The Driver: Index Health, a Miami-based startup focused on personalized health data analysis, recently raised $6M in a seed round. Index Health’s seed funding was co-led by LAUNCHub Ventures and Inovo Venture partners. The company uses precision medicine to focus on “root cause” analysis to help identify disease. The new seed funding will help with the hiring of new medical staff and professional engineering talent. Index Health is to expand the services across the country in

Our Take: As providers look for ways to more actively connect with the communities they serve, particularly those in underserved communities, they need to move away from passive, reactive approaches like surveys to more active, participatory methods that broaden their involvement in the communities themselves. Through outreach to community groups, religious organizations, social and commercial groups, providers need to form broad cross-sector partnerships to begin to develop

The Driver: ZoCalo Health is a virtual primary care startup focusing on culturally appropriate care for Latino patients now starting in California, Texas, and Washington. ZoCalo’s seed funding was led by Animo Ventures, Vamos Ventures, and Virtue Ventures. This round also included support from Able Partners and Necessary Ventures. ZoCalo plans to focus on developing affordable and accessible primary care for the Latino population since culturally appropriate care is not one s

Our Take: The American healthcare industry is rapidly changing as the traditional fee-for-service payment method, where care providers were incentivized to perform as many procedures as possible, is gradually being replaced by the move to value-based care. While early VBC programs date back as far as the late 1960’s it was not really until the passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2013 and the creation of the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) and its m