Healthcare investor and serial entrepreneur Dave Chase has launched a venture fund, called the hf Quad Aim Fund. The fund will focus specifically on supporting companies facilitating the transition from volume to value-based care while bolstering the quadruple aim -- Chase's expanded version of the well-known triple aim in healthcare. His includes caregiver experience alongside patient experience, improved outcomes, and lower costs. The fund expects to raise $25 million.

While it may seem like an obvious approach, Chase says a lot of health tech companies don't think about how their product addresses those four points, and they often end up creating tech solutions that actually make life harder for doctors as a result.

"The first thing I learned as a new consultant at Accenture was 'Fix the process before you put technology on top of it'," Chase told MobiHealthNews. "If you have the right process, technology can supercharge it. But in healthcare, if you look at a typical doctor and ask them whether information technology has helped them to be a better doctor and do their job better? I think you know the answer to that."

Although the fund is new -- it is currently investing in just three companies -- the ideas behind it have been brewing for a long time. The investment thesis grows out of Chase's Health Rosetta, an open source platform for ideas about making value-based care work. There's a tightrope to be walked, he says, between being an innovator that doesn't understand the complexities of healthcare and being a healthcare insider that can't think outside of the box and innovate.

"The broad overarching theme of the companies we’re investing in is that they understand the idiosyncrasies of healthcare without being shackled by them," he said. "We found that most startups are blind to or dismissive of those idiosyncrasies and that’s their deathknell; or established players trying to compete on innovation find themselves so shackled by those idiosyncrasies that they don’t see new opportunities; or they don’t understand cloud-based economics. Our companies walk that fine line of understanding idiosyncrasies without being shackled by them."

The fund's initial three portfolio companies include Cova, care coordination company Vizi, and direct pay billing company Hint Health.

Additionally, hf Quad Aim Fund will draw on Healthfundr's network of experts across the country -- they currently have 3,500 -- who will be available both to advise companies and to help vet potential investments. Chase also stressed the importance of looking beyond Silicon Valley for good healthcare ideas. 

"While I’m certain that there will be at some point, there’s yet to be a great health IT company that’s come out of SIlicon Valley. If you look at the highly successful companies, they’re based in Wisconsin and Massachusetts and Illinois -- and not Silicon Valley. The thing we recognize is great companies are everywhere and the funding environment is really bad outside of Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York.

Chase founded Avado, an EHR-neutral patient portal that was acquired by WebMD in 2013. He was also a managing partner in Healthfundr, an Angel List-like platform for health funding.