Amit Garg

Exciting news from Monica Chopra, Jeffrey De Flavio, MD, Samantha Adelberg, and the rest of the Auxa Health team as they officially announce their $5.2M Seed round. The team's deep industry expertise and drive for change have led them to solve critical infrastructural friction to providing quality healthcare and adoption of value-based care. Auxa's AI benefit navigation platform is simplifying the complexities of healthcare by streamlining all of the fragmented and siloed data and information to make it actionable in real-time for healthcare organizations. For the 70% of Americans who aren't getting access to the health and social care benefits they deserve, Auxa's solution will be pivotal in enabling equitable care. We're thrilled to partner with co-investors Zeal Capital Partners, AlleyCorp, Laconia, and Chaac Ventures on this journey and look to share many more milestones ahead. Cc K50 Ventures, Ryan Bloomer, Daniel Vásquez, Nick Talwar, Stefanie Ng https://lnkd.in/dPDY7-Db

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One of my proudest moments as an investor occurred today as Alaffia Health announced its series A because it shows how the Aperture® Venture Capital vision of multi-level, multi-generational #impactinvesting is succeeding in the marketplace. Here’s the model in its most basic form : ✅As diverse fund managers with meaningful capital to allocate, we are changing the VC landscape every day just by doing our day jobs. ✅As Black/Brown investors with ~40 years experience collectively, Aperture GPs have access to talent /excellence that others do not, so our portfolio *organically* is more inclusive by race, gender and geography even while optimizing for financial outcomes (all about the alpha). ✅Our most successful portco’s are using financial #innovation to solve market problems that impact underrepresented demographics and underserved communities. Alaffia Health is a shining example of the impact portion of our overall fund thesis, and we couldn’t be prouder of TJ Ademiluyi and Adun Akanni, MPH, PMP - the dynamic brother-sister founder duo whose vision we have steadfastly supported on their journey. Congratulations to TJ and Adun from William Crowder and myself, as well as the whole Aperture team- Marjorie King Philip McKenzie Yves Louis-Jacques Tanvi Lal Michelle Dhansinghani Lisha Bell Katie Kelly Amy Chung Cindy Chong, CFA Brian Fernandes-Halloran Monroe France Jayden Pantel Darren Herman Evan Wladis Neal Triplett Thomas Scriven Peter Ammon Irina Bit-Babik Tim Milanich Rob Rahbari

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Still feeling energized from last week's roundtable on building successful relationships with hospitals. We invited 7 portfolio companies and health system leaders from Mayo Clinic, Cedars-Sinai and UCLA Health. The founders shared their questions ranging from the strategic to the nuts and bolts of closing partnerships. For example, how do you determine what measures of effectiveness help drive alignment? And how do you get all the stakeholders together to actually drive a decision. Answer: put them all in a room for half a day! “I think we're in a pivotal moment regarding how we assess AI. There are numerous risks currently dominating AI discussions, particularly those concerning bias and other associated risks. However, there's a notable absence of focus on evaluating the proactive value of AI. We need to consider what AI actually offers and what we want it to offer. It's not solely about determining whether it will cause harm; people are apprehensive about how this technology will be implemented. One perspective gaining traction involves ensuring the product's validation process is robust enough to prevent risks to various populations.” -Vladimir Manuel, Medical Director at UCLA Health From Vlad's comments above to perspectives others shared, we heard a sense of excitement for the promise of #AI and other new technologies. But we're also in a unique moment where the risks are not well understood. Still much to do here.

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📢 Calling all healthcare innovators to join MIT Solve's Health Equity Challenge! Half the world lacks access to comprehensive health services, and two billion people face financial hardships due to healthcare costs. We at Verge believe that healthtech innovations can change that, and so does MIT Solve. MIT Solve is calling for innovators worldwide to submit their technology-driven solutions that improve healthcare access and outcomes in an affordable, scalable, and sustainable way, especially in under-resourced communities. 🔍 What's MIT Solve Looking For? - Ensuring ethical and effective health-related data collection for AI  - Strengthening health system capacity & resilience - Increasing access and quality of health services for underserved groups around the world 🏆 Why Participate? - Prize funding - 9-month support program - Tailored workshops, coaching & more! 📆 Don't miss out on this opportunity to make a difference because the deadline is TOMORROW: April 23, 2024, 12:00 PM EDT. Check out more details here: https://lnkd.in/g8cGEfid #HealthcareInnovation #HealthcareAccess #Innovation #GlobalHealth #SocialImpact #HealthEquity #HealthEquityChallege Verge HealthTech Fund

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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I recently sat down with Michael Batko, CEO at Startmate and Founder of Puddle Pod for Episode 11 of Insane Ambition. Startmate has invested in 230+ startups, much of it under Michael's leadership, and now has $3.5b in value across its portfolio companies. In this episode, we discussed: - Michael's journey from consulting, then living in the Amazon rainforest, to leading Australia's biggest startup accelerator - The future of Australia's startup ecosystem - The labour government's very stupid plan to make it harder for people to qualify as sophisticated investors (now thankfully shelved) - Startmate City! Startmate's plan to build Australia's first startup city. Probably the most ambitious idea I've ever heard from a startup accelerator. - The balance between visionary thinking and traditional startup advice (think Elon Musk's plan to colonise Mars, vs Y Combinator's problem/customer obsession) - "The Courage to Be Disliked", and its influence on Michael's approach to life and business. Links in the description below 👇

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Meet Agent Hospital – self-evolving simulacra of clinician and patient autonomous agents, aka the in silico “learning health system.” The system simulates the end-to-end cycle of treating patients from disease onset, triage, registration, consultation, medical examination, diagnosis, medicine dispensary, convalescence, and post-discharge follow-up visit. The authors introduce "MedAgent-Zero" as a method for using simulated doctor-patient interactions to train medical agents without relying on manually labeled data, allowing doctor agents to evolve by accumulating experience from both successful and failed medical cases, enhancing performance over time. After treating 10,000 patients, the “evolved doctor agent” achieves strong performance on the MedQA task – an imperfect benchmark, but a proxy for performance on medical questions and therefore diagnostic capability. It’s been a year since the first generative agents paper came out (https://lnkd.in/ddb_i3UV). I’m excited about this body of research applied to biomedicine where experiments involving humans are generally either very expensive to run or often unable to be studied due to ethical considerations of a given intervention. With further development and more task specific benchmarks, it’s plausible these simulacra could become tools for any biomedical organization designing systems that involve human-AI interaction. (h/t Nikhil Krishnan) https://lnkd.in/d9zRVy8j #healthcare #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai

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Looking forward to discussing how changing demographics and culture norms are affecting investment opportunities in longevity, health and well-being at The Care Summit today Alongside Cake Ventures' Monique Woodard, Ziegler's Dan Hermann, Oak HC/FT's Billy Deitch and JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Jennifer Edwards, we’ll dive into the trends shaping how we are investing in the space: - Last year marked one of the most significant social and economic moments in modern times: The number of older adults—those aged 50 and over- surpassed the number of children under the age of 15 for the first time. - In 2020 the 50 plus population contributed $45 trillion to global GDP, or 34% of the total. That equates to about 3x the revenue of the world’s 100 highest- earning companies in 2020. - The U.S. population grew by 24.5 million from 2010 to 2022, and Hispanics accounted for 53% of this increase – a greater share than any other racial or ethnic group. - Women around the world and across all ages drive 64% of consumer spending

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The best way to make progress on improving outcomes for diseases like #breastcancer is to foster collaboration between different healthcare organizations - working together to share knowledge and leverage data in a privacy preserving manner. That's why this partnership between Rhino Health and International Consortium for Health Outcomes Measurement (ICHOM)'s learning collaboratives is especially exciting.

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Digital Health: Countervailing Forces… Consider this: over the past five years nearly $78 billion has been invested in digital health companies and yet just this past year over 20 million Americans were taken off the Medicaid rolls. Certain policy changes can be very damaging, to say nothing of other human-induced factors like pollution, climate change, wars, inadequate housing and education, and hunger which have staggering implications on health. At times it can feel like bailing water out of a sinking ship.    The overall venture capital activity in 1Q24 was a relatively muted $36.6 billion across 2,882 companies for an average round size of $12.7 million, as compared to $51.6 billion and 4,026 companies in 1Q23. Notwithstanding that the level of investment activity in the healthcare technology sector has receded from the $30 billion highwater mark in 2021 to a more manageable $10 – $12 billion annual pace, the opportunities to “transform the business of healthcare” remain obvious and acute. Arguably, the 2021 hangover still lingers in the healthcare technology sector as companies that raised too much capital at too high a price work to sort out challenging cap tables. Out of the 2021 mosh pit of too many companies, it appears that the sector is in an “Emerging Winners” phase that will drive companies with narrow and/or incomplete offerings to combine or shut down.   Thoughts on what to expect for the remainder of the year… https://lnkd.in/egy7Afhg Flare Capital Partners #digitalhealth

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Had a blast diving into Amir Dan Rubin's extensive healthcare career on Vital Signs. Amir previously served as the CEO of One Medical and Stanford Health Care, was an EVP at United/Optum and is now the Founding Managing Partner at Healthier Capital. Our conversation spanned payer-provider integrations, lessons learned from leading One Medical, applications of generative AI, and more. Some highlights: ⚡Combining care models We talked a lot about the One Medical/Iora combination. Amir argues that just because two care delivery approaches may occupy the same physical location (e.g., a clinic), that doesn’t mean they necessarily need to conform to the same economic model. For instance, One Medical and Iora were able to combine effectively despite the former being a membership model and the latter being global capitation. Amir emphasizes that much of the overhead resources (e.g., front desk staff, phlebotomy) can be shared across models. ⚡How One Medical uses generative AI to improve efficiency One Medical allows members to message the care team, and then uses NLP to read the message, figure out its content, and triage it to the appropriate team member. Amir is excited about leveraging internal knowledge graphs to get around hallucinations. This approach can point to relevant internal data in helping compose responses, creating more trust and accuracy in the outputs. ⚡Behind the Amazon acquisition One Medical was interested in expanding its direct to consumer offering. However, they recognized that customer acquisition was costly, which is why partnering with Amazon Prime’s existing membership base made sense for them. Amir explains how at their core, both Amazon and One Medical are all about using technology and logistics to create an excellent customer experience. An awesome conversation ranging from health system innovation to startup strategy to health tech investing! Listen to our full episode below: Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3Wrbnol Apple: https://apple.co/3XWOomb

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The healthcare industry's impact on the environment is a hidden cost we can no longer ignore. The sector is responsible for nearly 5% of global emissions, and a significant portion comes from operating rooms (ORs). These critical spaces are energy guzzlers, generate massive amounts of waste, and contribute heavily to greenhouse gas emissions. Just think, a single surgery in the US produces as much waste as a family of four throws away in a week, and ORs alone are responsible for a whopping 50-70% of a hospital's clinical waste! At Caresyntax, we're committed to making surgery more sustainable. Our data-driven solutions tackle these challenges head-on by supercharging OR efficiency. Our platform optimizes energy use, minimizes waste generation, and streamlines resource management. This not only benefits the environment, but also improves patient outcomes. Caresyntax empowers hospitals to operate more efficiently, leading to a healthier planet and a healthier bottom line. By leveraging data analytics, we've helped partners achieve remarkable results. We're talking about a 60% drop in energy consumption, a 33% increase in surgeries performed per OR annually, and a positive net margin of $2,500 per patient due to fewer readmissions. Let's make surgery more sustainable together. Read the Caresyntax paper for a deeper dive into this critical issue and see how we can help your hospital reduce its environmental footprint. https://lnkd.in/ggM-P6ij #DigitalSurgery #DataDrivenSurgery #FutureofSurgery

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Severe mental illness remains one of the most underserved areas in mental health, possibly because it is difficult to address with the type of virtual, easy-to-scale models that VCs love to back. We're so excited that Sonia Priscilla García and Stas Sokolin at Amae Health have been able to break the mold, bringing better in-person solutions for patients and families dealing with SMI, and attracting strong venture partners to do so cc: Lisa Jacobs Blau, Alison Ryu, Claire Akkan Quiet Capital, Healthier Capital, Jan Ellison Baszucki, Karin Kissane, Mike Volpi

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One key reason why healthcare technologies like AI, telemedicine, and software haven't structurally lowered costs or broadened access for the entire system after decades of experimentation (excluding pure financial engineering of payer contracts) is the limited reimagining of care delivery itself, with asynchronous telemedicine as a notable exception. In the same way that digitizing physical paper failed to exploit the capabilities of a new computing medium for word processing, hosting physician-patient conversations over video does not transform the actual delivery of care. In telemedicine, many of the inputs (e.g., clinician time) and therefore cost structures of in-person care persist, which is why we often see fee-for-service telemedicine companies struggle to achieve economies of scale (i.e., growing revenues non-linearly while growing costs linearly). Until we deconstruct the components of a medical appointment – from intake and triage, to chart review, history gathering, physical examination, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up – we will continue to be underwhelmed by the disconnect between the transformative potential of these technologies and real-world patient/system impact. I’m optimistic that the emergence of reliable and performant medical AI agents will urge us to perform this deconstruction and redesign the fundamental building blocks of a “medical appointment.”

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Another large funding round in the virtual behavioral health space. It's interesting to note Talkiatry's focus on a physician-centric care model with W-2 providers, as opposed to most of the other players who are delivering care with 1099 mid-level therapists. However, it's still not clear to me how they are measuring care quality and outcomes, which is the foundation of true value-based care.

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Thoughts from Hemant Taneja CEO of General Catalyst: Entrepreneurship - great founders find their way to great mentors, who are your mentors? Healthcare - the future of healthcare is value based, how do we align incentives for payers and providers? (More payvider integration?) A.I - open source is good for innovation, but how do we balance access for bad actors? Regulation is important, but what exactly are we regulating? How do we prevent regulation from stifling innovation for smaller players? We’re living in the age of peak ambiguity, advice given will be based on the context of a world that might not be relevant in the future. Follow your intuition.

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Another medical school is offering free tuition (under specific income thresholds) as the field of medicine undergoes rapid change in the face of clinician burnout, employment consolidation, and adoption of new technology. Though these programs are in essence experimental and require further study on the impact of the applicant pool composition, acceptance rates, specialty selection, match rates, sustainability, and more... I see huge benefits in reducing the financial burden of obtaining a world-class medical education overall. There are many potential second-order effects – here are two that are top of mind: 1. Tuition-free medical school may attract many people who avoid the profession because they aren't positioned and/or don't want to take on six-figures of debt in their early 20's. It won't solve the residency choke point (i.e., there are a fixed number of slots based on government funding), but these programs could help address selection bias in who considers becoming a physician. As someone who debated returning to medical school after finding a home in another career, I expect these programs to encourage more non-traditional applicants (i.e., early-to-mid career people) with unique experiences they can bring to medicine. 2. Financially liberating future physicians could inspire greater risk-taking and innovation. Imagine what doctors might be willing and able to do if they weren't effectively obligated to work stable, employed jobs post-residency? Would more physicians consider taking risks after residency to start their own practices, pursue additional research they'd always dreamed of, or give back to their communities in new and different ways?

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#hiring If anyone knows an awesome engineer that would be interested in joining an emerging #AI company doing important work in #healthcare, please drop me a line! Andy AI is backed by General Catalyst, YCombinator, Greater Ventures, and others, and they’re looking to hire a full stack engineer (US based) who's excited about using AI to improve healthcare and reduce nurse burnout. Andy is AI software that automates clinical documentation for nurses who do home visits. A nurse makes an audio recording of the visit and Andy automatically generates a form that usually takes nurses 90 minutes to complete. Nurses love the product because it potentially saves them 15 hours of charting a week! The founders previously built healthcare AI at Google Health and Apple, and are now building their vision to transform home health. More about Andy AI: https://with-andy.com/ Nurses love it: https://lnkd.in/g9XqZrUq #GenAI #digitalhealth #hiring #engineers #healthtech

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Newest episode of #HealthAndVeritas with guest, Mitesh Rao, MD, CEO of OMNY Health talking about democratizing access to healthcare data and improving health through more reliable information. Harlan Krumholz talks about "The business case for quality: estimating lives saved and harms avoided in a value-based purchasing model" an article in Health Affairs Scholar that returns us to the uncomfortable domain of asking why our "system" doesn't do more to save lives and improve health outcomes. I talk about Marijuana. I am concerned that we are watching a slow moving catastrophe due to the desire to decriminalize and reduce controls over Cannabis and THC-containing products (which is good) while paying too little attention to quality and regulations. Listen to the pod and tell me what YOU think. And please post your comments, tell a friend, and rate and review us on your favorite podcast app. Yale School of Management Yale School of Public Health Yale School of Medicine https://lnkd.in/ezj8qVqy

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