Trinity College is among the local founding partners of Digital Health CT, a new digital health (or medtech) accelerator in Hartford, designed to attract new talent and technology and to rapidly scale health-care-focused technology start-ups. Other founding local partners include Hartford HealthCare and UConn’s School of Business and Technology Commercialization Services team.
Digital Health CT—to be run by Startupbootcamp, a network of industry-focused programs that support early-stage tech founders—will provide entrepreneurs with the resources and industry and investor connections they need to help grow their business. The program will include a special emphasis on digital health and will join Hartford’s growing community of innovation and entrepreneurship assets, including Hartford’s insurtech accelerator, also launched by Startupbootcamp in 2018. Both of these efforts were catalyzed by investment from CTNext through the Hartford/East Hartford Innovation Places Program.
Each year, up to 10 start-ups will be accepted into the three-month intensive digital health accelerator in Hartford. Startupbootcamp and the program’s partners will work with local stakeholders to create opportunities for participating companies to receive coordinated feedback from leading health care payers, providers, and research institutions in a very short period of time. As a result, digital health companies will find a center where they can receive fast, focused, and fundamental feedback that will help them develop products that will improve health and patient experience.
To be eligible for the program, entrepreneurs must have a working prototype and have secured from other sources the operating capital to fuel their current stage of growth.
Trinity President Joanne Berger-Sweeney said, “We are proud to be hosting the digital health accelerator in Trinity’s new space at One Constitution Plaza, which will also house our key partnership with Infosys, serving as a hub for innovation and entrepreneurship for our students, faculty, and alumni—and a model of institutions of higher education partnering with the private and public sector for the public good.”