A Q&A with Avant-garde Health CEO, Derek Haas
Fulcrum has recently invested in Avant-garde Health, a healthcare analytics platform committed to improving the value of leading healthcare providers’ care. Learn more about their growing value-add directly from CEO Derek Haas.
What is Avant-garde’s mission?
Avant-garde’s mission is to empower healthcare providers with the best possible insights to enable them to continually improve the cost and quality of their care.
What sets your platform apart from your competitors?
We believe we provide the most robust set of insights possible to help clinicians and staff understand and improve their surgical care.
We uniquely provide insight into true care delivery costs using Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing (TDABC), an approach co-developed by our advisor, Harvard Business School Professor Bob Kaplan. The idea behind TDABC is to understand for each patient what care is delivered, who is delivering that care and how much time they are spending along with their cost rates. Personnel represents about 65% of the costs for a healthcare system that employs its physicians.
We not only help healthcare providers understand their costs, we also help them understand their care processes and outcomes in an integrated fashion, which is incredibly powerful.
We also help physicians focus on clinically relevant patient populations, and risk adjust so that the analytics are as credible as possible. We routinely publish articles with our data in leading clinical and business journals.
What excites us the most is seeing our clients improve how they deliver care based on our insights. To help facilitate this we also connect with them to share best practices and help them put together an improvement plan.
What’s the biggest challenge your team is working on?
Getting people to change how they deliver care is a big undertaking. We are constantly enhancing our solution and innovating with how we interact with our clients so that we can help maximize the improvements they make.
What is your team’s proudest accomplishment?
We are particularly proud of the care delivery improvements that we have been able to help our clients achieve. We have had clients continue to work with us for seven years now since they are constantly improving and getting better. Despite all the challenges hospitals have had the last few years with Covid, our clients have remained very loyal to us.
What were you looking for in a funding partner?
We were looking for firms that would actively roll up their sleeves and partner with us to help us achieve our long-term vision of creating a world in which the best possible cost and quality data guide healthcare delivery for every patient.
Why did you choose Fulcrum?
We really enjoyed meeting everyone that we spoke with at Fulcrum during our funding process. Entrepreneurship is a long journey and the people you partner with are a big part of the success you achieve and the fun you have along the way. We valued the Fulcrum team’s experience as operators. All of their other portfolio companies raved about their experience working with Fulcrum.
What’s next for Avant-garde Health?
We are excited to continue to grow and expand the impact that we make through Avant-garde Health. We have a very passionate team that is committed to transforming health care delivery. With Fulcrum’s support, we are rapidly growing our team across all areas of the business to scale the impact we can achieve.
To learn more about Avant-garde, click here.