What The Health?! How Emily Casey is using community to improve healthtech

From an early age, Emily Casey’s mum encouraged her to get into science – enrolling her in science classes during the school holidays and buying her CSIRO magazines from the age of six.

“I was just fascinated with how things worked and solving problems,” Casey tells Women’s Agenda. “And then the ability to translate and help solve problems in the real world – everything from global warming to helping people with their health.”

While this fascination with using science to solve real-world problems initially led Casey into medical school, five years into her education she realised becoming a doctor wasn’t the path she wanted to take.

“When I got further down the clinical pathway and was doing placement in hospitals and things, the reality of the job became a bit more clear and didn’t really line up with what I had in mind,” says Casey.

“I decided that being a medical doctor was not ultimately for me, but I’ve now taken that knowledge of my love of science and been able to integrate that into the communications community.”

As a self-proclaimed medicine defector, Casey founded a community called ‘What The Health?!’ in February 2021. She’s now brought together a group of health trailblazers (founders, investors, clinicians, operators, etc) who are all determined to improve the healthcare system.

What started as a little newsletter has grown into a community of more than six thousand people as well as hundreds of startups all across the health innovation space, says Casey, noting this covers everything from biotechnology and therapeutics to devices and digital health.

“We do content events, have a private paid community, and just try to make health, tech and innovation a bit more connected, collaborative and accessible as well as fun,” she says.

“So it’s a bit of I guess non-conventional health content – lots of lots of memes and jokes, and we try to make it a little bit unique and more engaging because it can often be quite dull, but it really, really doesn’t have to be.”

Community members are from across Australia and New Zealand, and Casey says she is grateful to be able “to learn and meet so many wonderful, inspiring people”.

“We’ve seen a lot of growth globally, which is quite cool – just given it’s been such a small interest area that’s grown a lot recently. So, I suppose we’ll just continue to grow that global reach and build up the media.”

“Hopefully, we’ll be able to expose and share more stories of the great companies and solutions out there.”

Alongside running the ‘What The Health?!’ platform, Casey is also an investment principal at Side Stage Ventures.

“We are investing into some of the most ambitious founders in Australia,” says Casey. “We invest in really early-stage technology and innovation companies, which is super exciting. It’s sort of taking early bets and helping people who are doing incredible things with a big vision to change the world.”

Considering that women founders receive only a small slice of the funding pie, Casey thinks it’s important that investors actively try to shift the dial, particularly when it comes to health tech.

“Every investment that we make is essentially a vote for the world that we want to see,” she says. “And at the moment, we are continually voting to see a world that is still created by men. And that’s why we really need to change these behaviours, and hopefully start to create a better pipeline of investments and great female founders.”

This article was first published by Women’s Agenda.