1776 and MedStar collaborate on new pitch competition for health-tech startups

MedStar Health and 1776 announced on Friday that the two organizations have teamed up to offer a new pitch competition for health tech startups. The competition, called (quite long-windedly) “Thinking Outside Healthcare’s Traditional Box — Shifting the Frame from Patient to Consumer,” will be held in June.

Winners of the pitch competition will take part in a six-month incubation program run using 1776’s UNION platform and hosted at the 1776 campus in Crystal City.

We're teaming up w/ @MedStarHealth to find & incubate startups redefining health, & we're running it on UNION https://t.co/1SfEyxoL2y

— Union (@JoinUnion) March 10, 2017

“Innovation is increasingly transforming patient care beyond the hospital, into more accessible settings like urgent care sites, ambulatory complexes and surgery centers, retail pharmacies, the home and anywhere consumers are connected digitally,” Mark Smith, M.D., chief innovation officer of MedStar Health and director of the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2) said in a statement. “We have been working with 1776 to activate the startup ecosystem to recruit the best ideas — going beyond smartphone applications and patient portals — that will shape the future of health.”

More information on the specifics of the pitch competition will be available in April, the press release states.

The new partnership is not the first time MedStar and 1776 have worked together. The two also collaborate on MedStar’s Health for America program, as 1776 provides the HFA fellows with workspace, mentorship opportunities and more.

The partnership also represents an opportunity for 1776 to get more stakeholders using UNION, an online platform that’s sort of like a social network for member startups. 1776 has been executing a push around UNION recently — on Thursday the incubator announced that it has reached agreements on the use of UNION with more than 20 other startup programs around the world.

Read 1776 CTO Yuriko Horvath’s very informative Medium post for more on what, exactly, UNION does and how it came to be.