SAN FRANCISCO—In 2021, JPMorgan Chase formed Morgan Health from the ashes of Haven, its scuttled healthcare collaboration with Amazon and Berkshire Hathaway.
Over the past four years, Morgan Health has focused on investing in up-and-coming healthcare companies that hold promise in reshaping the way employers provide access to and pay for medical care for workers. It's up to eight investments in the portfolio, with plans to keep building.
In an interview at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on Tuesday, Morgan Health CEO Dan Mendelson told Fierce Healthcare that its current portfolio of investments has focused in several key buckets. For one, investments in primary care and prevention have been central.
The team has also invested in companies that drive enhanced data analytics and that have devised ways to reduce costs while promoting high quality, Mendelson said.
The final bucket, he said, is looking for investment opportunities that target specific populations, such as Kindbody, which provides fertility and family planning services, and Cortica, which focuses on patients with autism and other neurodivergent conditions.
With that foundation in place, Morgan Health sees continued opportunity to build around technology and specialty needs.
"We, of course, will be very focused on everything that we are focused on today, like we're not done with digital health, we'd like to do more in and around AI," Mendelson said. "So kind of all the digital aspects, and then the special populations."
Oncology, for instance, is a major source of healthcare costs for employers, as is diabetes. Mendelson said those are likely areas the team will be digging into in the future.
In addition, he said Morgan Health is putting significant focus on supports for small businesses, which are less able to shrug off high medical costs. He said that Chase banks about half of small businesses in the U.S., which gives Morgan Health the potential to reach a broad swath of this space.
Mendelson said the team has surveyed and worked alongside these firms and found many feel their costs are rapidly expanding in a way that they cannot get their arms around.
"They can't control them, and so it just eats into profitability and imposes stress on the owners," Mendelson said.
One area that holds promise that Morgan Health is actively weighing is individual health coverage reimbursement arrangements, or IHCRAs. Under these programs, workers are offered a stipend to secure health benefits that meet their needs.
Mendelson said the market remains small but has the potential to ease the strain for smaller firms, but they also need to be able to ensure that the plans employees are selecting facilitate high-quality care.
"We want to invest in ICHRA in the context of plans that are high-quality," Mendelson said.