Health IT, Startups

Rosemark Capital founder highlights population health investment strategy

Rosemark Capital founder talks about the company's interest in population health investments.

Rosemark Capital founder Chris Kuenne’s firm marked its first investment since it got started start one year ago by leading a Series C round for digital health company, Jiff. The move illustrates the Princeton, New Jersey-based company’s investment priorities with health technology at the top, followed by marketing technology and financial tech.

It focuses on investments in enterprise technology companies at the Series C level or higher. Kuenne sees business-to-business-to-consumer models as the best way to solve problems and to scale the business. It likes this stage of a company’s development because it is past the product risk stage and into the commercial risk stage. “We believe we can be an effective investor by bringing in our commercialization expertise.”

Kuenne has marketing experience from working at Johnson & Johnson, among other businesses, and later founding Rosetta. Publicis later acquired the digital marketing agency for $575 million in 2011.

In a phone interview with MedCity News, Kuenne discussed Rosemark’s investment strategy and where its digital health investment targets lay. He said its first investment reflects its belief that “the next frontier” of managing healthcare expenses will start with self-insured employers. “The human resources function will become a marketing function to the company’s employer base to use health or wellness management programs to make employees healthier.”

Kuenne identified population health in general and particularly likes telemedicine, disease management and elder care for investments. It’s also looking at data analytics.

One of the problems it currently sees in health and wellness companies is similar to what he witnessed in digital marketing — too many point solutions. “The reason we focused on Jiff  is that there is lots of ambiguity [when it comes to health and wellness tools]. It begs the need to have a platform to show which ones are working and which ones are not.”

Kuenne added that despite its focus on the b2b2c business model, it wouldn’t turn down “an amazing b2c company.”

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