JP Morgan Healthcare Week in January was full of surprises. It started on Sunday, straight off the plane from SingFit’s flurry of activity at CES and directly to the UC Davis Future of Health all-day event. The panelists spoke from great vantage points of organizations including Best Buy Health, Pfizer, LiveCare Corp. and many major provider systems. During networking breaks, it was energizing to find lots of other attendees from organizations, from Amazon Web Services (AWS) through Walgreens Boots Alliance, interested in accessibility and inclusion when it comes to healthcare.
During the rest of the week, that theme of creating greater inclusivity was threaded through many of the meetings I had and events I attended. It was reassuring when it comes to building more preferable futures to meet with the team at Hopelab, a not-for-profit Venture Capital firm. This organization’s strategically savvy solution led an inspiring investment thesis focused on creating fixes for “systemic barriers to youth mental health and emotional well-being.” If you are a company in this space looking for funding or are looking at new funding models overall, I encourage you to check out Hopelab, a funding model that can be replicated to solve other challenges inside healthcare and in other industries. Full disclosure, I’ve haven't done a deep dive on them, but everyone I met with was absolutely passionate about remaking both the mental health and venture systems.
The weather in San Francisco was incredibly erratic and included hailstorms and rainstorms interrupted by brief glimpses of sunshine. Early morning on Tuesday, however, the thunder, rain and, yes, lightning, couldn’t keep me away from the Women in Health Breakfast put on by Avestria Ventures, a VC fund focused on female founders and women’s health.
In the packed room at 8:00 am, panelists and attendees took on issues ranging from the lack of women in clinical trials to the fact that 2% of venture funding goes to female founders, only a small portion of which goes to those of color.
Of course, I cannot leave out those at the UK JP Morgan Whiskey Reception put together by, among others, the UK's Department for International Trade (DIT). The connections we made through DIT lead the Yorkshire & Humber Academic Health Science Network to "support the adoption and spread" of the SingFit digital health platform through the NHS and the UK healthcare ecosystem at large, which you can read about in their case study by clicking here.
Cheers,
Rachel Francine
CEO of Musical Health Technologies