between ‘innovators’ and ‘hosts’ via matchmaking events to promote formation of partnerships. For most startups, that eliminates months (if not years) of cold-calling and precious business development resources.
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