By Oak HC/FT
The past year at Oak HC/FT has been a whirlwind for the Oak HC/FT team – among our busiest in the firm’s five-year tenure. In the last six months alone, we were thrilled to add eight healthcare investments and two fintech investments to the portfolio. In addition, we participated in two follow-on financings OODA Health and Devoted Health, both existing portfolio companies.
All our new healthcare investments fulfill the dual aim of increasing the quality and lowering the cost of healthcare – and do so in a variety of ways, be it easing administrative burden, tackling difficult-to-manage patient populations, or leveraging technology to increase access. Meanwhile, on the fintech side, we have partnered with businesses that are applying unique technological approaches to modernize antiquated industries. Across both sectors, we are proud that each of our companies – led by inspiring, talented, and dedicated entrepreneurs and teams – are innovatively tackling daunting and messy problems.
Given our rapid pace of investment through 2018, we thought it would be worthwhile to reflect a bit about these new additions to the Oak HC/FT family and why we are so excited to partner with them in the year ahead!
What Cricket does:
Provides virtual and in-person care management services for patients with chronic kidney disease.
Why we’re excited:
The kidney care market is stagnant, riddled with perverse incentives, and represents a massive cost center in healthcare: $100 billion is spent annually, constituting ~1% of the U.S. federal budget! Cricket aims to address these challenges by improving patient education, increasing access to care (including home treatment), and delaying kidney disease progression.
What Groundspeed does:
Extracts and structures commercial insurance data to equip insurance carriers and brokers with data and analytics tools that improve profitability and lower costs.
Why we’re excited:
The current process for carriers and brokers -- to sift through thousands of unstructured data sources and gather crucial information on their customers -- is manual, costly, and inaccurate. As a result, 90% of data is not utilized to its maximum efficacy. Leveraging their deep industry expertise, Groundspeed automates this structuring and data-ingestion process through advanced NLP techniques helping brokers and carriers improve underwriting performance, reduce billions of dollars in costs, and drive growth.
What Maven does:
Provides maternity benefits management services through a “digital clinic” composed of the largest on-demand network of women’s health providers in the U.S. and covers fertility, maternity, post-partum care, and return to work services.
Why we’re excited:
For too long, employers, and health plans have failed to meet the specific health needs of women. Maven helps to fill this gap by delivering a suite of solutions that supports healthcare needs associated with a growing family.
What Notable does:
Leverages artificial intelligence and wearable technology to digitize physician-patient interactions.
Why we’re excited:
Cumbersome data entry and complex administrative demands are causing physicians to burnout at an increasing rate. Notable aims to return the human connection to medicine by automating clerical tasks and allowing physicians to focus on what matters: the patient connection.
What Olive does:
Provides AI-powered automation tools that streamline repetitive and high-volume tasks without complex integrations.
Why we’re excited:
Healthcare is plagued with a lack of system interoperability that bogs down administrators with an endless number of manual tasks. Olive leverages robotic process automation and process-mining solutions to reduce this administrative burden and allow its customers to focus on delivering high-quality care and customer support to patients.
What Oncology Analytics does:
Offers payers purpose-built tools for oncology care that facilitate evidence-based prior authorization review of provider-submitted cases. Oncology Analytics utilizes a team of case managers, nurses, pharmacists, and oncologists, in addition to a database of thousands of treatment protocols, to recommend oncology treatments that lead to optimal patient care.
Why we’re excited:
Nearly 1.7 million Americans are diagnosed with cancer annually, with treatment costs reaching $50 billion annually. The introduction of newer and more expensive drugs, together with an abundance of information and research initiatives, makes it more challenging for clinicians to make informed treatment decisions. Oncology Analytics leverages its vast database to help in this process and make cancer treatment more effective and efficient.
What Pagaya does:
Provides technology-driven investment vehicles that leverage artificial intelligence to invest in U.S. fixed income and alternative investments, with a focus on short duration high yield investment strategies.
Why we’re excited:
Although marketplace loans are one of the fastest-growing asset classes, few asset managers are able to efficiently understand them on a granular level. Hundreds of unique data points available on each individual asset are mostly analyzed manually. Beginning with a focus on this category, Pagaya is uniquely positioned to address this problem via its advanced machine-learning data models that value individual assets in milliseconds and reinvent how they are traded; just as early quant funds did for equity markets.
What Paladina does:
Provides near-site and on-site direct primary care services, selling to self-insured employers, labor unions, and municipalities.
Why we’re excited:
By providing ease of access, increased preventative care, smaller panel sizes, and round-the-clock physician availability, Paladina avoids costly procedures (chiefly in the ER) and lowers the total cost of care for its patient populations.
What Therapy Brands does:
Provides practice management solutions to mental and behavioral health providers.
Why we’re excited:
The software market for behavioral health providers is extremely fragmented, populated by a number of incomplete point solutions. Therapy Brands aims to solve this problem by offering an end-to-end SaaS suite covering practice management, medical records, patient engagement, payments, revenue cycle, training and compliance, and clinical data capture.
What WithMe Health does:
Replaces legacy pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) by using modern technology and rich datasets to consistently apply proven science and create engaging, individualized medication experiences for employees.
Why we’re excited:
Despite growing challenges and unmet needs faced by employers, employees and their families, there has yet to be a material change in the PBM marketplace. WithMe replaces an employer’s PBM with a medication guidance solution that greatly improves on and expands the scope of services available in the market today. The company’s modern technology and rich datasets allow consistent application of proven science to create individualized medication experiences for employees and their families that are proactive, adaptive, convenient and engaging.