An interview with Maven Director Chris Klomp

In conjunction with our Series E round of funding, Maven appointed three new independent members to our Board of Directors: Chris Klomp, Yvette Bright, and Dr. Jennifer Schneider. We sat down with each of these leaders to learn more about what attracted them to Maven and what they hope to bring to the company in their new positions.

Chris Klomp spent the first decade of his career in corporate strategy and private equity at Bain & Co. and Bain Capital. While in graduate school at Stanford, he started working alongside two of his childhood best friends to build Collective Medical, the largest real-time care coordination network in the United States, with a particular emphasis on serving high-risk safety net patient populations, and served as its CEO and Chairman. PointClickCare acquired the platform—which spans nearly half the hospitals, health plans and patients they serve in the United States—in December 2020. 

Chris lives with his family in Salt Lake City, Utah.

What about Maven’s mission resonates with you? 

My wife and I are fortunate to have four children. Getting them here wasn’t always smooth sailing, and we had some scary moments along the way. While I can’t possibly fully understand all of the sacrifices made to get our littles here—the uncomfortable and often painful bodily changes, the countless questions and ‘what-ifs’ plaguing otherwise sleepless nights, the confusing and worrisome test results and the several unexpected, serious emergency department visits—I’ve had a first-hand glimpse into some of the challenges that arise in the start-of-family journey. I also come from a background of extraordinary privilege, not least because in some of those more concerning moments, we simply phoned a friend—our own maven—who in our case was my father. He is a skilled OB-GYN who delivered nearly 10,000 babies in his career and was an early practitioner of infertility medicine. He knew us and he knew my wife’s specific circumstances. As importantly, he cared about us and was willing to gently and expertly answer our questions and allay our fears whenever needed. But what about everyone else?

Every woman and every family deserves a Maven. 

Until now, we haven’t sufficiently prioritized women’s and family care in our society. The traditional healthcare system, though comprised of an extraordinary array of talented specialists, was not designed to provide comprehensive family planning and support. A host of reasons underlie this: the system remains transactional in nature; people are left to self-navigate; care is often unaffordable; there is a mismatch of available, in-network local providers to actual patient needs—the list goes on. At the most base level, these problems stem from a lack of access—to care, to providers, to support, to benefits. And not just for maternity care, but for myriad challenges that many, if not most, of the world’s nearly four billion women and their families will have to face. These include infertility, miscarriage, postpartum and ongoing mental health, lactation, early childhood development, menopause, and more. 

These issues are caused by, and lead to, a lack of equity for women and others who have been marginalized by our existing system. Full stop. Yet, every person should have the right to better understand their health and have their voice heard. For too long, we have not prioritized meeting these needs. It’s time to change this. Maven Clinic is that change, one woman and one family at a time. For me, that’s an easy mission to get behind. 

What excites you about joining the Maven Board of Directors at this point in the company’s journey?

Three things. One, the opportunity to work with a founder and CEO like Kate Ryder. She is incredible and effuses equal parts authenticity and capability. Two, the team around her is fantastically talented and passionately mission-oriented. As it is for me, this is personal for them. And three, Maven is clearly the category leader and on the precipice of driving tremendously-needed impact at previously unfathomable scale. 

What’s so inspiring to me is that Maven ensures everyone has their own maven. Enabled by the largest and most diverse team of care advocates in the industry, in a very literal sense, it provides each member with their own advocate, available even in those ‘2 AM’ moments of concern, to help navigate each step of their health journey. ‍

What are the biggest opportunities you see for Maven to increase its impact in the coming years?

Maven is tackling inequity head-on and is already accelerating adoption of women’s and family health benefits globally, shifting the discussion from ‘nice to have’ to ‘need to have.’ A longer term opportunity remains to solidify its position as the trusted leader in women’s and family health. As part of this, Maven will also need to become the category leader in clinical data so that we can prove to the world that investing in start-of-life and start-of-family is just that, an investment—one that starts a virtuous cycle of positive externalities for both the family and society. 

This objective requires massive scale and depth. It requires enabling seamless collaboration between Maven’s digital care platform and the patient’s physical care team. It requires serving not just commercial populations, but also Medicaid and uninsured populations alongside public health, and adapting the care model to the unique needs of each group. Ultimately, it means aligning care decisions with risk so that every participant—patient, provider, patient, public health—is aligned in their objectives and incentivized to make the best possible decisions.

The biggest opportunity is to level the playing field by originating a superior model of care.

What are the hallmarks of a high-performing data organization within the healthcare space?

High-performing healthcare organizations of any type require a robust data substrate and technology that both anticipates and surfaces needs. It should seamlessly enable users—in this case, providers and patients—to act on those insights. This means we think about data as a means, not an end, to drive specific clinical, financial, and operational outcomes. It should facilitate real-time decision-making with great accuracy and specificity. It should also enable the provider to proactively engage the patient in a highly scalable way, in addition to allowing the patient to make informed choices of their own.

Further, the information cannot be siloed. It needs to easily move across providers and others involved in the patient’s care, and it needs to do so in a manner that protects patient privacy and ensures they retain control over how and by whom their data is used. For Maven, that means we need to understand what’s going on with the patient, have access to the right information to support her, and then ensure that whatever insights and information is generated by our activities is subsequently available to the other providers in her care ecosystem. This is central to the work we did at Collective and I’m eager to bring some of those learnings to Maven.

How can Maven best support value-oriented partners seeking to accelerate their transition from fee-for-service care?

Maven is about holistic care. And one of my favorite things about it is that it isn’t just a fertility benefits provider (though it is exceptionally adept in this space). If you only have a hammer, that’s the tool you use. But Maven has built a comprehensive suite of tools including care management, telemedicine, and financial benefit support, to surround the patient and ensure they have access to the precise support needed to achieve their health goals.

For example, Maven’s goal isn’t simply to maximize the success of a series of IVF cycles for a couple struggling to conceive. While that may be very important and ultimately needed, the first-order goal is to pursue a care model that ensures the couple can bring a child into their home as safely, quickly, and inexpensively as possible. IVF may even prove unnecessary in the face of other issues, the resolution of which enables the couple to conceive naturally. But if you’re not approaching the problem through that wider aperture, an otherwise well-intentioned provider might miss the better solution which also happens to be more value oriented—financially, physically, and emotionally.

This means being present 24/7 when the patient needs it. It means a diverse team of providers to care for them, spanning discipline and personas in a way they feel comfortable accessing it. It means not just solving the immediate problem, but paying attention to the totality of patient needs, including pregnancy support, postpartum care, return to work care, early childhood support, and more. It includes mental health support. It’s providing them someone to speak with if they’re nervous about an upcoming appointment or have questions and want a friendly, trusted face to help guide them through the next steps. 

Healthcare and changes to the body are intimidating enough. Every person deserves a team of champions helping them through the journey. Maven is just that—an expert in all things women’s and family health, working alongside other members of the patient care team in the brick-and-mortar world, to help guide each member through their health journey. And Maven is about finding ways to do this for everyone—not just those who can afford it—so that we not only improve quality and cost, but we improve fundamental equity for all.