LRVHealth — which used to be known as Long River Ventures — has launched what it calls 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, 8 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. Overall, 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, with additional partners planned to be added over the course of 2018.
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.
“The Innovation Institute infrastructure will assist in vetting investment opportunities, piloting solutions and helping to grow early-stage companies,” 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. “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.”
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.
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,” Will Cowen, LRVHealth general partner, said in a statement. “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.”