Pear Healthcare Playbook

Today, we’re excited to get to know Justin Barad, CEO and Co-Founder of Osso VR, a surgical training platform that uses virtual reality to accelerate surgical training and improve surgical outcomes. Designed for medical device companies and practicing surgeons of all skill levels, Osso uses cinema quality-VR to offer a realistic, hands-on training environment. In two recent randomized peer-reviewed studies, surgeons training with Osso VR showed anywhere from a 230% to a 306% improvement in overall surgical performance compared to traditional training. Today, Osso VR is available in more than 40 countries, partnering with leading global medical device partners including Johnson & Johnson, Stryker, Zimmer Biomet, Medtronic, Endologix, and Smith + Nephew. Osso recently raised a $66M Series C led by Oak HC/FT. In this episode, Justin tells the story of his unlikely journey from video game developer to orthopedic surgeon to VR company founder. He also gives valuable advice about prototyping, early recruiting, and the difference between seed fundraising and Series A. Finally, Justin shares what he’s excited about for the future of virtual reality. 

Today, we’re excited to get to know Vijay Kedar, CEO and Co-Founder of Tomorrow Health, a technology-driven healthcare company changing the way individuals and families manage healthcare at home. Tomorrow has partnered with over 125 health insurers and provider organizations to coordinate and deliver home-based care for their members. Tomorrow Health is a fully integrated solution that matches patients with suppliers spanning 40,000+ products and services and tracks every step in delivering at home care. Founded in 2017, Tomorrow Health most recently raised a $60M Series B led by Bond Capital along with previous investors such as Andressen Horowitz and Obvious Ventures. Prior to founding Tomorrow Health, Vijay was the Senior Director of Care Innovation at Oscar Health and drove Oscar’s case management strategy and operations. Vijay earned his MBA at Harvard Business School and BA in Government and Economics from Harvard as well.

This week, we’re super excited to get to know Sonia Millsom, CEO of Oxeon, a trusted healthcare firm, powering change through talent, entrepreneurship and investment. She is a veteran healthcare leader who has been at the forefront of value-based healthcare, with extensive experience growing mission-driven innovative companies, as well as serving as an adviser, board member and investor. Prior to joining Oxeon, Sonia served as the Chief Commercial Officer at Maven Clinic, which achieved the first unicorn valuation in women and family health. Before joining Maven, she was Chief Growth Officer at Boston-based startup Iora Health, where she helped strengthen the organization’s revenue and oversaw an expansion that led to its $2.1 billion acquisition by One Medical. Sonia also held leadership roles at Best Doctors, Health Dialog and UnitedHealthcare. She is also a board member for Clever Care Plan, Quilted Health and Suvida Health. She is an advisor to a number of early stage startups including, Stellar Health, QHLTH and Flourish Fund. Sonia has a MPH from Columbia University and a BA from Boston College. In this episode, Sonia shares her experiences across the ecosystem from the payer to provider sides, and from large public companies to small startups, all the while empowering diverse leaders in the healthcare space.

Today, we’re excited to get to know Vivek Garg, CMO and SVP of Primary Care for Humana. Vivek currently leads national clinical strategy and excellence, care model development and innovation, and the clinical teams for Humana's Primary Care Organization (CenterWell Senior Primary Care and Conviva Care Center) as Chief Medical Officer (CMO), serving over 240,000 seniors across the country.  In this episode, Vivek shares his incredible journey from joining as the first medical director of One Medical and Oscar Health to serving as the CMO and CPO of Caremore to leading Humana’s Primary Care group, technology’s role in combating burnout, and tactical advice on working with larger health plans like Humana and tips on how to sell your first pilot (hint: it is not to sell your product at freemium).

Today, we’re excited to get to know Caitlin Reiche, Chief Commercial Officer at Zus Health — the first Chief Commercial Officer we’ve had on the podcast! Founded in 2020, Zus Health is a health data platform designed to accelerate healthcare data interoperability by providing easy-to-use patient data at the point of care. At Zus, Caitlin leads the commercial organization with the goal of growing the Zus builder community and is responsible for marketing, sales, partnerships and customer success. Prior to Zus, Caitlin was the Chief Operating Officer of Buoy Health and led Product Strategy at Patient Pop and Athenahealth. She graduated with a MS in Health Policy and Management from Harvard Chan School of Public Health and a BA in Psychology from Middlebury College. In 2021, Zus raised a $34M Series A financing led by Andreessen Horowitz and followed by F-Prime, Maverick, Rock Health, Oxeon and more. In this episode, Caitlin shares about her various roles in health tech, building community in the health tech space, the new era of Data as a Service companies, and what it means to be a Chief Commercial Officer at a quickly-growing startup.

This week, we’re super excited to get to know Erica Jain, CEO and Founder of Healthie, infrastructure for next generation digital health organizations that offer virtual-first care. Healthie’s API-first and fully brandable suite of solutions - EMR, coaching platform, scheduling software, and patient engagement - enable healthcare builders to launch and scale best-in-class experiences for their members and quickly scale a provider network. Currently, more than 2,000 organizations use Healthie’s services and organizations that use Healthie work with more than 2 million patients on the platform. Erica shares about Healthie’s early founding days in a business school classroom (staying focused on the prize, skipping a Brazil trip to pursue Healthie 24/7), building customer love and scaling to thousands of providers, valuing a pathway to profitability (before it was cool in 2022), and the power of collaboration with other tech players in the quickly-evolving healthcare infrastructure industry.

This week, we’re super excited to have Brandon Li, co-CEO and co-founder of Power, a platform to find promising new treatments through clinical trials. Power’s platform allows patients and providers to search every trial currently available in the U.S. It includes over 30,000 clinical trials and 100,000 researchers spanning 10,000 medical conditions. In Aug 2022, Power announced a $7M seed round led by Footwork and CRV. Brandon has spent a long time building and scaling consumer marketplace platforms to help people navigate traditionally opaque industries. Prior to founding Power, Brandon was the Head of Bizops at Thumbtack where he led growth strategy for the Home improvement marketplace. He landed at Thumbtack after Setter was acquired, where he was the GM of California. Before Setter, he spent time at McKinsey as an Engagement Manager focused on fast growth marketplace clients. Brandon has a background in high growth companies—Brandon is a serial entrepreneur, starting multiple companies across logistics, hometech and even suits! Another native guest from Canada, Brandon graduated from University of Toronto in Industrial Engineering. In this episode, we discuss how to navigate the idea maze, building from patient perspectives, and the emerging field of new pharma tech companies.

This week, we’re super excited to chat with Andrew Arruda, CEO, and Co-Founder of Flexpa, the fastest way for your digital health app to connect to new Patient Access APIs Founded in Jan 2021, Flexpa allows its customers to support linking data sources from Medicare, individual & family, and employer group plans from Unitedhealthcare, Anthem, Humana, and more. In this episode, we learn about Andrew’s unique journey into healthcare entrepreneurship as a confluence of the pandemic, love, near-death experience and friendship, the changing landscape of healthcare data regulations, and running a solid fundraising process. In June 2022, Flexpa announced an $8.5M seed round led by General Catalyst.

This week, we’re super excited to chat with Troy Bannister, CEO and Co-Founder of Particle Health, a user-friendly API platform shaping the new standard for healthcare data exchange. Founded in 2018, Particle Health’s comprehensive API uniquely combines data from 270 million plus patients’ medical records by aggregating and unifying healthcare records from thousands of sources. With this approach providers are able to easily obtain clinical data points without complex technology integrations, putting actionable patient health data at their fingertips. In this episode, we learn about Particle Health’s founding story, define healthcare data access and frameworks and the regulatory tailwinds for healthcare data access in the broader healthcare system. Is healthcare ready for the blockchain? We find out here! Particle Health raised $25M to accelerate their platform growth from Canvas Ventures. The financing brings the organization’s total capital raised to $39M.

This week, we’re super excited to have Karan Singh, COO and Co-Founder of Headspace Health, a leading provider of mental health and wellbeing solutions, touching the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries As Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer, Karan drives clinical strategy, business development, research, and oversees daily operations for Ginger. He has worked across the healthcare ecosystem, from consulting with leading bio-pharma clients at ZS Associates to commercializing a health data analytics solution at Humedica. Karan holds his MBA from MIT Sloan and graduated with his Bachelors from UC Berkeley. Founded in 2011, Ginger provides personalized mental health support from behavioral health coaching, therapy, psychiatry, and self-care resources, all from the privacy of a smartphone. Last year, Headspace and Ginger merged to form Headspace Health, which is valued at $3B. Before Ginger was acquired, Ginger had raised $220M+ in funding. Now Headspace Health combines Ginger’s therapy, psychiatry and coaching offerings together with Headspace’s mindfulness and meditation services. Mindfulness by Headspace, human-to-human support by Ginger. Through their flagship Headspace brand, they have touched the lives of over 100 million people in 190 countries through mindfulness tools for managing stress, sleep, and focus. Headspace for Work and Ginger is distributed through over 3,500 enterprises today. In this episode, we talk about what it was like founding Ginger, and establishing new business models (one of the first digital health companies that sold to employers at scale), and the incredible journey a decade later touching over 100m lives globally. Karan is extremely humble and grounded and I think we can learn a lot from his leadership style and his perspectives and philosophy on founder work-life balance.