How Morgan Health Strategic Ventures Invests in the Future of Health

By Dan Hartman , Partner, Morgan Health Ventures

Each day, advances in science and health research deliver more insight and actionable information, while new technologies are being leveraged to improve care for patients. And yet health outcomes in the U.S. are not improving as fast as our costs are rising. To shift that tide, it's important to identify and support solutions that measurably improve equitable access to high-quality health care.

One of our key roles at Morgan Health is to serve as a strategic investor to growing, innovative companies who are highly aligned with our vision to improve the equity, quality and affordability of employer-sponsored health care.

Since 2021, we have completed six transactions – deploying a total of $155M in 摩根大通 capital.

At the foundation of each of our six investments, apree health , Centivo , Embold Health , LetsGetChecked , Kindbody and Personify Health (formerly Virgin Pulse and HealthComp), is a commitment to better serve employers of all sizes. In the U.S., 180 million people rely on the health coverage they receive from their employer – and employers make significant investments to make health care more accessible and easier to navigate. Our portfolio companies have brought innovations to market that meet some of employers’ most pressing health care needs, including advanced primary care, affordable health plan options, analytics support and fertility planning. Our investments help make those innovations scalable and reproducible. Looking ahead, we’re committed to continuing to help our portfolio companies grow and serve more employers. We’ll also focus on addressing other critical needs in employer-sponsored health care. Here are some of the areas where we believe we can leverage our capital as well as the reach and other resources of JPMorgan Chase to help drive innovation at scale:

• Drug Management: Access to drugs – particularly in high-cost categories like oncology, obesity and cell gene therapy – is eroding in many quarters of the market - partly because small businesses can't keep up with the cost. Average price hikes for drugs between January 2022 and January 2023 were 15.2%. We will seek investment opportunities that address drug spend and access, with a specific focus on high-cost drugs or conditions that are highly prevalent in employer-sponsored insurance populations.
• Data and Analytics: There’s a vast amount of health care data today. In fact, nearly one-third of the world’s data volume is generated by the health care industry. For a plan administrator to learn from this data, there must be a solution that is actionable and tailored to their insured populations. As such, we’ll be seeking investment opportunities that provide the necessary infrastructure and analytic capabilities to impact administrative efficiency or drive improvements in health care quality and price transparency.
• Small- and Medium-Sized Business (SMB) Solutions: Rising health care costs place a more severe burden on SMBs. In fact, the smallest employers are facing the biggest hikes in premium costs. Employers with just 1-10 employees saw a 12% increase in average family plan premiums in 2022. To help navigate this challenge, we will weigh investment opportunities that enable SMBs to provide more affordable, high-quality, and equitable health care to employees through new purchasing and coverage models.
• Behavioral Health: Fragmented, disjointed solutions have proven ineffective in treating behavioral health. To help drive change in this area, we’re considering investment opportunities that approach patient care holistically, with behavioral and medical spend linked to create a comprehensive and unified view of the patient.
• Women’s Health: Despite deep investments in this area from employers, too many gaps in health and access to care still exist. More than half of this health gap for women occurs during their working years. There are investment opportunities that solve for the discrete, largely unmet, needs of women in the workforce, including but not limited to maternity, menopause, and comprehensive women’s primary care.

Improving health care will take time, and that's why we're planning for the long term. We are committed to supporting innovations with the potential to improve health outcomes, affordability and equity.

Dan co-leads Morgan Health Ventures and is focused on identifying high-potential, growth-oriented companies with innovative business models