Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by whafro 4859 days ago
I was in the first batch at Rock Health, and now continue to help out as a mentor. It was a great experience for me, and it's come a long way in the last couple years.

As with all accelerators, your mileage may vary. If your key needs are technical mentorship or great design leadership, Rock Health won't instantly solve those problems for you, though there are really smart folks working alongside you in the office who may well have faced some of the same challenges before.

What Rock Health does bring is a pretty amazing network within health care, and surprisingly direct access to the people and companies that can help make things happen for you. Need a trial in a hospital? Rock Health makes it (comparably) easy to get one started with top-tier places like UCSF and the Mayo Clinic. Want a meeting with a major payer? United Healthcare will be in the office on Thursday, Kaiser Permanente and Aetna are coming next week. Not sure what particular regulations mean for you? A prominent consultant holds office hours twice a month, and one of the heads of Medicare is coming by soon.

As someone whose career was built designing great products on the consumer web, I got keenly interested in some of the healthcare challenges once I met my wife (a pediatrician). But so much of the space is inaccessible to outsiders. Rock Health was the perfect venue to learn, build, and connect with the digital health space, and I'm a far more capable technologist as a result.

It's still a new program, and there are certainly improvements to be made (and, as I mentioned, it's come a long way), but on the whole, I'd give serious consideration to what Rock Health can bring to your work. For me, it was priceless.