Creating health-tech opportunity

WITH CARE: Nick Adams, president of Providence-based Care Thread, part of the health technology industry group MedMates. He says the association with MedMates could lend more credibility to smaller companies. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO
WITH CARE: Nick Adams, president of Providence-based Care Thread, part of the health technology industry group MedMates. He says the association with MedMates could lend more credibility to smaller companies. / PBN PHOTO/MICHAEL SALERNO

MedMates grew up out of a simple premise: Put enough health-tech industry members in a room together, and innovation will take care of itself.
“The capacity was always there, the participants were always there, but there was no net, no association that brought them together on a regular basis and created a forum for dialogue and networking,” said Stephen Lane, co-founder and chief venture officer of Providence-based Ximedica, who founded MedMates with Woonsocket-based Aspiera Medical Director David Goldsmith. “We were creating an environment where folks who wouldn’t have previously been in the same room were able to seek each other out.”
Conceived during the Rhode Island Foundation’s inaugural Make It Happen Rhode Island brainstorming session in September 2012, MedMates is the state’s first group for networking and advocacy in health technology not exclusive to a specific subsector, such as medical devices or bioscience. Fifty people attended the first exploratory meeting in January 2013, and the group officially launched in April after securing a $50,000 Rhode Island Foundation grant.
A year later, MedMates boasts 410 members, most of them from within Rhode Island. MedMates’ members span every sector of health technology, including biotech, health IT, medical devices and pharmacy, and they bring a diverse range of professional experience as CEOs, investors, researchers and entrepreneurs. Membership isn’t exclusive to the private sector, either – the group also welcomes academic representatives like Katherine Gordon, managing director of Brown University’s Technology Ventures Office, and government liaisons like Christine Smith, executive director of the R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council.
In its first year, MedMates’ cross-sector approach already has borne fruit. Before David Goldsmith met Paul Hayre, co-founder and president of Wellesley, Mass.-based Sano LLC, at the MedMates “For the Love of Entrepreneurship” event on Feb. 27, their two companies had already unknowingly collaborated on a medical study at a Pennsylvania hospital testing the efficacy of Aspiera’s Terrasil wound-care and antiseptic ointment and Sano’s chronic-wound diagnostic platform. Neither company had learned of the other’s involvement from the principal investigator of the study and didn’t connect the dots until Hayre attended the MedMates event as one of more than 20 presenters who pitched their business ideas to potential mentors and investors. Now Aspiera and Sano are exploring a potential research collaboration.
During its first year, the group focused on getting the word out, attracting new members and developing programming for its monthly meetups. Not every member attends every meeting, MedMates’ Communications Director Maeve Donohue said, since the events vary in topic and intent. While some are structured as casual social mixers at a local restaurant or bar, others are educational events or workshops, or serve as a forum where members can receive updates from sister organizations like the Bioscience Leaders or Tech Collective.
Most importantly, Donohue stressed, the meetups serve as a place where random collisions across sector lines become a little less random.
For a small company like Providence-based Care Thread, an alumnus of the Betaspring accelerator program that provides secure mobile messaging for hospitals, the opportunity to connect with industry experts who may become mentors or potential business partners has become invaluable.
“When you start a company, there are times when you are very alone,” said Nick Adams, co-founder and president of Care Thread. “Meeting other people who have been there before really helps lessen the load, just by the fact that they’ve done it. MedMates is an opportunity for me to meet people like that. I get to hear them say, ‘Don’t worry, this happened to us, too.’ ”
Association with MedMates can also lend a new company much-needed credibility in an industry that often prefers to rely on established providers over innovative startups, Adams said. With connections to leaders at Lifespan, Care New England, CVS Caremark Corp. and other giants of the Rhode Island health industry, MedMates can act as a kind of liaison and matchmaker for young startups. Through MedMates, Care Thread was nominated to participate in Healthy Rhode Island, a project of the lieutenant governor’s office focused on innovating to improve the future of the health care system in Rhode Island. The nomination has allowed Care Thread to gain better access to Rhode Island health care entities that could become potential partners, Adams said.
It was exactly those sorts of connections that Neil D. Steinberg and Jessica David of the Rhode Island Foundation hoped would spring from MedMates when they awarded the group its initial $50,000 grant. David attributes the group’s success to its private-public model and the energy and industry expertise Goldsmith and Lane bring to the table.
“I think when it is driven by someone in that industry, it adds a lot of credibility to the effort,” said David. “It makes it real because they’re talking about things and setting agendas on topics that they care about.”
As MedMates prepares to celebrate the one-year anniversary of its official launch, its organizers have outlined an ambitious agenda that will lead the group into its second year. The agenda centers on three distinct initiatives: creating a “launch pad” for startups in the health-tech sector, connecting MedMates members within industry subsectors, and helping to shape policy at the state level.
To spearhead these initiatives, MedMates is looking to hire a full-time executive director, Goldsmith said. The executive director would work closely with policymakers to rally continued support for initiatives like the Innovate Rhode Island Small Business Fund supporting matching grants for federally funded technology research. The director would also play a role in exploring the idea of turning MedMates’ startup “launch pad” into a Betaspring-style accelerator for health tech.
Meanwhile, on April 9 MedMates invited members to participate in a discussion of the year’s action agenda and map out how to make the group’s vision a reality.
“We set out to galvanize the community, and that’s definitely what we’re doing,” Donohue said. •

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