Four advisors on why they mentor, what they've learned from founders, and how this year's cohort can make the most of their time in the program.

Every Healthworx Accelerator cohort is shaped as much by its advisors as by its founders. These are volunteers – healthcare attorneys, researchers, engineers, and industry veterans – who give their time because they believe in what early-stage healthcare companies are building. We sat down with four of this year's advisors to learn more about what brought them to the program and what they hope founders take from it.

Edo Banach: "You get out of it what you put into it."

Edo Banach's path to Healthworx Accelerator started at a health conference in Las Vegas, back when the program was still known as 1501 Health. Today, he brings a career's worth of government and industry healthcare expertise to the cohort – including leadership roles in Medicare and Medicaid coordination, dual-eligible policy, and his tenure as CEO of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization.

For Edo, mentoring Healthworx founders isn't so different from the work he already does at his law firm. "My greatest use for startups is just mentorship," he explained. "As part of my day-to-day at the law firm, I mentor associates – I’m already using that part of my brain." And he's quick to point out the reward isn't financial. "[The compensation] are the good vibes."

That said, Edo is candid that not every founder gets equal value out of the relationship – because not every founder engages with it the same way. He recalled a former cohort member who reached out well after the program ended, asking for a specific, well-researched introduction. "She already knew how I could help her more than I knew how I could help her," he said. "You get out of it what you put into it."

His advice for this year's cohort is simple: come prepared, and don't treat advisor time as a one-off. As he put it, in an industry increasingly chasing AI-driven solutions, "the best way to actually solve healthcare problems is through human-to-human contact."

Christopher Khoury: "Nearly every day, I'm revisiting a prior assumption."

Chris brings more than two decades spanning biomedical research, life sciences, provider systems, policy, and tech-enabled innovation. Today, he serves as Vice President, Strategic Insights at the American Medical Association, focused on monitoring and understanding the broader healthcare environment: its complexity, its structures, and the people who keep it running. Day to day, he leads a team and executes projects that are constantly looking at changes and developments in our healthcare and business environment, and translates those into opportunity and more effective decision making for the mission of the organization.

This is Chris’s second cohort as an advisor. "I met Soo some years ago, was impressed with the Healthworx model, and she was kind enough to invite me to participate," he said.

His motivation for volunteering his time traces back to earlier in his career, working in product development at a medical device startup. "I get excited to provide good advice where possible and hear how healthcare entrepreneurs are addressing our biggest problems," he said. More specifically, as it pertains to founders seeking bespoke support, Chris is a great resource for understanding and leveraging policy, technology, and health system workforce issues in the context of product strategy and market success.

His advice for founders echoes a mindset he's borrowed from the physicians he works alongside: lifelong learning. "Use your time within the program to connect with as many people as possible and test your thinking in a friendly space," he said.

Mike McShea: "It's not just the technology – it's the business model too."

Few advisors bring a resume quite like Mike McShea's. He spent nine years on CareFirst's board, watching Healthworx take shape from its earliest investments. Today, he's Chief Scientist at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, leading a team of roughly 70 engineers – 40% of them PhDs – focused on advancing healthcare capabilities. Before that, he was a product executive at Philips Healthcare, where he brought innovative (and notoriously difficult-to-launch) products to market, including an early tele-ICU AI solution built more than 15 years ago.

That combination gives Mike a rare vantage point on why healthcare innovation is both urgent and hard. "The healthcare system today still remains very badly broken," he said, pointing to research showing one in four hospital patients across a set of Massachusetts hospitals experienced a safety error that caused harm. "That's out of control." He believes the moment for innovation has never been bigger, largely thanks to AI – but only when it's applied to real problems first. "You don't start with what can I do with AI. You start with what are the big problems that need to be solved."

Given Mike’s extensive and diverse experience in the field, he’s positioned to be a valuable asset to any founder in the program. "Thinking of the last cohort, there was not a single company in there that I couldn't help in some way," he said. His sweet spot is the intersection of technology and business model: "Healthcare is extremely complicated to sell into... it's got to be innovative, and the business model has to be innovative as well." He often sees founders who are crystal clear on their product but fuzzy on the "who cares" question – the value proposition, the target segment, the reason a health system would actually adopt it.

His advice to this year's cohort: get specific, and get close to your earliest users. "Finding the early partners who will really open the door and let you in – let you really understand how to make it successful – is really critical." He's also become an informal connector for founders beyond his own sessions, pointing them toward the right expert in his network rather than just offering his own opinion. "I like making those connections happen."

Ben Bohonowicz: "It's passion more than anything."

Now entering his third cohort, Ben Bohonowicz has spent 16 years in the benefits brokerage and advising business – with a twist. "Most of my competition sells insurance products. We build care pathways within health insurance plans," he explained. His focus has always been on getting employees the right care, at the right time, at the right place, with the highest-quality providers – a lens that maps directly onto the challenges Healthworx founders are trying to solve.

Ben's sessions focus on one of the hardest problems in health tech: selling into the employer marketplace. "This marketplace is overly saturated from point solutions," he said. Founders need to find real differentiation, target the right size of employer, and – critically – structure contracts that prove value. "Where's the data? Where's the transparency? Are you doing things like value-based or performance-based contracts?" Just as important, he said, is fitting into an employer's existing workflow rather than adding a new burden: "Anything that deviates... just doesn't get the traction you're looking for."

What keeps him coming back year after year is simple: "It's passion more than anything for me, it's invigorating to meet founders that have the right level of passion." His sessions frequently turn into deeper one-on-one relationships – he estimates he's spent dozens of hours over the past two years working directly with five or six founders per cohort on their go-to-market strategy, pricing, and positioning. Two of those relationships, with companies he mentored in past cohorts, are now becoming integral to a new initiative his own business is launching. "It's quite meaningful," he said.

Ben's vision for where healthcare is headed ties directly back to why he mentors: a future where technology helps patients find the right care, at the right time, without the fragmentation that defines the system today. "I've never been more excited [about] how we see the opportunity to get people healthier and improve outcomes," he said.

What Ties Them Together

Four different backgrounds – law and policy, insights and strategy, deep tech and AI, employer benefits – but all four advisors circle back to the same idea: the real value of Healthworx Accelerator isn't just the curriculum, it's the relationships. Founders who show up curious, prepared, and willing to engage get the most out of advisors like these – and the advisors, in turn, get to stay close to the kind of entrepreneurial energy that drew many of them into healthcare in the first place.