More fundamentally than any other event of the past decade, the COVID-19 crisis has kindled a wholesale re-imagination of how we conceive, deliver, evaluate, and pay for health care. Foremost among these changes is the sudden ubiquity of telehealth, but the pandemic has also unleashed a wave of investment and regulatory innovation not seen perhaps since the launch of the Affordable Care Act.
Few are better poised to unpack these trends than Dr. Bob Kocher, an industry titan who for nearly two decades now has stood at the vanguard of efforts to make healthcare work better, faster, cheaper across this country. Today, Bob is a Partner at venture capital firm Venrock, where he leads healthcare IT and services investments and serves on the Boards of Virta Health, Aledade, Renew Health, Lyra Health as well as Devoted Health, both of which he cofounded. He’s an Adjunct Professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine and a Senior Fellow at USC’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy & Economics. Before coming to Silicon Valley, Bob played a key role crafting the Affordable Care Act — serving as Special Assistant to President Obama for Healthcare and Economic Policy. Most recently, Bob was tapped by Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on California’s COVID-19 Testing Task Force, which quickly and substantially expanded the state’s testing capacity.
Bob is a brilliant physician, entrepreneur, policy wonk and scientist. His reflections on this moment are not to be missed.
More on Bob’s work, including his reflections and scholarship on health care writ large, can be found on his website.
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