Rock Health, incubator for digital healthcare startups, will expand to Boston this summer

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist

Ed Coburn, director of the health media group at Harvard Med School, helped Tecco expand the program from its San Francisco base to Boston. Already signed on to mentor are local entrepreneurs like Jason Jacobs of RunKeeper, Ben Rubin of Zeo, Erika Pabo of Harvard Med School, Sonny Vu of Misfit Wearables, and Jacob Sattelmair of WellFrame. Former MIT Media Lab director Frank Moss, a co-founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, has been a mentor for the San Francisco program and will participate in Boston as well.

Tecco says the program's goal is to bring "radical innovation" to healthcare. The Harvard Med School relationship and the Longwood location of the program will give entrepreneurs who participate an opportunity to test their prototypes in partnership with experienced docs and other medical professionals, she says.

Tecco says that Rock Health was the first incubator program exclusively targeting health startups (there are now others, like Blueprint Health and Healthbox.) She launched it after getting her MBA from Harvard Business School, and spending a summer assessing and organizing health-related apps for Apple's iTunes Store. The program is underwritten by sponsors that include Genentech, Nike, and the Mayo Clinic. Among Rock Health's San Francisco alumni are Chronology, a social network for people with Crohn's disease and colitis, and Cellscope, which builds attachments for smartphones that enable medical diagnoses to be done at home or in village clinics. Interestingly, a Cambridge startup called Ginger.io acquired Pipette, a Rock Health alum that uses mobile phones to monitor patients' conditions, earlier in March.

Application info for the Boston program is here.

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Rock Health, incubator for digital healthcare startups, will expand to Boston this summer

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