A patch worn on the chest that tracks your blood pressure for 24 hours. A system that watches for cardiovascular trouble in the operating room and the ICU. A scanner that reads your blood vessels with light in under three minutes.
Three products, three startups. One founded in the U.K., one based in Israel, one headquartered in New Jersey.
They are not just the latest winners of HMH Emerge, a pitch competition Hackensack Meridian Health runs with Choose New Jersey — they are evidence of perhaps the greatest innovation attribute of HMH CEO Bob Garrett, a willingness to partner with anyone from any sector located anywhere on the globe if it means better health care for the people of New Jersey.
Garrett often starts small and sees where it leads. That philosophy is a big part of how HMH grew to 18 hospitals and more than 500 patient care locations, nearly double its size when it launched in 2016.
And it’s worth revisiting on a day Garrett announced he will retire (in the summer of 2027) after a more than 40-year career.
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Amazon. Google. Uber. CLEAR. All are big names. None are known as health care companies. HMH partners with all of them.
Uber gets patients to appointments, especially those with limited transportation. CLEAR brings airport-style identity checks to hospital check-in. Google’s health care and engineering teams are helping HMH build a long-term AI strategy.
In March, Garrett explained the benefits to BINJE.
“Working with Google allows us to design tools that are clinically meaningful, not just technologically interesting,” he said.
Amazon and One Medical are building primary care centers, with two open as of March and nearly two dozen more on the planning board. About one in three New Jerseyans has no primary care doctor, Garrett said.
“Amazon brings scale and convenience, One Medical brings a modern care model, and we bring the clinical depth of a major health system,” he said.
And those are the headliners. The rest is a long tail of experiments.
“We have 300 AI use-case pilots going on at Hackensack Meridian,” Garrett said in January 2025.
Silicon Valley noticed. HMH was invited to speak at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this January.
“We got big shout-outs in California for our out-of-the-box partnerships,” Garrett said. “The tech community sees what we’re doing and they embrace it.”
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The key in all this: It’s not all about Silicon Valley moments.
Emerge started small.
In 2024, the idea was narrow: find promising Irish health startups and help them into the American market. Two Irish companies, Spiorad and Neurobell, won that first year. The second class, announced in February, went global. Winners get financial support, clinical trials or studies, help refining their business models and pilots inside HMH.
The first year’s process was simple. A two-minute video pitch. Ten startups picked for mentoring. The top three pitching HMH executives, board members and outside investors in something called the Bear’s Den.
Sandra Powell-Elliott, chief innovation officer for HMH, said the arrangement runs both ways.
“In trade, these companies can get invaluable footholds in the American market. It’s a winning idea, in both directions,” she said.
Then there is India.
In January 2025, HMH signed a strategic affiliation with Apollo Hospitals, India’s largest private health care system. It started with a conversation at Davos a year earlier.
“I met one of the senior executives from Apollo, and we had a really good discussion which evolved into: How can we collaborate?” Garrett said.
The first target is the coming nursing shortage. Nurses in India would handle telehealth duties, freeing up nurses in New Jersey, and some could eventually come to the U.S. to work. The plan begins at places like JFK Medical Center in Edison and expands from there.
“So, we’re going to start in the virtual nursing space,” he said.
The traffic runs both ways here, too.
“They’re not quite as advanced in behavioral health or mental health as we are,” Garrett said. “There’s a lot here we can help with.”
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None of this is new for him.
The Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine began as a partnership with Seton Hall University. A cancer partnership with Memorial Sloan Kettering came five months after the 2016 merger. Carrier Clinic joined in 2019.
BINJE’s Top 20 list of his accomplishments is impressive. The merger, the medical school, an Honor Roll hospital. Those are the big ones.
But they are only part of the story. What set Garrett apart is the smaller stuff: a startup from Israel, a ride to an appointment, a nurse on a screen. He said yes to them, and kept saying yes, hoping small deals would grow into big ones.
That is not a health care skill. It is a leadership skill — one that would work in any industry. The best executives are curious in every direction, and not too proud to take a meeting with a startup or the company that gets you through airport security faster.
How can we collaborate? Four words, asked of a stranger at a conference. They have a way of adding up.
