Investing in healthcare makes sense for OMERS. The foundation of our investing philosophy is focused on seeking high-quality investments to meet the pension promise to our more than 525,000 OMERS members, and healthcare is an area we’ve identified as a priority sector across several of our asset classes, including for our team at OMERS Growth Equity.
OMERS Growth Equity launched in 2019 as the newest mandate under our longstanding OMERS Private Equity activities. Our OMERS Growth Equity healthcare investing team has had the opportunity to meet and speak with many entrepreneurs who are transforming the healthcare industry with their digital health and technology-enabled services, continually innovating to improve the patient and clinician experience.
Healthcare is an attractive sector because it features alignment between our pension return objectives, and our commitment to build a better tomorrow by helping innovative companies accelerate their growth strategies. Our principles for healthcare investing are guided by our ongoing search for partners focused on delivering a sustainable value proposition that benefits patients, clinicians, and payors. We seek to partner with management teams who are excited to advance healthcare innovation and delivery, because they, too, want to make the world a better place.
Healthcare is changing rapidly for reasons both demographically and technologically driven. Aging baby boomers are driving efficiency improvements in care delivery. Science is better understanding the human genome, and its effects on long-term health. Machine-learning algorithms are helping us understand links between lifestyle decisions and lifespan quantity and quality. Finally, smartphones and wearable activity trackers have spurred incredible growth in the availability of real-world lifestyle data. All these factors have led to the creation of new companies that are changing the healthcare sector, which translates into investment opportunities for OMERS to play a part, as an investor, in helping speed up progress in healthcare through technology.
At OMERS Growth Equity, we work closely with our partners to bring to life growth strategies that create long-term value. Below you will learn more about three of our current healthcare partners, all of whom embrace missions that closely align with our investment vision:
Aledade
Value-based healthcare is a healthcare delivery model in which providers are paid based on patient health outcomes. The model tracks everything from prescriptions and lab results to interactions with various care providers across multiple settings, but it also requires significant insights from often disparate data to work effectively. The data can enable primary care physician teams, as the frontline of care, to provide preventive and quality healthcare, helping patients navigate towards the appropriate settings for the care they need on a timely basis.
That’s where Aledade comes in. Based in Bethesda, Maryland, the company has aggregated information from various data sources and created a workflow tool that allows primary care physicians to actively engage in their patients’ health journeys. For example, say a patient has visited an emergency department, the Aledade tool could generate a notification to a primary-care team to investigate whether the patient requires a follow-up. Aledade’s software enables managing a person’s care proactively, with an emphasis on prevention. Aledade also employs a workforce of over 200 practice coaches who advise primary care practices on workflow changes and enable their transformation to new payment models. Aledade powers the ecosystem of independent primary care physicians already in place, versus building a new network or buying existing practices.
The company is on a mission to leverage technology and know-how to take care of physicians so they can focus on taking care of patients, and OMERS Growth Equity is proud to have invested in both Aledade’s series C and D funding rounds.
Innovaccer
Based in San Francisco, Innovaccer is a healthcare data activation company serving providers, payers and life sciences companies. The development and adoption of electronic health records and digitization of communications was supposed to translate into a better patient experience, but the industry faced interoperability challenges. Innovaccer is working to aggregate data from numerous sources (e.g. insurance claims, prescription data, electronic health records, etc.) to create a health data cloud that bypasses these obstacles.
Innovaccer’s objective is to eliminate data siloes and build a software platform that is accessible to the many different partners working to provide better, more efficient care, at lower cost. In addition, with the Innovaccer Health Cloud the company is enabling other healthcare organizations to innovate applications. We are confident in Innovaccer’s ability to unite the healthcare data ecosystem to improve healthcare delivery and innovation. That’s why we have supported the company’s series D and E funding rounds.
Evidation
A California-based company pioneering the use of person-generated health data (PGHD), Evidation leverages permissioned data from connected devices towards novel evidence generation, therapeutics innovation, and new measures of population health. The model revolves around the Evidation community app, which provides access to research opportunities and novel health programs alongside microincentives for members to achieve everyday health goals.
Evidation is two-sided in that individuals can actively engage in a new ecosystem of participatory health, such that--when members provide their consent--researchers and healthcare companies can apply permissioned PGHD to understand product impact and individual health journeys outside of clinic walls. Say a researcher is seeking a diabetic person with high cholesterol for a pharmaceutical clinical trial: the Evidation app could send notifications to members who might fit the inclusion criteria, allowing them to consent into the study and permission their continuous glucose monitoring data for use in it. The platform also provides a continuous, closed loop relationship with members, enabling more detailed insights into the lived experience of patients who are on or off therapy. This will help better care get to people who need it and accelerate development of products tailored to real world health challenges. OMERS Growth Equity co-led the Series E funding round in Evidation in 2021; we believe that the company is positioned to be a key enabler of the feedback loop that translates into timely, appropriate care and more comprehensive health insights from everyday life.
A common element exists between Aledade, Innovaccer and Evidation: Each one is using technology as a core tool to improve the healthcare experience. Each is led by a team who share our desire to make tomorrow better. At OMERS Growth Equity, we take pride in the way we’re advancing our long-term investment goals while supporting the next generation of mission-driven healthcare entrepreneurs.
We’re always looking for like-minded partners to collaborate with, who also want to create a better tomorrow. To learn more about us, please visit our website and reach out.
