1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, now let’s talk about healthcare, specifically in the US. What kinds of opportunities are you zeroing in on with these investments? I would like to actually brainstorm a bit about the healthcare market in general, because as I’m sure you believe, I also believe that healthcare is one of the biggest opportunities of this next wave of technology – all the AI and everything. Every time you think about it, healthcare is one of the great unsolved problem that AI can really revolutionize.

So what are you investing in? What are you seeing in the market as you get down to the dirt?

Julien Pham: Our thesis is around this notion of modern healthcare delivery meets health equity. We are heavily inspired by the Institute of Health Improvement’s (IHI) work around population health. They have coined this term, “the quadruple aim”, which has now become the “quintuple aim” in 2022, so there are five aims that they’re looking at.

The first aim for a greater society is better care delivery. How does a solution or a product improve outcomes for patients?

The second one is, how does it reduce the cost of care at a systems level?

The third and fourth ones are about how we can improve the experience of care for both patients but also providers. How do we reduce provider burnout, etc.?

Then the fifth aim that was released recently was around how do we optimize health equity? How do we provide better access so that we level the playing field for everyone?

So we come from that framework when we look at companies and screen them. For us, ensuring that the solution improves outcomes and is equitable for everyone based on this framework is important. It ends up helping the underserved and vulnerable communities.

Oftentimes, we see that the founders who build the solutions themselves come from those communities. So in a way, equity is somehow closely linked to diversity. We don’t necessarily back people just because they’re diverse.

Again, if you remember, our definition of diversity is really about diversity of thought, experiences, and backgrounds. But what’s important to us is that whatever you’re innovating around helps populations at scale and particularly the most vulnerable.

So based on that, where I see the market for care delivery and opportunities in the future is clearly boundless, right? I think the pandemic has made us realize that everyone is vulnerable to a pandemic.

I think that there is such interesting opportunities to innovate because of the AI tools. We know that the market for healthcare in the US is around $4 trillion, whereas the global market is about $12 trillion. So, about a third is in the US alone, right? And that’s probably an underestimate of what the need is out there.

I think a lot of this growth in the market and these opportunities is because we have an aging population and therefore more vulnerable senior individuals. There’s been improvement in science and understanding of biology, physiology, and genetics that makes us so much better at identifying diseases a little bit earlier, especially chronic diseases, because the ones we can fix, we’ll fix, right? But the ones we can’t fix become chronic. There’s this surge in chronic conditions that we haven’t yet found solutions for, but we have the technology.

The problem is that the way commercialized innovations work is, you’re going to build solutions that can solve a problem, right? And so there’s more therapies out there and there’s much less prevention.

We have to do prevention as well.

That’s the reason for this growth of chronic disease conditions, because now we may have therapies for some discrete conditions, but we’re not really working hard for prevention or understanding care delivery at a population’s level. With the tools that we have today like AI, gene editing, etc., the opportunity is huge.

I’m very excited about the deal flow that we get. I see incredible things, but we’re definitely noticing patterns. And I think that’s the second part of the question that you ask. Some of the patterns that we see are around chronic conditions, equitable access, equitable care, so that we can provide care for everyone. That includes FemTech and women’s health. We’re seeing a big pattern there and a lot of deal flow. Then we’ve anything around AI and how AI has an opportunity to automate care delivery.

The last little anecdote I’ll share here is I just came back from Toronto. I was at the Collision conference. There was this little poster next to one of the stages where it allowed people to walk by and put little stickers on the wall. The question was, where lies the largest opportunity for AI? There were three boxes. One of them was education. The other one was jobs or employment, future of employment. And one of them was healthcare.

And literally, everybody put it in healthcare. People are realizing that there’s so much potential for AI in healthcare in the future. I’m very enthusiastic about that as well.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital
1 2 3 4 5 6 7