In the health care investment space, more money does not always mean more success. While there’s no shortage of investors and startups looking to disrupt the health care sector, successfully navigating the different needs of payers, providers and patients can prove daunting.

That’s where strategic corporate investors come in. They work with corporate entities that invest and build up startups with the goal of improving the health care system. These investors connect corporations with fresh, new solutions from entrepreneurs, while providing startups strategic counsel in navigating red tape and understanding how different solutions will play out in the marketplace.

In this episode of HealthChangers, we talk to two strategic corporate investors:

Matt Hermann, Senior Managing Director at Ascension Ventures, which invests on behalf of a system of hospitals and health systems
Matt Karls, a partner with Echo Health Ventures, a strategic investing firm focused on next-generation companies that are transforming health care

In Uganda, nearly a half million people from surrounding war-torn countries have sought safety in refugee settlements. The U.S. organization, Medical Teams International, operates health clinics in Uganda to help the refugees and locals with their medical needs. But the slow, paper-based system impacts the time it takes to treat patients as well as identify outbreaks of diseases like malaria. Also, it can take up to a month to manually collect and send data from health clinics in Uganda to the United Nations.

Two years ago, Medical Teams decided to find a solution to this problem. They partnered with skilled volunteers, people with specific expertise who are willing to share what they know, to build a technology solution to automate the process and help transform the way refugees in Uganda receive health care. In this episode, we spoke with two of the volunteers chosen for the project, Heidi Brown and Jason Dempsey, who both work in Cambia's IT department.