Digital Health Resources

I often get asked how best to learn about the digital health ecosystem, which events to go to and where to find the most interesting startups. I wrote this page to try and list some of my favorite resources. While the physical events are likely to have a bias toward the Bay Area, many of the resources are online and useful where ever you are in the world!

If you have any questions or know of something that’s great but not listed here please get in touch.

Groups

Stanford Biodesign

The Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign has a long history of catalyzing innovation in the health technology space. The center now houses a range of academic and fellowship programs and puts on a series of events each year including the Innovator’s Workbench and the Thomas Fogarty Annual Lecture.

Docs & Hackers

Established by two awesome engineer entrepreneurs (Amit & Ankit) who found it hard to get feedback from clinicians, this group aims to get everyone in the same room. They hold events in the Bay Area, Boston and Bangalore and they always pull a great crowd with a very strong mix of engineers and healthcare providers. Events always start with a handful of startup pitches.

Society of Physician Entrepreneurs

SoPE is a non-profit innovation network that has several different chapters across the country. The Bay Area chapter is organized by Uli Chettipally MD and holds regular monthly meetings, often in South Bay and featuring startup pitches and healthtech keynotes.

UCSF Health Hub

This is a relatively new organization started by UCSF that aims to connect external entrepreneurs and people working on interesting projects to internal UCSF resources, clinical champions and other stakeholders. The idea is to foster collaboration to bring innovation in to the UCSF Health System. As part of the initiative, they regularly hold and sponsor events, usually free of charge that have a very good turn out.

Stanford Center for Digital Health

Events & Conferences

Haas Healthcare Conference

This is an annual one day conference organized by students at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and School of Public Health. Usually held at UCSF’s Genentech Hall around March, the conference attracts around 300 students and healthcare leaders from around the Bay Area and features keynotes, breakout sessions and exhibits from leading healthcare companies around the Bay Area.

Stanford Medicine X

This is an annual conference held at Stanford Medicine in September over a few days. One of the things that makes it unique is the involvement of patients and caregivers who attend in large numbers, creating a unique and patient-centered environment.

Health 2.0

The Health 2.0 Conference is held in September in South Bay over three days. The conference/organization was acquired by HIMMS a few years ago and consists of several big stage talks, a wide range of exhibitors in the health tech space and startup pitches. Tickets are not cheap but worth a look.

Rock Health Summit

I’ve never been to this one, but I’ve heard great things. It’s a two day digital health focused conference in SF that seems to bring in some big name speakers. Beyond talks there are breakout sessions, demos and giveaways. I believe they also include tours of some local portfolio companies to those who pay for it. Again not cheap but definitely worth a look, especially if you’re from out of town and want to be fully immersed.

JPMorgan Healthcare Conference Week

The main JPMorgan event, held in Union Square usually in the third week of January, consists of several keynotes and days of short investor-focused presentations from the CEOs of leading healthcare companies across the entire spectrum. While the JPMorgan event is invite-only, the hyper concentration of healthcare executives creates a huge amount of buzz around the city with countless meetings, serendipitous encounters and peripheral networking events.

HIMMS

I’ve been to HIMMS once as a guest and found it to be a very enjoyable experience. It’s a week long conference that alternates between Orlando and Las Vegas. It convenes everyone from small startups to the Epic, Cerner, IBM and UnitedHealthcare’s of the world. It features big name keynotes and hundreds of smaller sessions. With so many executives in the health tech space in one place, it’s the perfect place to make connections. The exhibition halls are filled with company booths and honestly it’s quite overwhelming! Evenings are packed with complimentary company sponsored events. Tickets are expensive, but if there’s one destination event in healthcare IT this might be it.

HLTH

This is a new kid on the block and similar to HIMMS as a major destination conference in Las Vegas. It pulls in a long list of executives across healthcare and indeed, that is one of its main draws. It also sets out to attract both large corporations and startups and a signature aspect of their branding is the caricatures they make for each of their speakers.

UCSF Entrepreneurship Center

The UCSF Entrepreneurship Center, led by Stephanie Marrus is a fantastic organization that puts on a wide range of events and initiatives including their Lean Launchpad inspired Startup 101, speaker series and an annual digital health mixer event co-hosted with Rock Health, UC Berkeley & Stanford. They have a mailing list with their events and external events of interest listed - it’s well worth subscribing.

Websites

STAT

STAT is an investigative media company owned by the Boston Globe and focused on health, medicine and scientific discovery. While their premium subscription isn’t cheap, they produce some unique and well researched content that’s almost always a great read.

Kaiser Family Foundation

KFF, now based in San Francisco, produces some of the highest quality statistics on national health issues, including polls and surveys and projections. In the self-insured employer space they collect detailed statistics on the cost of coverage, deductibles, plan designs, etc. and how they change over the years. Very useful and informative!

Kaiser Health News

KHN is a nonprofit news service that is an editorially independent program of the KFF and does not accept advertising. Another great source of news and educational content about broad health issues.

MobiHealthNews

This site has come along in strides in recent years. Despite the name, their focus is broader health technology and I think of them as the TechCrunch for the healthcare world. A great place to hear the latest breaking news and funding announcements.

KevinMD

Initially started as Kevin’s individual blog, KevinMD has turned in to a site with a multitude of physician opinions on technology, current issues and controversial topics. It’s place to find more pragmatic and slightly critical viewpoints outside of the tech bubble.

HackerNews

While this social news site is focused on broader technology and startups, there is a decent amount of healthcare discussion that happens on here. You often find doctors lurking in the comments sections and it’s generally a great place to keep abreast of technology announcements, trends and opinion.

Digital.Health

Started by Daniel Kraft, MD (health technology extraordinaire and chair of Exponential Medicine) this website lists a bunch of resources, health tech company by disease area and startup resources. It’s still relatively new but definitely worth a look.

Tech Tonics

Hosted by Lisa Suennen (VC and visiting UCB professor) and David Shaywitz, MD (formerly CMO of DNA Nexus, now investor with Takeda) this podcast features interviews with high profile entrepreneurs and health care leaders across the spectrum. Well worth a listen!

The ACO Show

Sponsored by Aledade, a company that helps build and power primary care led ACOs, this podcast is a pretty interesting view in to how their model works and the components that all ACOs need to think about. Of course they’re trying to advocate for their model but I’ve found it very informative and interesting.

Venrock’s Running Through Walls

Venrock is one of the most prominent and well respected venture capital firms in healthcare. In each short episode of this podcast, a Venrock investor interviews an entrepreneur they’ve invested in. Some really great stories here.

Reconstructing Healthcare

This podcast is run by Michael Menerey, a benefits consultant, and as such is primarily targeted at HR benefits leaders running self-insured health plans. With that said, it is a really eye opening and well produced series for anyone interested in the self-insured employer space. In each episode he talks to leaders at companies who primarily sell to self-insured employers (eg. PBMs, care management providers, TPAs, etc) and doesn’t shy away from asking the hard questions. Highly recommended!

Rock Health

While not an official series with a regular cadence, Rock Health put out some interesting podcasts with various leaders in digital health. Worth adding to the list and having a listen.

Fixing Healthcare

This podcast is hosted by Robert Pearl, MD, formerly CEO of The Permanente Medical Group (TPMG), the largest medical group in the US comprising of over 9,000 physicians and 35,000 nurses and staff. He’s now a lecturer on organizational behavior at the Stanford GSB and in this podcast he interviews some of the most prominent leaders in healthcare including Don Berwick, David Feinberg and Eric Topol. His overarching question in most of the episodes is what the interviewee would do if they were appointed to lead the US healthcare system, improving quality, patient satisfaction and physician satisfaction by 20% while also reducing overall system costs by 20%.

The Healthcare Policy Podcast

Newsletters

GIST Weekly

I stumbled on this after reading a particularly helpful article on PBM pricing and it’s continued to be an excellent policy-focused weekly email news commentary. GIST are a boutique healthcare consulting firm based in Washington DC.

Kevin’s Weekly Healthtech Reads

Kevin O’Leary leads innovation for Allina, a health system in Minneapolis. He puts out a weekly email newsletter, delivered on Sundays that provides news and opinions on the latest in healthcare delivery with a focus on technology.

Rock Weekly

Run by the folks over at Rock Health, this is my longest standing email newsletter, arriving almost without fail every Monday. It includes the latest news with a focus on digital health, along with major funding announcements for the week.

Company Lists

Crunchbase

Has details on almost every company out there, including founders, fund raising details.

Data

Medicare

NHS Digital

AHRQ

List of Medical Imaging Datasets

Books

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Bob Wachter

The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande

Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon by Henry Marsh

Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters by Atul Gawande

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Videos

AHealthcareZ

AHealthcareZ is a project set up by Dr. Eric Bricker, an internal medicine physician who co-founded Compass Healthcare Navigation, a service that was later acquired by Alight. Dr. Bricker has a huge wealth of expertise when it comes to the incentive structures behind the way health care is paid for and he also has a passion for education. His short and informative videos are some of the best out there!

Exponential Medicine

Exponential Medicine is an annual conference/event run by Daniel Kraft at Singularity University. It brings together healthcare leaders from across the world and the conference component of it consists of talks from a wide range of speakers at the cutting edge of their fields. Exponential Medicine are kind enough to livestream the conference on YouTube and the videos are subsequently available to watch.

Stanford Medicine

The Medical School puts up regular videos of speakers, including guests like Professor Henry Marsh of UK neurosurgery renown.

Stanford Biodesign

The Biodesign’s YouTube channel hosts a bunch of great content on topics like FDA approval for medical devices and team dynamics as well as their annual Fogarty Lecture and Innovator’s Workbench where they interview medical device executives.

Accelerators and Incubators

SkyDeck

SkyDeck is UC Berkeley’s most prominent accelerator program based out of fantastic space in downtown Berkeley. They take companies across all industries with some form of UC connection and have a long history of working with healthcare companies. Their cohort track is a 6-month program that includes workspace, programing and support and a $100k investment structured as a SAFE from their newly launched fund.

StartX Med

StartX is a non-profit community designed to support Stanford affiliated startups. They go out of their way to say they are not a time-limited “accelerator”, but they do provide a huge amount of free resources, 1-on-1 mentorship, drop-in office space and educational seminars to the companies they accept. They don’t take any equity for participation, but they do have a StartX Fund that will invest in companies in the program based on objective criteria. StartX Med is part of StartX and designed to support the unique needs of health technology companies.

IndieBio

IndieBio is a life sciences accelerator based in San Francisco with a 4-month program that culminates in a demo-day. They take 8% equity for the program and invest $250k in companies accepted through an “Accelerator Contract for Equity” with a $3M cap, I’m assuming this is something similar to a SAFE as popularized by YC. It’s a cool physical space and they’ve had some pretty interesting companies go through.

NFX Guild

QB3

YCombinator

The highest profile accelerator out there. Although it was not their initial focus, YCombinator has now invested in a wide range of healthcare companies ranging from medical devices and genomics to digital health and healthcare services. They recently launched some resources specifically for biotech companies. They currently write checks for $150k in return for 5% structured as a SAFE and have a demo-day at the end of each batch.

Plug and Play Center

AngelPad

Village Global

500 Startups

Fogarty Institute

MedTech Innovator

Investors

Of course there are way too many investors to list on this page. I’ll be creating a Google Sheet with a list of major health tech investors, in the meantime take a look at three of my favorites - a16z, Venrock and NEA.

Signal: list of VC firms by industry provided by NfX Guild.