Earlier this month, as Crain's reported, a Google prodigy called CityBlock landed its first big contract with EmblemHealth. Manhattan-based CityBlock is pioneering the use of technology to provide better and more cost-effective treatment for people on Medicare and Medicaid, especially in poor neighborhoods.
Earlier this year, the pharmaceutical giant Roche paid just under $2 billion for Flatiron Health, a New York company which may just completely change the way cancer care is delivered. Like CityBlock it is applying sophisticated technology to a major medical issue.
Last year, 79 New York health tech companies raised an amazing $703 million in venture capital.
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The way the tech sector is changing New York is one of the most underreported stories in New York as Cara Eisenpress and I detailed in our February story "Tech City" and in related follow-ups. Health tech may be the area that has the biggest impact on lives. (Crain’s will shine a spotlight on it Wednesday at its health care summit. There is still time to register.)
The companies that make up the sector span a wide range of endeavors, from ZocDoc, which makes the appointment process an online breeze (and is a participant), to the insurers Oscar and Clover to Pager, a mobile app that arranges health care in a home, office or hotel. The list could go on and on.
Unlike some other sectors in tech, New York faces still competition from other emerging centers like Nashville, Tenn. (health services), Boulder, Colo. (life sciences), and Boston, long a major center of biotech, not to mention Silicon Valley. Also, for all the promises, no one has figured out a path to profitability or an exit strategy except for being acquired by a big health care company desperate to diversify.
Certainly the business is complicated and does not have very engaged consumers, extensive regulation and entrenched traditional institutions and ways of doing business.
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