Chris Saxman

FORCING CHANGE IN SITE OF CARE McKinsey & Company's recent paper on the forces pressuring healthcare, including the possibility of margin compression of up to 13 percentage points for health systems, does a good job of putting numbers around what most operators already feel. Two of the biggest drivers they mention are policy shifts in reimbursement and rising utilization driven by an aging population. The cohort of 70+ year old Americans will grow the fastest over the next 5 years, and it is well established that older patients have more complex needs, more chronic disease, and more touchpoints within the healthcare system. Layer that on top of continued clinical workforce shortages, and the supply-demand gap widens further. From my perspective, optimizing for site of care is the most important lever we have to address this challenge. We can’t quickly reduce how much care older patients need, but we can change where and how services are delivered. Supporting aging patients in lower-cost settings like the home, ambulatory sites, and virtual environments is no longer just a preference or convenience, it’s a necessity. This is where the conversation around site-neutral payments becomes so relevant. CMS is moving quickly in this direction, and hospital outpatient departments (HOPDs) are squarely in the crosshairs. The shift will undoubtedly clamp down further on hospital margins, but it shouldn’t be surprising. We’ve been talking about the demise of HOPD reimbursement for years, and the health systems that will fare best are the ones who are working towards aligning their approach with where patients can be treated safely, efficiently, and at lower cost, rather than relying on legacy reimbursement structures to fill the gap. And just like it doesn’t make sense to try to replicate a hospital or nursing home environment in a patient’s home, we also shouldn’t try to carry the same clinical staffing model into every care setting. Yes, there are non-negotiables when it comes to patient safety and clinical expertise, but there’s also a meaningful opportunity to rethink how teams are built. That means clinicians at every level working at the top of their licenses, thoughtfully involving family members and community resources, and using technology to surround these sites of care with non-clinical operational support. From my health system days, I understand why rising costs, margin pressure, and site-neutral payments feel like threats. While painful, I’m hopeful they can also serve as a positive forcing function, pushing us toward care models that are better aligned with our aging population and the realities of today’s workforce.

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Say you know me without saying it ... "Hey, let's improve healthcare purchasing!" Durable goods, every day disposables, every part of purchasing in healthcare products continues to be broken. Natan Wise and team Conduit Health are improving the spend process for consumers, healthcare providers. This moves $100b in annual spend, but also improves people's lives. You can read our deeper take at XYZ here: https://lnkd.in/gEhfACtB Thrilled to have more money to run with the Drive Capital partnership! And Maybe you want to improve people's everyday lives? Live in NYC? You probably want to work here: https://lnkd.in/gtGEB8Ku

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It had to be said! 🎯 Epic's stranglehold on healthcare IT has stifled innovation for too long and the writing is on the wall. The consolidation myth needs to die already. We were promised efficiency and lower costs, but what we got was bloated bureaucracies that prioritize profits over patients. The data doesn't lie: smaller, agile providers consistently outperform these healthcare monopolies on both outcomes and patient satisfaction. Time for a major reset in how we think about healthcare delivery.

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𝗔𝗜 𝗜𝘀 𝗥𝗲𝗱𝗲𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗥𝘂𝗿𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘁𝗵𝗰𝗮𝗿𝗲 — 𝗡𝗼𝘁 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗱𝗮𝘆. 𝗧𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆. Rural healthcare providers aren’t just fighting disease. They’re fighting inefficiency, documentation overload, staffing gaps, and time. At the Center for Health Systems Innovation and OLSF Ventures, we believe the next wave of transformation isn’t about adding more people. It’s about amplifying the people already there. That’s why we’re excited about the work of companies like: Ambience – Using ambient AI to instantly document and code physician-patient encounters in real time. No scribes. No dictation. Just more time for care. Lumeris – Providing value-based care platforms and physician enablement services that optimize workflow, improve patient outcomes, and reduce unnecessary costs—especially important in resource-scarce rural markets. Percipio – Delivering advanced diagnostic support through AI-driven clinical decision tools, helping rural physicians confidently manage complex cases when specialty referrals aren’t an option. These aren’t abstract ideas or future-state visions. They’re live solutions—already deployed, already making a difference. Because in rural America, workflow is survival. If we want to close the health equity gap, we need to equip providers not just with compassion, but with the tools to do more with less. #RuralHealth #HealthcareInnovation #ArtificialIntelligence #Ambience #Lumeris #Percipio #CHSI #OLSFVentures #HealthEquity #Startups #DigitalHealth #AI #WorkforceEnablement #ValueBasedCare #Leadership #PrimaryCare

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Matt Holt, former New Mountain Capital executive, is exploring a $30 billion deal to combine five health tech startups into a single platform called Thoreau. The venture would set out to simplify and integrate services across payers, providers and data — and if completed, it would rank among the largest private equity-backed health tech companies ever. Time will tell if this massive consolidation ever gets completed or translates into real value — or if it's just another bet on scale.

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Health tech startups are scrambling to adapt as labor shortages and pricing pressures loom large. With EHR giants like Epic calling the shots, how are founders supposed to keep their heads above water while navigating this chaotic landscape? #HealthInnovation #DigitalHealth https://lnkd.in/gYbCjspE

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Check out the latest from Limbic - their breakthrough study in Nature Portfolio, shows how Limbic turns frontier language models into behavioral health specialists. In their pre-registered, double-blind randomized trial they showed that: 1️⃣ Adding the Limbic Layer improves AI-led therapy performance by 43% 2️⃣ Clinicians preferred Limbic over general-purpose LLMs 83% of the time 3️⃣ 74% of Limbic's AI sessions ranked among the top 10% of therapists 4️⃣ Patients rate the Limbic experience as comparable to clinician-led sessions Amazing stuff from Ross Harper and Sebastiaan de Vries - delighted to have them in the Entrepreneurs First portfolio.

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I’m excited to share that Angle Health, founded by former Palantir Technologies execs Tylon (Ty) W. and Anirban Gangopadhyay, has announced an oversubscribed Series B bringing total funding to nearly $200M. I’m proud to be an early investor and to have led this competitive round with the amazing team at Portage. Why we keep leaning in: - 26x revenue growth since the Series A - Serving 3,000+ employers across 44 states - 80%+ renewal rates Angle Health is rebuilding the healthcare benefits infrastructure for SMBs, who employ nearly half of America’s workforce but have historically been shut out of enterprise-grade coverage. Their AI-native platform helps predict risk and deliver better care at a sustainable cost. This is exactly the kind of product-driven, AI-native company we’re proud to support at Mighty Capital.

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Nice quote from one of our Partners Andrew Brackin in TechCrunch: “This was one of the biggest use cases of ChatGPT,” Andrew Brackin, a partner at Gradient who invests in health tech, told TechCrunch. “So it makes a lot of sense that they would want to build a more kind of private, secure, optimized version of ChatGPT for these healthcare questions.” https://lnkd.in/gY3TV5VD

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I met Craig Limoli, Founder and CEO of Wellsheet, in 2019. Craig was presenting at the Ai4 Healthcare Conference in New York City, hosted by Michael J Weiss . It was one of those early gatherings focused on AI in healthcare - well before the recent wave of hype. Craig took the stage to share how Wellsheet was using AI to help doctors and nurses make better, faster decisions at the point of care with its Care Team Copilot. Wellsheet’s technology was impressive, but its real edge came from Craig’s deep understanding of the problem he was solving. Before founding Wellsheet, he worked at IBM as a strategy consultant, helping large health systems assess their tech stacks. He saw firsthand that the tools available were clunky, fragmented, and ultimately failed to support the clinicians doing the hardest work. It’s a story as old as time - the very systems IBM was selling to hospitals weren’t meeting their actual needs. So, Craig left IBM, enrolled in the The Wharton School MBA program to sharpen his entrepreneurial skills, and decided to build the product those systems truly needed - a Care Team Copilot designed to summarize patient charts, streamline documentation, and support real-time collaboration between physicians and nurses. We stayed in touch after that first meeting, and a few months later, Wellsheet raised its $4.5 million Series A, which our team at SpringTide Ventures led. The round came together just as the world was shutting down in the early months of the pandemic. Understandably, Craig was nervous that investors might pull back as uncertainty swept through the market, but we didn’t. We believed in Wellsheet’s mission, and more importantly, in Craig’s ability to execute against it. Despite the chaos of 2020, he stayed focused and transparent - qualities that made us even more confident we were backing the right founder at the right time. Fast forward to today: Wellsheet is now live at hundreds of hospitals and continues to outperform much larger competitors. In fact, when a major national health system evaluated solutions from both Google and Wellsheet, they unanimously chose Wellsheet. The healthcare industry faces an unprecedented shortage of doctors, nurses, and frontline clinicians. Wellsheet’s technology helps address this challenge by automating the most time-consuming and manual parts of clinical work. For physicians, it means no more laborious data entry; for executives, it means decisions are queued up for them - clear, informed, and ready to act on. By streamlining chart reviews, documentation, and decision support, Wellsheet enables care teams to focus on what truly matters: delivering better patient outcomes. We’re proud to support, and keep championing founders like Craig and his mission-driven team at Wellsheet!

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A great thesis for folks investing or building in healthcare lies around the fact that smaller clinics can't justify the overhead of on-site specialized services due to low patient volumes. Building virtual platforms that serve these use cases is a proven playbook. In the US, digital pharmacies are partnering with smaller specialty clinics, and MSK solutions are crushing it in rural areas... there's still a huge amount of whitespace in Canada. Pediatrics, Sleep and Mental Health are all additional areas with potential, and there are even more to list. The most exciting part of these solutions actually goes beyond better access to care--they have the potential to make work much more fulfilling, rewarding, and flexible for independent practitioners. Lemoine Fitzgerald, The Prairie, 1929

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