Triangle Startup Weekend. Chances are you’ve heard about it or you’ve been to one. And with more than 123,000 attendees and 1,500 past events around the world, TSW is making a global impact. This weekend alone, there were eight other Startup Weekend events around the globe.

Triangle Health Startup Weekend is a three-day event that took place at American Underground @Main. So what makes this most recent TSW different from the plethora of others?

It was the first-ever digital health focused TSW in the region. It also had five women-led teams and 37 percent of the participants were women, a stat that made the organizers proud. And there were 21 doctorates in the room, which organizer Janet Kennedy says is different from many other Startup Weekends.

“Smart, smart people here,” she says. “Not that there aren’t always smart people at Triangle Startup Weekend— there are a lot of very innovative and creative people. But in order to tackle something like health you really have to have a much higher level of knowledge about the situation.”

Vincent Nacouzi, an emergency medicine physician in Raleigh, has been working on his TOW (tongue out of the way) device idea for seven years, but says TSW helped him in areas in which he was not strong. The TOW device helps move patients’ tongues when inserting a tube for surgery. Nacouzi says that TSW helped him learn more about the real life challenges of putting his product on the market— the advertising and marketing behind it and how to work with different types of people.

The full report can be read at ExitEvent.

(Note: {a href=”external_link-2″}}ExitEvent is a news partner of WRAL TechWire.)