Which Are the Top Healthcare IT Cities?

Whenever you talk about cities, people start getting really defensive. I guess that’s a good thing since many people are really proud of their cities. However, I saw this tweet and image from Rasu Shrestha about Nashville and I started thinking, “Which cities are the top healthcare IT cities?”

No doubt this chart makes a pretty impressive case for Nashville as one of the top healthcare IT cities. Although, this chart is really focused on Nashville as a healthcare city vs Nashville as a healthcare IT city? Is there a correlation?

I think there is to some extent. It’s really hard to have a healthcare IT city without a lot of great healthcare organizations. The two generally go together. Colin saw this first hand when he attended the Health:Further conference in Nashville. He certainly saw a lot of great healthcare IT companies at the event.

At HIMSS each year the good people of Atlanta, Georgia like to make the case that Atlanta is the healthcare IT capital of the world. This includes a big Georgia booth that includes a wide spectrum of Healthcare IT companies. I’m not sure how many people think of Atlanta when it comes to healthcare IT, but when you visit the Georgia booth at HIMSS, you realize that they may be right in saying they deserve the spot as the top healthcare IT city.

Another obvious choice for top healthcare IT cities is Boston. It helps to have Harvard and MIT in your area to prop up your city as a major healthcare IT city. Some really impressive healthcare organizations help as well. The only knock on Boston is that it does so much in the biotech world that it often can overwhelm the healthcare IT companies that are in the area. Regardless of that competition, Boston has some of the most innovative healthcare IT companies out there.

Many people like to mention San Diego as a great healthcare IT city. It gets a similar knock to Boston in that it’s often more life sciences vs healthcare IT.

Silicon Valley (San Francisco, etc) has to make the list just for the sheer number of startups they have working on healthcare IT. The challenge in Silicon Valley is that there’s not a great concentration of healthcare IT companies in any one place. In some ways that’s a good thing since those companies can pull from the mentality of other industries. In other ways, it misses out on the momentum and sharing of things that are unique to healthcare.

Chicago and New York City also have to be included on this list due to their sheer size. It’s amazing how many healthcare IT startup companies call these cities home. However, similar to silicon valley, the size of these cities also makes building the community a little harder. However, Matter in Chicago and Startup Health in NYC have done some good work in that regard.

I could keep going. It seems like there are healthcare IT startups happening in every city. Plus, there’s always the irony that some of the biggest healthcare IT companies are in cities like Verona, Wisconsin and Kansas City. Not the 2 cities you probably would have thought of first when you thought of top healthcare IT cities.

Which cities would you add to this list of top healthcare IT cities? Are there other elements I’m missing from the cities listed above? Let us know in the comments and on social media with @HealthcareScene. We’d love to hear what cities you think deserve to be on the list of top heathcare IT cities.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

   

Categories