Top 50 Emerging Leaders 2021 continued (in alphabetical order by CVC unit): Dusty Lieb, partner of strategic investment, Echo Health Ventures
Dusty Lieb is a partner at Echo Health Ventures, a strategic joint venture between health insurance providers Cambia Health Solutions and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina, the latter through its corporate venture capital (CVC) subsidiary, Mosaic Health Solutions.
He concentrates on healthcare IT and services companies, helping care providers and consumers to take part in the evolving retail-centric and shared-risk healthcare environment.
Lieb joined Cambia Health Solutions in late 2012 when the firm was starting a new group to conduct strategic CVC initiatives. He spent four years on a Cambia team to support the strategy of the core business by using venture investing as a tactic to drive innovation and catalyse change within its organisation and the industry at large.
“Four years ago, we entered into a strategic collaboration with the direct investing team from Mosaic Health Solutions. Through this collaboration, we were able to expand our knowledge, network, and scale to yield greater impact for our portfolio companies and our two parent companies.”
Lieb said he joined Cambia and Echo because of the mission-driven nature of the work and focus on transformation of the strategic healthcare investing model.
“Spending time in the world of traditional, transactional healthcare, it is easy to become cynical about the industry and its impact,” he added. “But our purpose – to make investments that support our parent companies’ vision and commitments to transformative, consumer-centric healthcare – makes tangible the ‘why’ beyond just creation of financial value.
“Investing with a corporate mission and mandate also enables us to deliver outsized value to our portfolio companies. In healthcare especially, innovation is often stifled by the complexity and intransigence of the existing system.
“By investing in companies cantered on people and their families and improving their experience with healthcare, as opposed to those propping up the current system, we can enable entrepreneurs to more effectively deliver transformation by navigating the incumbent infrastructure.”
