BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--LRVHealth (FKA Long River Ventures) today launched the premier early-stage venture platform for digital health, medical devices and diagnostics, fueled by its fourth investment fund, LRV IV. More than 20 well-known healthcare insiders and thought-leaders, eight national healthcare systems and the Innovation Institute have partnered with LRVHealth to raise and deploy $100 million in venture capital to drive this collaborative innovation platform. The LRVHealth platform is specifically designed for identifying, creating and investing in disruptive, early-stage companies across healthcare IT, healthcare technology enabled services, devices and diagnostics.
With nonprofit healthcare systems at its core, the LRVHealth partner ecosystem unites 148 hospitals and 1,882 non-acute care settings with more than 25,000 clinicians covering over 43 million Americans across 23 states. Additional healthcare systems, healthcare payers and healthcare vendors will be added as strategic limited partners over the course of 2018. These investors and partners will gain access to early stage healthcare focused investment opportunities for their stakeholders – and more importantly, have an opportunity to build, guide and benefit from the latest innovations, helping them to remain competitive in today’s highly uncertain and ever-changing healthcare landscape.
“LRVHealth has emerged as the premier early-stage healthcare venture capital firm. When the Innovation Institute began looking for a partner to launch a fund with, we evaluated several potential suitors and concluded that LRVHealth was the best fit,” said Joe Randolph, president and CEO of the Innovation Institute, a for-profit LLC owned by six non-profit health systems, operating in 20 states. “Our intent was to be more than a passive limited partner investor, instead actively participating in the fund with a seasoned team. The Innovation Institute infrastructure will assist in vetting investment opportunities, piloting solutions and helping to grow early-stage companies. We believe the Institute’s business model – highly focused on innovation and growth – brings benefits to the LRV IV Fund that other early-stage funds don’t have. This type of for-profit and non-profit collaboration will be a major catalyst to the transformation already underway across the nation’s healthcare industry.”
A Venture Platform Founded with Deep Domain and Operational Insight
LRVHealth is an “Inside Healthcare” venture capital platform that unites experienced healthcare operators and investors with leading providers, payers, vendors and proven industry executives. The LRVHealth investment team is led by Will Cowen, Tripp Peake and Keith Figlioli, who recently joined LRVHealth after serving as senior vice president of healthcare informatics at Premier, Inc. for nearly a decade. Together, the team has more than 60 years of cumulative healthcare operating and investing experience. LRV IV is the firm’s fourth fund and builds on a 17-year track record of providing the first institutional investments in market leading companies such as GetWellNetwork, MedVentive, Phreesia, lifeIMAGE and Convergent Dental.
The providers, payers, vendors and executive advisors that have partnered with LRVHealth are both investors and active strategic partners. By bringing these industry insiders together with an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, co-investors and other resources, LRVHealth creates unique opportunities to identify and advance the best ideas and most innovative solutions to the industry’s most pressing needs.
Rounding out the LRVHealth network are the firm’s executive advisors – consisting of world-class entrepreneurs, healthcare system CEOs, policy experts and other professionals with a wide range of relevant experience and industry knowledge. Initial executive advisors include:
- R. Andrew Eckert, president and CEO of Acelity, board chair at Varian Medical and board member at Becton Dickinson (BD). Eckert is also past CEO at Valence Health, CRC Health, Trizetto and Eclipsys.
- Dr. Glenn Steele, chairman at xG Health Solutions and former CEO of Geisinger, and vice chairman of Health Transformation Alliance. Steele is also the former dean of the Biological Sciences Division and the Pritzker School of Medicine, and former vice president for medical affairs at the University of Chicago.
- Terry Linn, former senior vice president of corporate development and strategy at Premier, Inc., chief development officer at AMI and partner at Ernst & Young.
- Micky Tripathi, president and CEO of Mass eHealth Collaborative, former president and CEO of Indiana Health Information Exchange and former manager at Boston Consulting Group.
“Having been on the forefront of many innovation cycles in healthcare and helping to define new markets, it is critical for our healthcare systems to constantly test and build net new innovations within their systems and in collaboration across multiple systems,” said Dr. Glenn Steele, chairman at xG Health Solutions and former CEO of Geisinger, an integrated health services organization nationally recognized for the development and implementation of innovative care models. “LRVHealth and its partners are solely focused on driving innovation across digital health to help transform our nation’s healthcare system and improve patient outcomes and care – a mission that directly supports a key focus of my career. It’s an honor to be an advisor and help the team build great companies that can be financially successful and also empower the healthcare ecosystem to better accomplish its mission for people, patients and supporting communities.”
LRVHealth’s network of strategic investors and its operating model to engage and directly interact with them creates a unique platform for collaboration and innovation among network members. Both startups and strategic partners benefit from LRVHealth’s:
- Network of Test Beds: members have the ability to see, test and/or adopt new ideas from portfolio companies or from other participants in the ecosystem.
- Best Practices: LRVHealth actively curates and shares best practices on developing test beds, data sandboxes and innovation processes.
- Fellowships: investors/operators have an ability to join a portfolio company or LRVHealth for a prescribed period of time to focus on a dedicated innovation area.
- Company Building: partners can work together across the LRVHealth and Innovation Institute networks to build and scale net new business that directly impacts their operations and strategy.
"The healthcare sector is traditionally known for being conservative or risk averse, but the rise of healthcare consumerism and the flood of related data is forcing us into a phase of disruption not seen in our lifetimes,” said Will Cowen, LRVHealth general partner. “Clinicians are rapidly and successfully embracing new care delivery models, administrators are adopting new perspectives on value and risk, CIOs are demanding system interoperability and data sharing, provider networks are revaluating the scope and scale of their operations and boards and CEOs across the sector are focusing on innovation as a top tier issue.”
About The Innovation Institute
The Innovation Institute is
an independent, for-profit LLC structured to cultivate innovative
solutions to transform healthcare delivery. The Innovation Institute is
owned by non-profit health systems. This collaborative taps into
physicians, employees, and industry business partners to incubate and
commercialize new medical products and ideas. Comprised of three
distinct elements – an innovation lab, an investment fund, and a shared
services group (Enterprise Development Group), The Institute strives to
“do more, with less, for more people.” For more information, visit www.ii4change.com.
About LRVHealth
Founded in 2000, LRVHealth is the premier
early stage venture platform exclusively focused on finding, investing
in and building disruptive new digital health, devices and diagnostic
companies. The firm consists of experienced healthcare entrepreneurs,
operators and investors with deep domain expertise in almost every
aspect of the healthcare system. In addition to its operating partners,
LRVHealth has built an effective “inside healthcare” network that
consists of a small number of highly engaged provider organizations that
are both geographically and competitively diverse, and are complemented
by select payers and healthcare vendors who add valuable perspective and
expertise across the healthcare landscape. LRVHealth has provided the
first institutional funding into dozens of successful healthcare focused
startups for nearly two decades, including GetWellNetwork, Phreesia,
MedVentive, lifeIMAGE and Convergent Dental. For more information please
follow LRVHealth on Twitter (https://twitter.com/lrvhealth)
and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/5036626),
or visit www.lrvhealth.com.
