ARTICLE SUMMARY:
In part 2 of our feature on Fogarty Innovation, we look at FI’s Education platform, which produces workshops and classes for both the internal audience of FI companies and the wider medtech ecosystem, and its Alliances program, which brings disparate stakeholders, such as government agencies and provider groups, together to accelerate the delivery of new technologies into patient care.
While the connections Fogarty Innovation enables through an extensive network are undeniably important, just as important is the education program that the incubator has developed, a program that, too, has evolved. “When we started out, we were largely producing programs and workshops geared toward the companies in residence here,”says Marga Ortigas-Wedekind, a veteran of multiple medtech companies including iRhythm, Xoft, Guidant, and Omnicell, among others. She heads FI’s education program. “It was really all about block-and-tackle mechanics—how to fundraise, how to implement a QMS system, things like that.” Over the last two years, however, FI executives began to identify “broader topics” that FI wanted to address, topics of interest to both the internal audience of the FI companies and an external audience of the wider medtech ecosystem. “As we looked at the educational programs we had been doing, particularly during COVID,” she notes, “we realized we were already doing more external and general education.”
