Announcing…OOP 2026!!!

Hello everyone!!! 

One of the crazy things about going from a 1 person company at the beginning of the year to a 5 person company is…I can’t just wing it anymore! We have to do things like…drumroll…plan in advance.

To that end, I wanted to share a bunch of things we have slated for 2026. The main theme you’ll notice, we’re all-in on in-person now. The internet is going to become unusable in the next year with bots, engagement farming, and mostly incorrect information.

IMO if you care about actually learning the correct info and finding peers, it has to have some in-person component.

The OOP 2026 events timeline!!

This year we really flexed our events muscle. We did multiple hackathons, dinners, back-to-back conferences, etc. 

And despite all that, we think there’s even more for us to do and pain tolerance is made up anyway. Which is why we’re announcing now…our 2026 events calendar!!!

• Healthcare 101 Learning Summit (LIVE IN NY 1/29-1/30!!) - Do you or someone on your team want to learn how US healthcare works? I’m teaching my healthcare 101 course LIVE in New York on Jan 29-30! You’ll learn all how US healthcare works AND you’ll build a healthcare network + do group activities to learn how healthcare actually works in the real-world. GET TICKETS NOW, WE HAVE A MAX CAPACITY HERE.
• Hackathon: Hardware Edition- We’re going to be doing a hackathon focused on hardware this spring in SF. Not soldering, more “build on top of the APIs” of wearables, clip-on pins that record, mobile devices etc. We think there’s a lot of interesting projects that take data generated in the real-world.
• Healthcare Data Camp - We’re running it back! We’re getting all of our healthcare data nerds in one place to get into tactical breakouts and learn from each other. You have to apply to get in, we select a small intimate group, and you’ll meet some awesome people.
• Med Machina: A healthcare hardware & robotics conference - This is our NEW conference focused on showcasing how hardware/robotics companies are shaping healthcare. We’re going BIG on this one - demos, panels, and all that good stuff. I think hardware is going to drastically change healthcare, this is the conference to find out how. 
• Hackathon: Pharma Edition - We’re planning an AI hackathon focused on use cases for pharma specifically. Everything from bench science, to lab automation, to post-launch commercialization - what are some interesting ways we can make that process better?
• Healthcare Ops Knowledgefest - Our healthcare conference for ops people is back for the 5th year!!! All breakouts, no panels, and a great place for ops people to learn actual tactics and find your community. 

More details are going to come out about all of these - but if you sign up here you’ll get notified when all of these open up.

We’re still shaping up most of these events, so email events@outofpocket.health if you:

1. Have space that could potentially host one of these events. Most will be 100 or less people, Med Machina will be larger (like 300+ people).
2. Want to do an exclusive hackathon AT your organization or specifically with your tool
3. Want to chat sponsored dinners/happy hours where we curate the attendees + event design
4. Know a BALLER that can come speak at Med Machina - specifically higher ups (SVPs and above) at existing hardware companies or at healthcare organizations that have DEPLOYED hardware/robots at their organization.
5. In general if you think there are interesting partnerships here with your organization

If you want to get the sponsorship packets for these, email sales@outofpocket.health. We don’t take many sponsors for our events, so let us know sooner than later.

Our 2026 media kit is live

Want to know all of the ways we can work together? FOR MONEY.

We just updated our 2026 media kit with all of our offerings. We’ve actually sold most of the content inventory for Q1 of next year already, so if you’re interested you should hit us up sooner than later. You can fill out this form to see the packet or email sales@outofpocket.health directly.

We would like to trade our services for your money, so let’s do that.

Healthcare Coworking

Our healthcare coworking experiment is going great! We’re in 4 cities now: SF, Chicago, New York, Boston.

If you want to join any of them, you can sign up here. We do lunch and learns, happy hours, etc. It’s a great thing for anyone who’s remote but wants to be around healthcare people - we find it really energizes everyone to be a part of it.

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Live AI workshops

We’ve started doing live workshops with teams to make their employees more productive using LLMs. A lot of non-technical people still don’t use these tools in their day to day lives, and we’ve found it’s much easier if we sit down with them and go through a flow together.

We come and teach things like:

• More advanced prompting and using multi-modal aspects of LLMs.
• How to use LLMs to do research better, do basic data analyses by yourself, etc.
• Using LLMs in your browser to help you debug things yourself
• How to quickly prototype with vibe coding tools so you can better visualize your ideas
• Where to watch out for LLMs making things up, what they can’t do, etc.

If you’re interested in bringing something like this to your org, hit up sales@outofpocket.health and we can chat.

Two courses are now enrolling!!!

Remember how I said we’re all in on IRL? Well we still have a lot of virtual stuff in the mix too don’t worry.

‍Healthcare 101 (starts 12/1, ENROLLMENT ENDS THIS WEEK). I’ll teach you everything you need to know about how US healthcare works. What are all the payers? How do hospitals make money? What are the big laws to know? I’LL TEACH YOU THAT SHIIIII in a way that’s entertaining and informative.

Your boss is going to be out of town next week so get those approvals now :) 

Our new FREE course is happening 1/20 - 1/22 on the current state of interoperability! You’ve heard the word before, but what does it actually mean? Why is it still so hard for data to move around? We’re going to dive deep into it with our sponsoring partner Metriport. They’ve been knee deep in this for a while now, and have a lot of learnings to share.

Our courses are unique because the chat is always poppin’ off and we learn from each other, not just the instructor. It’s a good time, highly recommend signing up!

Toodles + thanks

Okay that’s been a lot, but this is a really exciting year for us here at Out-Of-Pocket. It’s the first year that people are including us in their budgets for next year. 

When I started this I was fighting to explain the value of entertaining and irreverent healthcare content. People didn’t understand our conference model because it was smaller and more intimate. We were fighting to get budget from people that were champions of the brand just doing us a solid.

It finally feels like we have people’s attention and I feel really proud of where we’ve gotten to. And I also don’t take that position lightly.

If any of the above sounds interesting to you and you want to work together, my email is always open.

Thinkboi out,

Nikhil aka. “URL to IRL” aka. “we’re a hybrid model”

Twitter: ​@nikillinit​

IG: ​@outofpockethealth​

Other posts: ​outofpocket.health/posts​

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‎If you’re enjoying the newsletter, do me a solid and shoot this over to a friend or healthcare slack channel and tell them to sign up. The line between unemployment and founder of a startup is traction and whether your parents believe you have a job.