Tom Keefe
Photo: Oxeon
The company offers executive search, investment and venture capital services.
Tom Keefe, an Oxeon principal and head of the Nashville office, recently relocated to Nashville after working with the company since 2013. Keefe and director Rebecca Velez Frey plan to hire 10 net new employees in addition to the six relocated from New York . Oxeon will set up an office at 827 19th Ave. S. in the Moore Building, a new mixed-use tower in Wedgewood-Houston, in January.
In September, the company announced plans for a Nashville office and appointed Duncan Reese to the new role of president. Oxeon invests in Nashville-based companies including Imagine Pediatrics, HarmonyCares, US Heart and Vascular and Honest Medical Group. It also provides executive search services for a value-based care network Top line health.
Keefe sat down with Publish to discuss the company’s current focus and plans in Nashville.
Why did you choose Nashville as your corporate office?
One of the things we really look for in our business is really great talent, great ideas, great investors and great communities. For us, Nashville really has all of those elements.
When I think about Nashville, there’s just an incredible line of great executives building healthcare businesses and all kinds of healthcare businesses.
There is public interest in building companies and investing behind founders and entrepreneurs. There is a lot of corporate sponsorship in the communities. You look at the work that HCA and Vanderbilt are doing in terms of care delivery and their efforts to become more deeply rooted in the community over time. This is all very encouraging.
Are there additional companies in Nashville or types of companies that you could see Oxeon investing in?
We continue to be really excited and investing in businesses in the pediatric space. I think there are many opportunities in pediatrics. We continue to invest really heavily in women’s health. This is a truly underserved area.
We’re really focused on the Medicaid space more broadly, we think there’s a lot of opportunity to improve care and incentives in Medicaid. We have a business in rural healthcare, which we think is really important and has a lot of opportunity given how fragmented rural healthcare is. We invest heavily in behavioral health. There are some really great specialty care businesses built here in Nashville.
What makes something venture capital worthy?
This is typically an area where we believe we have access and connections to great talent that can really help us differentiate a business and grow and scale it effectively. We’re looking for ideas that, broadly speaking, create value for several different stakeholders at once—the providers who deliver care, the actual patients from a quality and cost perspective, and the payers who actually typically pay for the care.
We are really focused on corporate relationships with the companies we invest in. One of the really difficult parts of building healthcare is getting customers, given how fragmented the system is and how big some of the customers or potential customers are.
Much of the talent in our business is focused on building specific types of value-based care businesses. We really focused on, is there an opportunity to help the businesses that we invest in think differently about contracting, think differently about the types of populations that they serve? How can we diversify the types of populations we serve? And how can we also think about different models of care?
Is there an area of the healthcare market untouched by Oxeon that you would like to enter?
I think there is still an opportunity to get involved in the cardiometabolic space. We think there is an opportunity to reduce the major comorbid conditions around heart disease, diabetes and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease through cardiometabolic solutions.
I think the big areas that we’re really focused on continue to be pediatrics and women’s health and — broadly speaking — behavioral health. [We have a] really big focus on government programs: managed Medicaid, Medicare, dual-eligible patients. These are really large categories of patients who are struggling. These are people who typically come from disadvantaged communities and our seniors, which is a difficult combination from a health equity perspective. We see this as a huge need and opportunity.
How do you plan to manage disparities in Tennessee as a state that has not expanded Medicaid?
I think it always causes a bit of cognitive dissonance when you work with companies that build for these groups.
We will continue to invest there and build there. The models we are working on outside of the state of Tennessee are definitely working and producing results, especially on the pediatric side.
I think the best thing we can do locally is be great advocates for these models and tell these stories and in the meantime be good participants here locally.
