Vandy’s Health Valuation Lab gives students real experience in valuing companies
Participating companies learn strategies to maximize growth opportunities to bring success to their organization.
In partnership with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (EC) and the Vanderbilt School of Medicine Department of Health Policy, Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management has launched a new initiative named the Health Valuation Lab that gives students real-life experience with the valuation of businesses.
It is a new course where participating students are split into teams and paired with a start-up participating in the EC’s Project Healthcare to provide valuation services. The course is currently offered as an independent study and is intended to grow into a traditional course. Teams assess a variety of factors including technology, market size/potential, competition, intellectual property, regulatory landscape, technical components, user evaluations, and financials and reimbursement.
“The Health Valuation Lab gives you a chance to have eyes into the investor world,” says participant Julia Weber (MBA’23). “Participating in the lab is a cool complement to my previous experiences with product development. Being on the investor side and doing a lot of research and market validation for a company trying to make it was kind of seeing both sides of the coin and building my business skills.”
The Lab relies on industry experts to offer initial guidance to participating students. For the first set of students, those involved were Mark Frisse, Biomedical Chair of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Aaron McKethan, Senior Vice President (SVP) of New Ventures at Aledade; Adam Boehler, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Rubicon Founders; Lisa Esch, SVP for Provider Strategy at NTT Data; and Matt Shappell, Partner at Frist Cressey Ventures.
Participating companies learn strategies to maximize growth opportunities to bring success to their organization. The 2022 Project Healthcare companies are:
- Atadas, a telehealth medication monitoring platform designed for the treatment and caring of patients with opioid use disorder;
- GeneXsure, a genetic risk assessment, testing, and counseling service;
- Major Care, an online postpartum care and doula service; and
- yumlish, a culturally relevant approach to nutrition therapy for diabetes that addresses socioeconomic/lifestyle barriers.
Click here to read the full news release and here to watch a video about the program.
