Taylor Walsh

Founder and Principal

I have been involved in the formative stages of several industry transformations in my career: the emergence of major metro area suburban newspaper groups; the first personal computer-based online information industry; and the Internet and the Web that gave us the concept of User Generated Content. This turned out to be perfect preparation for moving into alternative and holistic medicine in 2007, which had all the appearances of User Generated Healthcare: patients adding non-traditional therapies to their healthcare, even though modern medicine had no understanding of them and settled on rebuke and ridicule. The earmarks of disruption if I ever saw them!

Healthcare is not likely to create the equivalent of personal blogs any time soon, but the rapidly evolving fields of integrative and functional medicine and integrative health have been driven by two generations of individual consumers seeking more than the healthcare system could provide and paying extra to benefit from once rebuked treatments like acupuncture.

My work helps to further anchor the integrative enterprise into U.S. healthcare and to come up with innovations to strengthen health outside of it. I have contributed to the Altarum Institute’s Health Policy Forum and occasionally for The Integrator Blog, the primary source of professional, policy, and global news about developments in integrative health and medicine that is produced and edited by my friend and colleague John Weeks.

I was an early practitioner in what is called the Information Age, working since the formative days of the online information industry and through its transitions into the Internet and the Web. For me though the “age” has always been about Information Sharing: shaping the power of digital networks to enable, support and build communities and to connect people around their common interests, ideas, tasks, and professions. That work began at Source Telecomputing Corp., the pioneering national online services firm that produced THE SOURCE, owned by the Reader’s Digest. Later I was part of a collaboration of local libraries, governments, business groups and non-profits in the metropolitan Washington DC region, serving as Executive Director of the area’s first “public” Internet service, CapAccess. Influenced by the content-centric roles of the university library community in the early days of the Internet, we rolled out free net access, email and newsgroups, just prior to the emergence of the World Wide Web.

As a fourth generation Washingtonian I am always happy to walk down Half St. SE and into a major league baseball park, something we thought we’d never see again after baseball let town in 1972.

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