Managing Governance and Taking Bets on AI Startups with Amir Dan Rubin of Healthier Capital

This is part of our weekly executive insights series where Elion CEO Bobby Guelich speaks with healthcare leaders about their tech priorities and learnings. For more, become a member and sign up for our email here.

Role: CEO & Founding Managing Partner, Healthier Capital (previously CEO of One Medical, President & CEO of Stanford Health Care)

Organization: Healthier Capital

You’ve had an incredible career across Stanford Health Care, One Medical, and more. What led you to start Healthier Capital, and how do you see your differentiation?

My career has always been focused on making a significant, positive impact in healthcare. I started my career in a start-up, moved through consulting, health systems, health plans, back to a start-up, and then to a large public tech company. Across these experiences, I saw that change requires both innovative ideas and the ability to scale them.

I didn’t set out to be a venture capitalist, per se. I wanted to partner with technology-powered innovators to make a significant positive impact—and that led me to venture capital. At Healthier Capital, we bring our experience and perspective in the health-tech arena. Our team has built companies, taken them public, engaged in M&A, and scaled healthcare organizations. We believe that this is an incredible point in the lifecycle of the healthcare ecosystem, where innovative models and transformational technology can address the challenges of key healthcare stakeholders.

Are there particular areas or theses you’re focused on?

We look at key stakeholder groups on both the demand side and the supply side of the healthcare ecosystem, and seek innovative technology and business model solutions to key problems. We look for solutions which are positive-sum–where everyone can win, as opposed to solutions which are zero-sum–where one party has to lose for the other to win.

On the demand side of the healthcare ecosystem, we look for consumer solutions delivering better experience and access levels, and for payer solutions delivering higher value care outcomes with clinical service innovation. On the supply side, we look for technology-powered solutions to provider workflow and staffing challenges, and for innovative solutions to better coordinated care across networks of care.

The exciting opportunity is that these are exactly the kinds of problems that technology-powered innovators can solve.

AI adoption has moved incredibly fast, but governance hasn’t necessarily kept pace. Given your experience as a buyer of healthcare tech, how do you see AI adoption and governance progressing?

We see the best innovators and buyers looking for highly effective solutions that are also safe and have built in protections.

At the core, solutions need to solve real problems. The fact that such solutions use AI is secondary. Such solutions will need to show ROI, but also that they safely and effectively implement AI approaches. In our Healthier Capital portfolio we see companies such as Hyro using AI to safely automate consumer contact center interactions to improve patient access, leading to dramatically improved performance for health systems. We also see companies such as Medeloop leveraging agentic AI approaches to significantly accelerate clinical research. We see companies such as Ezra with FDA-cleared AI models reducing the time to complete an MRI scan.

Additionally, we also see organizations looking to implement AI-infrastructure layer solutions, such as Qualified Health, which allows for the safe implementation of multiple Gen AI solutions on a single platform. To better address safety, Qualified Health allows for the testing, monitoring, provisioning and tracking of Gen AI solutions across a healthcare organization.

With so many AI startups emerging, and major players adding AI features, many buyers are worried about making the wrong bet. How do you think about that risk?

Healthcare organizations are first looking to solve significant business problems. If a solution can address a big problem, deliver a large ROI, and can be implemented thoughtfully, then it can catch fire.

Additionally, many organizations are seeing the power of AI and believe they need to position and tool their organizations for the future. This may require picking some partners and making some bets, but there are also risks to not beginning down the journey of innovation.

What’s the AI category you’re most excited about right now?

• On the supply side: Automating contact centers, clinical research, care coordination, and clinical care delivery.

• On the demand side: Improving consumer access and experience, and transforming clinical care models.

Flip side—what’s the most overhyped AI trend?

I believe the underlying capabilities of modernized AI technology is very real, and we are just at the beginning of the opportunities. The largest challenges are often with execution, implementation, and change management.

What’s a white space where you’d love to see more innovation?

I’d like to see more clinical decision support solutions that serve the collective ecosystem. For example, might there be systemic solutions to best route patients to highest value care options while simultaneously addressing key considerations for ecosystem stakeholders. For example, if you’re a primary care physician, how do you know if a patient needs to be referred and to whom? If you’re a health plan, how do you know if that is a good or appropriate referral and worth the money? If you’re a receiving specialist, how do you know that this referral will align with your expertise, and how do you efficiently gather all of the appropriate diagnostics in advance of treatment?

All these stakeholders are really on different sides of the same routing problem, so it would be exciting to find a common solution that addresses all of these needs. There’s a lot of waste in the healthcare ecosystem trying to get the right person to the right place at the right time, and I believe we can find significant improvements that simultaneously address the needs of multiple key stakeholders.

In short, that is the premise behind Healthier Capital: delivering healthier outcomes for all.