Health Wildcatters

Last Tuesday I attended a kickoff meet-and-greet for Health Wildcatters, a new Dallas-based healthcare-oriented seed accelerator. My impression of the event? Electrifying. The venue ("Tech Church," headquarters for both Health Wildcatters and its older sibling Tech Wildcatters) was filled to the brim with people collectively representing an incredibly diverse array of business and technical expertise. For an illustration of the diversity of talent present within Health Wildcatters' orbit, take a look at the profiles of the mentors (58 in all) who have signed up to serve as coaches for its incoming startups. I had the fortune of having conversations with a number of them at the event. One was with Charley Kiser, President & CEO of management consultancy C. H. Kiser & Company, LLC, who told me that the difficulties that exist in sharing patient information between hospitals is driven only partially by technical constraints (e.g., lack of compatibility between different EHR systems, etc.) and that the lack of business incentives for hospitals to streamline data sharing may in fact be a bigger driver. Another was with David Sym-Smith, Partner at Mobility Ventures, who expressed incredible enthusiasm about the potential of mobile technologies to upend current models of healthcare delivery, up to and including the dissolution of hospitals as they currently exist. Taken in the aggregate, the level of talent and experience represented by the mentors on board at Health Wildcatters is amazing and bodes well for its success.

Go to http://healthwildcatters.com/news/ to see all of the media coverage Health Wildcatters has received. Photos from the meet-and-greet event can be found here and here.

- Isamu Z. Hartman, PhD

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