The White House’s Startup America Initiative is sponsoring a series of meetings between local healthcare providers and health IT innovators who are close to the proof-of-concept stage in developing their ideas. The Office of the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) are co-presenting the sessions.

The first such meeting was held in May in Philadelphia, where 10 innovators met with 10 area healthcare organizations. Similar events are planned for San Francisco later this month, Indianapolis in October and New England, also in October.

Writing on ONC’s Health IT Buzz blog, Wil Yu, special assistant, innovations, for ONC’s office of the chief scientist, offered these potential benefits for the meetings between tech visionaries and providers:

• Healthcare organizations that participate can identify potential future developers that they wish to collaborate with from a host of candidates in a single day, substantially lowering their search costs.
• Innovators can find potential partners by presenting to a dozen organizations at once–saving precious time and accelerating their development timelines.