Bridging the Gap: Where Health Tech Meets Public Health

Strategic Foundation

Challenge Identified: Health technology and public health sectors operate in parallel despite sharing identical missions, creating barriers to scaling equitable health solutions and maximizing innovation impact.

Target Audience: Cross-sector professionals including public health leaders, health tech founders, clinicians, researchers, non-profit leaders, and advocacy groups seeking collaboration opportunities.

Core Objectives: Demystify each ecosystem for the other sector, establish shared vocabulary, highlight equity-centered innovation, showcase real-world partnerships, and activate sustainable cross-sector networks.

Execution Strategy

Format Innovation: We designed a dual-format approach combining lightning talks for foundational education with panel discussions for deeper dialogue. The first session covered health tech ecosystem fundamentals, public health systems overview, and ROI measurement differences. The second session featured cross-sector leaders sharing real-world collaboration experiences and solution frameworks.

Partnership Model: Three-organization collaboration leveraged unique strengths—Bonne Fire ATL's local innovation expertise, Health Tech Nerds' technology networks, and Public Health Club's public health credibility. This model created multiplicative audience reach while ensuring content authenticity across both sectors.

Content Framework: Unified messaging positioned the initiative around "two powerful sectors, one shared mission, infinite possibilities when we work together," with supporting themes of collaborative strength and action-oriented learning.

Results & Impact

Quantitative Success: 320+ total registrations achieved through entirely organic outreach (no paid promotion), 60% attendance rate, active participation in Q&A sessions, and successful cross-sector audience attraction validated our strategic approach and authentic market demand.

Breakthrough Insights: The series generated the transformative concept that "innovation without equity scales exclusion, and equity without scale limits impact." Participants recognized health equity and ROI as complementary forces, community trust and product scale as compatible objectives, and implementation science and user adoption as aligned methodologies.

Behavioral Change: Participants moved from competitive to collaborative thinking, embracing cross-sector "translation" of expertise rather than skill reinvention. Many initiated ongoing cross-sector conversations and expressed interest in developing bilingual partnership capabilities.

Key Learning & Validation

The 60% attendance rate strongly validated market demand for cross-sector dialogue in health innovation. The dual-format approach proved highly effective for progressive learning, while the three-way partnership model created sustainable collaboration frameworks. Participant feedback revealed significant scalability potential across other geographic markets and sector combinations.

Most importantly, we demonstrated that strategic programming can transform professional communities by creating shared language and frameworks for collaboration where none previously existed.

Participant Impact

Feedback demonstrated diverse types of transformational learning across participants:

Strategic Insight: "How aligned public health and health tech goals are, how disconnected the frameworks remain, and how solvable that disconnect truly is struck me most during this webinar. The real power lies in bringing these two forces together. Health tech needs the context, trust, and implementation strategy that public health provides. Public health needs the scale, tools, and investment models that tech unlocks."

Skill Development: "This was a really great session! The conversation about dialect differences has convinced me more than ever I need to lean into learning the language of tech to go with my experience speaking the language of public health."

Framework Application: "Great session! Loved the rubric: Whose/Use/Dues" and "Thank you for the inspiration and update on what's happening within the public health circles."