New healthcare venture fund to encourage move from volume- to value-based care

Healthcare investor and entrepreneur Dave Chase has launched a venture fund, called the hf Quad Aim Fund that focuses on supporting companies facilitating the transition from volume to value-based care and includes caregiver experience alongside patient experience, improved outcomes and lower costs. The fund expects to raise $25 million, reports MobiHealthNews.

Chase founded Avado, an EHR-neutral patient portal that was acquired by WebMD in 2013, as well as being a managing partner in Healthfundr, a online platform for health funding.

The fund aims to invest in those focused on improving the care team experience, patient experience, health outcomes and lower costs.  

"The first thing I learned as a new consultant at Accenture was 'Fix the process before you put technology on top of it,'" Chase told MobiHealthNews. "If you have the right process, technology can supercharge it. But in healthcare, if you look at a typical doctor and ask them whether information technology has helped them to be a better doctor and do their job better? I think you know the answer.”

Currently investing in three companies including Cova, Vizi and Hint Health, the fund stemmed from an investment thesis from Chase's Health Rosetta, an open source platform for ideas about making value-based care work.

"The broad overarching theme of the companies we’re investing in is that they understand the idiosyncrasies of healthcare without being shackled by them," he said. "We found that most startups are blind to or dismissive of those idiosyncrasies and that’s their deathknell; or established players trying to compete on innovation find themselves so shackled by those idiosyncrasies that they don’t see new opportunities; or they don’t understand cloud-based economics. Our companies walk that fine line of understanding idiosyncrasies without being shackled by them."

hf Quad Aim Fund will draw on Healthfundr's network of 3,500 experts across the who will be available both to advise companies and to help vet potential investments. Chase also stressed the importance of looking beyond Silicon Valley for good healthcare ideas. 

"While I’m certain that there will be at some point, there’s yet to be a great health IT company that’s come out of SIlicon Valley. If you look at the highly successful companies, they’re based in Wisconsin and Massachusetts and Illinois—and not Silicon Valley,” said Chase. “The thing we recognize is great companies are everywhere and the funding environment is really bad outside of Silicon Valley, Boston and New York.”