2 big healthcare trends excite Venrock's Bryan Roberts

Bryan Roberts focuses on health care investments at Palo Alto-based Venrock.

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Cromwell Schubarth: Senior Technology Reporter- Silicon Valley Business Journal; Email | Twitter | Google+

Bryan Roberts focuses on just one sector at Palo Alto-based Venrock — health care — and has done well enough at that to be a regular in recent years on Forbes magazine’s annual Midas List ranking of top VCs.
That ranking was bolstered by three big IPOs in recent years: medical software developer Athenahealth in 2007 ($113 million), Ironwood Pharmaceuticals in 2010 ($203 million) and Zeltiq Aesthetics in 2011 ($91 million).
He co-founded cost and quality website operator Castlight Health and is on the boards of several other companies he invested in, most recently online second opinion service ConsultingMD.
He spoke with me this month about new directions in health care and where he is investing, in a conversation excerpted below.
What interests you right now?
There are couple of big trends going on right now in both the incentive structures and in information availability in healthcare. The combination of those two trends is leading to some really interesting new opportunities within healthcare IT startups.
Give me some examples.
So let's think about what the world looked like 10 years ago. As a patient the only information you got was from your doctor. You had very little context about your doc and very little information other than what they gave you.
When they told you to go do something, you went and did it. Whatever you did, wherever you went, by and large it cost you $20. It was a very dissociated system.
The only people who knew how much stuff cost were the people paying for care, usually either a large employer or an insurance company. Neither the doctor nor the patient knew how much stuff cost or cared. There were no market forces to press for a correlation between cost and quality or anything like that.