While Philadelphia Startup Weekend prepares for the sold out 3.0 edition, organizers have just announced Startup Weekend Health Philadelphia.
The first of its kind in the world, the June 1 event will take place at
Venturef0rth and is co-organized by Elliot Menschik, who already possesses a background that blends entrepreneurship and medicine.
Menschik gets an increasing number of calls from healthcare colleagues seeking tech solutions. He says, "Healthcare so lags behind the pace of change in mobile and analytics. As soon as you step into the healthcare domain all that efficiency and convenience goes out the window. Both practitioners and consumers experience this on a daily basis."
Menschik, who founded and sold the startup HxTechnologies, says this lag is the reason he got into healthcare IT in the first place. "There's so much opportunity and it's why it deserves its own weekend."
Philadelphia is just the place for the specialty startup weekend due to its position in both the medical past and present. He writes in the event blog, "From the biopharma corridor to world-class hospitals, medical schools, research institutions, health plans, associations and non-profits, you’d be hard pressed to find another city so immersed in all things medical. So it’s only fitting that Startup Weekend hold its first-ever Healthcare-only Startup Weekend in the same place as the nation’s
first hospital (1751),
first medical school (1765), and many other firsts."
Also, Menschik is hoping that potential sponsors, which would include providers, hospitals, insurance providers, and CROs, would not just kick in money, but would send a rep to present a problem. "Ultimately we would like to have sponsors who will alpha or beta test products. The hardest thing is getting a place to test in a field where customers are so conservative," says Menschik.
Meanwhile, the already sold out Philly Startup Weekend 3.0, the general all purpose edition, will take place April 20-22 at
The University of the Arts. Says co-organizer Brad Oyler of this year's improvements, "We are switching from mentors to coaches as an experiment to get coaches more involved with Startup Weekend teams, and we are going for a more social version this time, with a nightly team bonding event outside of the venue." Oyler thinks PHLSW 3.0 will be orders of magnitude better than 2.0 in October, 2011.
Source: Elliot Menschik, Brad Oyler, Philadelphia Startup Weekend
Writer: Sue Spolan