Peoria, A HealthTech Hub

Peoria’s MedTech Landscape

Nationwide, the HealthTech industry is changing the future of medicine by blending health and technology. Peoria is an emerging HealthTech hub, home to startups harnessing the power of technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, blockchain, robotics, telemedicine, and connected medical devices to advance a data-driven healthcare system.

Our region is also home to some of the most brilliant medical minds. Staff at hospitals such as OSF Healthcare, headquartered in Peoria, are making groundbreaking discoveries in clinical research and digital health innovation, and the city boasts several acclaimed medical teaching hospitals.

Sixteen percent of Greater Peoria’s workforce is employed at hospitals, clinics, specialty centers, and educational institutions—double the national average. Peoria’s entrepreneurial spirit and abundant, tech-savvy medical professionals make it an ideal landscape for the growth of the HealthTech industry.

The Jump Simulation Center

The Jump Trading Simulation and Education Center matches the most brilliant minds with the most innovative technology to improve the future of healthcare. 

The Jump Simulation Center—a collaboration between two medical powerhouses (OSF Healthcare and the University of Illinois College of Medicine Peoria)—allows healthcare providers to run simulations of real case scenarios as well as demonstrate new techniques and equipment. 

Within the 168,000-square-foot facility sits a virtual hospital, with a 75-seat stadium-style lecture hall, patient rooms, ICU, operating rooms, ambulance bays and more. Jump Simulation is also home to seven innovation labs geared toward design, imaging, creation of models and other specialties. The Center’s goal is to dramatically improve medical outcomes, lower healthcare costs, and share all findings freely with the world.

Pioneering Penicillin in Peoria

Penicillium rubens strain NRRL 1951 is best known as the bluish-green mold that helped scientists develop methods to mass-produce the powerful antibiotic penicillin during the closing years of World War II. This development was pioneered in Peoria, Illinois and has saved millions of lives worldwide over the last 75+ years. 

Mary Hunt, a female bacteriologist at Peoria’s USDA Northern Regional Research Laboratory (NRRL), has been respectfully dubbed “Moldy Mary” after discovering a variety of mold growing on a cantaloupe that was a fundamental breakthrough in the mass production of penicillin. Moldy Mary and her famous melon played an essential role in the mass production of this wonder drug—the ancestor to the penicillin still in use today.