When it comes to the Texas Medical Center's innovation community, Emily Reiser is a professional dot connector. As senior manager for innovation community and engagement for TMC Innovation, she's tasked with connecting everyone within the accelerator, the biobridges, the coworking companies, and more with the resources they need.

"When we think about how a startup is going to be successful, we think about how they are going to build new partnerships. But we also think about all the people they're going to need to activate and bring them to the next level," Reiser says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. "What we do is curate a community of high-value resources that can help these companies elevate to that next level."

Reiser explains this includes mentors, subject matter experts, consultants for regulatory needs, and more. On one hand, its providing curated support, but on the other hand, especially in non-COVID times, it's creating an atmosphere where people can run into each other at an event or onsite.

"My role is to help make sure that we bring all these people together and activate them so that everyone can get to that next level faster," Reiser says. "My favorite analogy is a switchboard operator. You take what someone needs on one end and connect it to what someone needs on the other end."

Health care in general has been greatly affected by the pandemic, Reiser says, and investment and innovation within health care hasn't been immune to challenges over the past year or so either. One of the greatest effect has been on telemedicine, she says.

"The fact is that this technology existed previously but had faced adoption hurdles — both by patients and providers themselves — prior to the pandemic, but when COVID hit and the policy changed how those visits were getting covered for reimbursement, that's opened up an entire wave of adoption," Reiser explains. "There's nothing like what happened this past year in terms of accelerating one component of health care innovation like this."

Telemedicine, as well as other emerging technologies that came out of the pandemic, are top of mind for Reiser and her team — as is advancing medical innovation across the TMC.

"When you think about the Texas Medical Center as just one example of where we sit in this entire environment, we have fantastic delivery of care," Reiser says. "We also have this incredible amount of research done on campus, a lot of federal funding for grants, and different innovations coming out at that early stage."

There was a unique opportunity in Houston to build upon another aspect of of the greater health care industry that existed between the research stage and the point of care,

"But up until about six years when TMC Innovation first opened, we didn't have a lot of in-between — how to go from the bench to the bedside," she explains. "We at TMC Innovation have been really focusing starting to fill in more of that in between."

Reiser shares more about the state of innovation in health care on the episode, as well as her advice for health tech startups and investors looking to connect. Listen to the full interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.