Elizabeth Rockett is a director at Kaiser Permanente Ventures (KPV), the US-based healthcare provider’s corporate venturing unit. With a background in healthcare product management, she moved to impact and values-based venturing, prior to starting work at KPV in 2015.
Speaking for last year’s award, Sam Brasch, senior managing director at KPV, said: “Since joining Kaiser Permanente Ventures in 2015, Liz has quickly established herself as a thoughtful and insightful leader within KP and the external entrepreneurial community around the opportunity and challenges for innovative companies addressing major unmet needs in the healthcare system.
“In recognition of her strengths and great early work at KPV, Liz was promoted to director within her first year. She has since gone on to lead investments in two leading digital therapeutics companies, BigHealth and Chrono Therapeutics. We are thrilled and lucky to have Liz as part of our team and excited for the role she is going to play at KPV going forward.”
She has been a board observer at Omada Health since July 2015, and currently sits on the board at Big Health and Chrono Therapeutics, both since September 2016.
Last year, KPV led Protenus’ series A round in July, worth $3m to the US-based healthcare IT security provider. November saw KPV back US-based healthcare collaborative communication platform Collective Medical Technologies’ $47m series A round.
After graduating from Princeton with an English degree in 2002, during which time she interned at Siemens Healthcare looking at user experience (UX) design, she moved to a product management role at Outcome, staying there until 2005.
Barring her time spent in California at Berkeley acquiring her MBA, she has stayed in the healthcare industry ever since. She left a product management role at The Advisory Board Company looking at nursing and operations analytics in 2008 in order to get her MBA, and returned to the industry in 2010 at The TriZetto Group.
Yet while Rockett has spent her entire career in healthcare, she does not see it as straight-forward as that, telling GCV last year: “In my life outside of work, I am big on the ocean, yoga, and family, not always in that order. Perhaps more interesting to this crowd is my exploration into culture and career development.
“I am a big believer in the non-linear career path. While I started my career building teams and navigating interpersonal dynamics at all levels in the early days of health IT, I came up through product and business line management. In moving over to the investing side, I am looking to build a high-potential portfolio of changemakers at KPV. Where I go from here, time will tell.”
2011 is when Rockett started working explicitly in the investment side of the healthcare industry, when she started work for Imprint Capital Advisors, as their director of health impact advising. There, she advised clients such as Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, WK Kellogg Foundation, Packard Foundation and impact investor Acumen Fund, on how to improve healthcare through their investments. A year as an adviser for her own firm, Rockett Health, saw her picked by Kaiser Permanente as their director in 2015.
As she told GCV last year: “I joined KPV because I believe we can make the smartest bets in healthcare venture if we use our platform well.
“Kaiser Permanente has been a leading light for the healthcare industry in value-based care and technology-enabled care. That position allows us to see opportunity and potential ahead of others, but also to keep our feet on the ground – focused on products and services that have tangible value.
“Beyond that, this is a team that likes to think big – our work is about more than maximising returns, we share a vision of how to transform the US healthcare system.”