Health Wildcatters Incubator
All of us in the mobile health space and in the health startup space have certainly been overwhelmed by the number of health related incubators that have been started over the past couple years. If you aren’t tracking this space like we do, then just check out Paul Sonnier’s list of health related incubators. If my count is right, he has 28 different groups listed there. I’ll be interested to see this list two years from now, but I digress.
One of the newest entrants into the healthcare incubator space is an incubator called Health Wildcatters out of Dallas, TX. I met the founder of the original Tech Wildcatters when she was visiting the Las Vegas startup community. I started talking to her a bit about the Health Wildcatters incubator and she quickly told me that she knew nothing about healthcare and that they hired an Executive Director to manage that part of the accelerator. I was impressed by her honesty.
MobiHealthNews has a great article looking at the first Health Wildcatters companies. They said the class of companies was focused on adherence, physical therapy and senior care. Those all seem like areas where we’ve seen a lot of startup action.
I’ll be interested to watch this and the other healthcare incubator companies to see how they do. Healthcare is a hard nut to crack and usually needs more than a summer’s worth of work. This is particularly true if we’re talking about a product focused on doctors, hospitals or other medical providers. If it’s a consumer health app, you might be able to find a genie in a bottle. However, even the consumer health apps haven’t yet been given three wishes.
I will say that I hope that Health Wildcatters company Echo Therapeutics is successful at creating a non-invasive glucose monitoring solution. Glucose monitoring that doesn’t use blood is a really hard nut to crack. Considering my predisposition to becoming a diabetic one day, I’m very interested in this technology coming to fruition.
