Yesterday, the New York City Economic Development Corporation and Health 2.0 announced $50,000 in awards to New York-based health care companies and a the launch of a program designed to support health care innovation in the city and state. The announcement follows another partnership Health 2.0 recently made with the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) on a patient portal design challenge. The new program, Innovate Health Tech NYC will grow healthcare technology innovation and entrepreneurship in New York City.
The program plans to hold a yearly competition that awards $50,000 to New York City-based healthcare technology innovators to encourage the development of commercially viable technologies that solve urgent healthcare problems. This year’s challenge is open to software and hardware developers to submit their technological solutions, such as wireless health monitoring devices, mobile applications, clinical workflow management tools, and healthcare analytics tools. The deadline for submissions is May 2, 2013.
Ten finalists will be selected and offered assistance from industry professionals to further develop their product pitch before a public demo day taking place in July. The top three winners will then be selected by a panel of judges comprised of industry leaders, recognizing them as the City’s best emerging healthcare innovations, and offered a total of $50,000 in prizes and exhibition opportunities.
Last week, NYCEDC and Health 2.0 launched PILOT Health Tech NYC, which partners early-stage companies in health technology with key New York City healthcare service organizations – including hospitals, physician clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and nursing associations – in order to pilot and advance new technologies. The program will provide funding of up to $100,000 each to 10 innovative pilot projects annually in New York City. These programs will position New York City as a growing center of health technology. Both programs are part of a larger portfolio of initiatives designed to strengthen the City’s life sciences and healthcare technology sectors.
As CivSource reported earlier this month, Health 2.0 also partnered with the New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC), on a $25,000 competition to design a new patient portal for New York patients.
All of these initaitives are part of the core mission of Health 2.0 which supports health care innovation through funding worldwide. So far the organization has introduced over 500 new companies to the market and awarded nearly $3 million in cash prizes to developers. New York state has also announced several major statewide initiatives in an effort to draw health care jobs to the state making it a hub for health IT.
