Impact

How Echo drives sustainable impact in health care

Echo Health Ventures was built upon the belief that corporate investors, working together with their industry stakeholders, are best positioned to drive meaningful and sustainable impact in health care. Over the past eight years, this belief has shaped our investment strategy and approach to delivering both financial and strategic value to the Echo Innovation Alliance, a shared corporate venture capital platform for strategically aligned Blues plans committed to making direct investments.

Building a model for impactful partnerships

For Echo, investing is more than writing a check. It is committing our resources and insights to entrepreneurs and the Echo Innovation Alliance health plans to help them build impactful partnerships. Our investment model is rooted in the belief that generating impact is not a solo effort. It takes Echo, our Alliance health plan stakeholders, and our portfolio companies working together to create the right conditions to scale innovation and drive impact. Our objective is to measure and communicate the positive impact generated by the Alliance and our portfolio on health care affordability, access, and outcomes.

To date, we have worked to embed impact into our investment approach. We have focused on promoting the core enabling conditions for impact, such as high-quality relationships and information sharing. We have fostered new and existing relationships among leaders and increased the flow of information and learning between our Alliance health plans and portfolio. Working alongside our portfolio and Alliance members, we built a shared understanding of how to break down barriers to partnering.

A future focused on measuring impact

We will continue to deliver on what has worked and answer what we, as investors, are doing to proactively advance positive impact. We see opportunities to refine how we define, measure, and communicate the impact our portfolio and the Alliance generate through partnering. That’s why we have joined the Duke-Margolis Capital Impact Council, a group of mission-aligned private equity investors and health care leaders dedicated to building better tools, frameworks, and strategies for measuring positive outcomes in health care.

We recognize the need to demonstrate how our investments are contributing to better treatment and outcomes, greater affordability, and improved access and experience. We’re committed to being transparent about the impact our investments generate and learning from others across the ecosystem.

Read our 2024 Impact Report for case studies highlighting how our portfolio companies work closely with the Alliance health plans to impact critical areas of health care.

We are confident that the companies we’ve backed, many of them early-stage, present real opportunity to drive innovation. Our role is to continue to foster the right conditions for our portfolio to scale their innovations and to adopt tools that help us measure their impact.

As a strategic investor, we aim to be a proactive and accountable partner for driving positive impact, helping to set a new standard for private investment in health care that champions innovation, impact, and financial performance.