Joe Wallace Announces iHub sets sights on medical industry

PALM SPRINGS — The Coachella Valley iHub could soon add medical technology companies to its Accelerator Campus in Palm Springs, with a total of $1.5 million in grants from the Desert Healthcare District and the city’s Measure J funds.

The Desert Healthcare District Board of Directors on June 25 approved a $500,000 grant, to be paid over the next three years, to help establish a heath and medical innovation center at the campus. The grant also gives the district naming rights for the new center.

But the money is contingent on the iHub securing $1 million in Measure J funds from Palm Springs. The Measure J Oversight Committee recommended the grant, also to be paid out over three years, at its June 20 meeting.

Opened in May, the accelerator campus is already home to four green tech businesses. The Healthcare District and Measure J funds could help Joe Wallace, managing director of the iHub, lure companies involved in medical data management or similar fields to the desert.

“Anything that has to do with medical technology or enabling medical technology,” Wallace said, listing some of the possibilities. “Number-crunching routines used in cloud storage of medical imagery, a compression routine that allows you to direct large amounts of pictures on bandwidth, virtual images.”

The new center would be housed in a 12,000-square-foot building on the campus, located at the east end of Alejo Drive, near Palm Springs International Airport. The Palm Springs Unified School District previously used the site as its operations yard.

The campus would receive $500,000 of the Measure J funds in the 2013-2014 fiscal year, then $250,000 in each of the following two years.

That timetable is part of a list of recommendations for spending more than $9 million in Measure J funds that the Oversight Committee is sending to the City Council on Wednesday. A final vote is not expected until September.

Robert Moon, chairman of the committee, said that as the group winnowed down the 300 requests for funds the city received, the iHub proposal retained strong support.