Ignite VC: Building Health Tech That Payers Actually Buy with Emily Durfee | Ep239

Episode notes

Most people think healthcare innovation fails because the tech isn’t good enough. That’s comforting. It lets us believe the solution is smarter founders, better AI, or one more pivot. Emily Durfee disagrees. From her seat as Director of Corporate Venture Capital at Healthworx, the investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, she sees a different failure mode entirely. Healthcare doesn’t break because startups lack ambition. It breaks because incentives don’t line up, data doesn’t move, and the people who control the system don’t move at startup speed, even when they want to. If you don’t listen to the episode, here’s the mental model you should walk away with. Healthcare isn’t slow because it’s dumb, it’s slow because it’s entangled Imagine trying to redesign traffic while the cars are moving, the roads are privately owned, the traffic lights are regulated by three governments, and every driver has a different insurance policy. That’s US healthcare. Emily’s career has taken her from early-stage startups to impact investing in Sub-Saharan Africa to payer-backed venture capital in the US. That global context matters.