Relentless Health Value

Optum, as we all know, is a sprawling behemoth with business units providing everything from pharmacy benefit management (PBM) to actually providing primary care. Optum Ventures is Optum’s innovation center as well as its strategic hedge. Just in case the PBM business takes a turn.

Today I speak with A.G. Breitenstein, partner at Optum Ventures. She talks about what she looks for in health care businesses poised for success. She considers how they intersect with … people. Entrepreneurs that A.G. is most interested in run businesses with a coherent story featuring real people in real life. She says real people move markets, even markets as big as the one Optum currently occupies and occasionally completely dominates. I found it very interesting learning how Optum views the universe, at least the side of Optum concerned with potential future disruption.

You can learn more at optumventures.com.

A.G. is a partner at Optum Ventures. She was most recently the co-founder and chief product officer at Humedica, one of the earliest big-data analytics companies in health care. Following its acquisition by Optum, she became chief product officer at Optum Analytics. She began her career as an attorney, founding a non-profit aimed at helping homeless youth at high-risk for HIV infection. A.G. expanded her mission by obtaining a degree in public health from Harvard. She is a mission-driven leader focused on transforming the health care system into a health system.

01:36 Discussing innovation centers and the expectation behind them.
03:27 “The problem of health care is very broad and very deep.”
03:53 Optum Ventures as a strategic venture firm.
04:54 The opportunities that entrepreneurs have to “plug in.”
06:42 The engagement infrastructure of getting patients to the right place at the right time.
08:27 “At the end of the day, patients drive the … system.”
10:47 Patients moving en masse.
11:21 Getting patients to make different, better choices than they are today, and understanding their movements through the system.
13:57 Why telehealth hasn’t survived.
15:23 “It’s exactly the wrong way to start the conversation.”
15:39 Going to where the patients are.
17:33 “We just assume patients can’t make [decisions] in health care.”
21:22 “It is incumbent on us to … prove [employer-based health care’s] fundamental value.”
23:58 Where health care is going.
26:01 “All of the broken stuff in health care ultimately derives from asymmetry.”

You can learn more at optumventures.com.