Bruce Broussard didn’t choose health care—but health care certainly chose him.
Broussard grew up in small-town Texas and studied accounting in undergrad. It was only by chance that, while in an early consulting job out of college, he started working on health care-related projects. It stuck: Broussard went on to become CFO, then CEO and chairman at US Oncology (acquired by McKesson in 2010). Starting in 2013, he served as the CEO and president of Humana, among the largest U.S. publicly traded benefits providers. Over the course of Broussard’s decade-long tenure, Humana’s market cap went from around $15 billion in 2013 to over $30 billion this year. I asked Broussard, since he’d know: What does it actually take to change health care?
"I’d say there's two things in health care that I look at that create structural change," he said. "One is the payment model—in health care, following the economics is important. The second is in technology, and the ability to evolve technology to be more proactive in care. Then, in addition, the ability to really simplify the care model and the experience inside health care."
Broussard will now have an opportunity to double down on those ideas—from the outside. After stepping down from Humana in July, Broussard is joining health care-focused VC firm Define Ventures as a venture partner, Fortune can exclusively report.
He’s looking for companies "with the ability to really partner with other well-established organizations, and be able to do that in a way where you’re able to leverage size and scale, but at the same time, be able to leverage entrepreneurship."
It’s a particularly change-oriented time in health care, as the AI boom is in full swing. Broussard, however, doesn’t buy the short-term hype.
"I think AI will be disruptive, but it will evolve like we’ve seen with other technologies," he said. "I go way back to the 2000s when the Internet came in and generated a lot of hype, then fell. But look where it is today, and look at the implications it's had on our lives. And I just feel large language models will be the same thing."
For fully materialized AI ROI across health care, Broussard is looking five to ten years down the road. He expects change will take on many forms, and necessarily so.
"[Innovation in health care] is iterative, and iteration takes time," he said. "It takes learning and changing."
Broussard has more experience in startups than a first glance at his CV might suggest. Back when Lynne Chou O'Keefe, Define Ventures founder and managing partner, was at Kleiner Perkins, she and Broussard first met. They later worked together on Cohere Health, a startup that streamlines prior authorization processes. The idea for Cohere in part originated with Broussard and Humana, and the startup has since raised more than $100 million in VC backing, including from Define and Longitude Capital.
Like his journey to health care itself many decades ago, Broussard’s path to venture wasn’t planned but is somehow fitting.
Perplexing…AI search startup Perplexity made headlines yesterday more than once. The company is reportedly in talks to double its valuation to $8 billion—and because Dow Jones and the New York Post have both (almost simultaneously) sued Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. (Disclosure: Fortune has a revenue-sharing deal with Perplexity).
Earning Stripes…Stripe has confirmed its acquisition of stablecoin startup Bridge. Read Stripe cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison’s post on X here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
Correction, Oct. 22, 2024: The email version of this newsletter misstated the timeline in which Cohere Health was founded. It started after O'Keefe left Kleiner Perkins.
